The most fundamental part of psychoanalytic training is the personal therapy of the person in question. This process of self-exploration and questioning may, at some point, encourage them to take up clinical work with others. No analytic training can guarantee this in advance, and to do so would go against the basic principles of psychoanalytic thought. What training organisations can do is provide a space for the rigorous study of conceptual and clinical issues.

Beyond the personal analysis of the individual interested in training, analytic trainings involve two central sets of activities: participation in theoretical and clinical seminars, and supervised clinical practice.

Analytic Training

Unlike many other professions, psychoanalysis is not based on the transmission of a body of knowledge that, once learnt,

would make one a 'psychoanalyst'. Rather, it involves the long and painful process of putting knowledge in question: the knowledge that one has constructed about one's own life, one's family and, indeed, the idea that knowledge is able to answer all the questions that matter to us.

This putting in question is the psychoanalytic process itself, and for this reason, the central part of psychoanalytic training is one's own analysis. Seminars and study groups have an important role in helping us to formulate the theory of mental processes and to conceptualise a clinical situation, but they do not produce psychoanalysts, however useful the resulting ideas may be when applied to other fields. In the context of a training, these activities become significant when the trainee is engaged in the process of a psychoanalysis. The ability to practise psychoanalysis depends largely on how far someone

has got in their own analysis, and then, in turn, on the decision to continue the work of analysis in relation to others. The paradox here is that if someone decides to train as an analyst, since this decision is linked to unconscious processes, it may well turn out that the analysis of these processes results in a questioning of the initial aim to be an analyst. In this sense, anyone embarking on a training does so at their own risk. Since one can never predict how far an analysis will go, there is no guarantee that a trainee will become an analyst, and since their initial aims will be put in question, there is no guarantee that they will even want to become one. These considerations suggest that an analytic formation is rather different from trainings in other fields, and the problems involved are the subject of frequent debate and discussion in analytic groups.