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Adopting this stance is challenging because it requires the candidate or analyst to give up the idealization of psychoanalysis and often of the training analyst that can lie behind claims to exceptionalism and replace it with a realistic assessment. In this brief contribution, I revisit ideas that I have expressed over the past twenty years (e.g. Tuckett [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18]; Tuckett et al. [19]) and collect them together to outline six significant and inter-related barriers currently in place which prevent psychoanalysts, on the whole, from having a productive debate with each other and also with those in other disciplines, or society more generally. As Denis puts it, "If the are not to limit themselves to indoctrinating their patients with ready-made formulas, psychoanalysts must allow themselves to be taken over by their patient's psychic functioning" ([3], 43). Denis suggests that due to their everyday clinical experience analysts find it very hard to loosen their attachment to their own model of doing psychoanalysis, in part due to what he calls the traumatic quality of their work and its emotional uncertainties, which tempts them to a fetishistic solution. [Extracted from the article]

The underlying concern of this paper is that psychoanalysis as practised today is in danger of losing its specificity and so losing its way. The author suggests this is possible for three reasons: the problem analysts face in responding to the strong emotional demands the great majority of patients necessarily place on them, the unintended consequences of the apparent success of 'here and now technique' and the absence of good clinical theory. The paper mainly discusses the author's ideas about some core elements of the clinical theory that all psychoanalysts must use when they are working and proposes (at the risk of being facile) some relatively simple heuristics related to them which are meant to be helpful. Recalling Kurt Lewin's maxim that 'there is nothing so practical as a good theory', he will suggest that continuous reflection on how one is using theory in daily practice is highly practical, if the theory is good enough. Theory in fact is a necessary 'third' in psychoanalytic practice which, if kept in sufficient working order close enough to clinical experience, provides an ongoing and very necessary check on our sense of reality. But, of course, as a third it can, like reality itself, be the focus of both love and hate with equally problematic consequences. The paper starts with a clinical example of a difficult but apparently successful analysis reaching its end, which will be used throughout the paper to illustrate and elaborate the theoretical ideas set out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What constitutes competent psychoanalytic work, what criteria are used to evaluate psychoanalytic competence and how can we exchange about these matters among colleagues of different psychoanalytic orientations? These are the core questions investigated in an ongoing project of the European Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF) Working Party on Education (WPE). This article reports on several group discussions at EPF conferences over 4 successive years. Findings reveal a great interest in discussing the question of evaluation on one hand, but bringing up uneasiness and anxiety on the other, followed by a tendency to bypass saying “no” to not enough competent clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]