The Letter, Issue 49, Spring 2012, Pages 73 - 79
YOU HAVE A VERY GOOD FUTURE BEHIND YOU[1]
Malachi McCoy[2]
Freud reminds us of the indispensable and ethical requirement, of one’s own reputable analysis, in the formation of becoming an analyst. The science of psychoanalysis is fundamental in demystifying what is involved in, and what is at stake for psychoanalysis. This paper recalls some of those fundamentals.
Keywords: Freud, formation, science, Melman, Lacan, Gallagher, cartel, plus one, Oedipus complex, ethics.
‘How can one become an analyst’? Freud asks in Recommendations On Analytic Technique …He writes ‘I count it as one of the many merits of the Zurich school of analysis that they have laid increased emphasis on this requirement, and have embodied it in the demand that everyone who wishes to carry out analyses on other people shall first himself undergo an analysis by someone with expert knowledge.’[3]
He continues:
Anyone who has scorned to take the precaution of being analysed himself will not merely be punished by being incapable of learning more than a certain amount from his patients, he will risk a more serious danger and one which may become a danger to others. He will easily fall into the temptation of projecting outwards some of the peculiarities of his own personality, which he has dimly perceived, into the field of science, as a theory having universal validity; he will bring the psycho-analytic method into discredit, and lead the inexperienced astray.[4]