German students' current choice of profession in the field of psychotherapy: Reasons for or against engaging in psychoanalytic training

The struggle for a psychoanalytic research institute: The evolution of Frankfurt's Sigmund Freud Institute

After the foundation of psychoanalytic institutes in Berlin (1920), Vienna (1922), and London (1925), the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (1929-1933) was among the first European institutes. Its closure in 1933 at the hands of the National Socialists, along with the transformation of the Berlin Institute into a state-governed psychotherapeutic institute, obliterated for a long time all memory of psychoanalysis in Germany. In West Germany, Alexander Mitscherlich was able to found a new "Institute and Training Centre for Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatic Medicine" in Frankfurt in 1960, which was renamed the "Sigmund-Freud-Institute" (SFI) in 1964. The German Federal State of Hessen financed this foundation as an act of reparation for psychoanalysis. From 1995 onwards, the institute mainly focused on research and the training branch was given to the newly founded Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (FPI). The SFI was now defined as a purely psychoanalytic research institute and remains the only state-supported institute devoted solely to psychoanalytic research up to the present. Due to the changes in the scientific world, it had to be structured in new ways over the last 15 years. The SFI is now an internationally and interdisciplinary well-known and productive psychoanalytic research institute.

Psychoanalytic training experience and postgraduate professional development - Part II

This exploratory study looks at the training and postgraduate experience of the 2008-2014 graduates of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. It follows our former study of all living graduates through the year 2007 (Schneider et al., 2014). The survey developed and used in the first study, with a few additional questions added to increase our understanding of the training experience, was sent to 38 graduates with a return rate of 58%. As with the first survey, graduates were invited to assess, among other training experiences, their training analysis, classroom work, and supervision, and to tell of their post-graduation involvement in teaching, supervising, study groups and other professional endeavors. They were also asked to rate their satisfaction with themselves as psychoanalysts and with their analytic career. The questions added to the previous survey related to the graduates' theoretical orientation, the influence on their training experiences of the change in gender distribution, and of the diversity of professions now represented in the analytic training program. They were also encouraged to provide spontaneous narrative data. The data from our second survey showed important differences when compared with our first. In the first survey male respondents were in the majority; in the second, women held the majority. Of the professions represented in the training program, psychiatry was the majority in the first survey, psychology and social work held the majority in the second. Most respondents claimed an object-relation theoretical orientation. Analytic immersion continues to decrease, with most respondents having two patients at the time of graduation and one at the time of the survey.