Anna Freud on essential personal qualities in a future psychoanalyst

"Dear John ..., You asked me what I consider essential personal qualities in a future psychoanalyst. The answer is comparatively simple. If you want to be a real psychoanalyst you have to have a great love of the truth, scientific truth as well as personal truth, and you have to place this appreciation of truth higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they belong to the world outside or to your own inner person.

Further, I think that a psychoanalyst should have... interests... beyond the limits of the medical field... in facts that belong to sociology, religion, literature, [and] history,... [otherwise] his outlook on... his patient will remain too narrow. This point contains... the necessary preparations beyond the requirements made on candidates of psychoanalysis in the institutes. You ought to be a great reader and become acquainted with the literature of many countries and cultures. In the great literary figures you will find people who know at least as much of human nature as the psychiatrists and psychologists try to do.

Does that answer your question?"

From a letter written by Anna Freud in. Kohut, Heinz (1968). "Heinz Kohut: The evaluation of applicants for psychoanalytic training". The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis And Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association

The Trainings of the Psychoanalyst

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If psychoanalysis, for Freud, was an impossible profession, what consequences would this have for psychoanalytic training? And if one's own personal analysis lay at the heart of psychoanalytic training, how could what one had learnt from this be transmitted, let alone taught?

In this groundbreaking book, Annie Tardits explores the many attempts that analysts have made to think through the problems of psychoanalytic training. Moving from Freud and his first students through to Lacan and his invention of the 'pass', Tardits charts the changing conceptions of psychoanalytic training. With clarity and elegance, she shows how different ideas of what psychoanalysis is will have effects on how training is understood.

If psychoanalysis involves each person's unique unravelling of the unconscious and of sexuality, what kind of training would be appropriate, or even possible?