The Psychoanalytic Education of CAPA Graduates

ABSTRACT

The CAPA Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Training Program and the evolution of Internet videoconferencing applications have inspired and enabled graduates of its advanced program to seek distance psychoanalytic training, mainly in approved institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Two forms of training, Formal Distance Programs and Distance Accommodation, are described. Distance analytic training presents technical and pedagogical challenges to institutes and to their faculty. Some of the objections to distance education that hamper participation by essential faculty are presented. These issues are discussed and remedies are suggested. With experience, these challenges can be addressed and the training experience becomes satisfying for faculty as well as students. The candidates themselves, in two letters, describe their positive experiences in simultaneous training. A sample of clinical work brought to supervision by a distance candidate in the early years of training is presented to give some sense of the aptitude for psychoanalytic work that exists among distance candidates. Some preliminary thoughts about the variations in the psychoanalytic processes are raised and will need to be supplemented by further experience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The sections of this article on The Scope of Distance Education, Technology, The Experiences of Analysts and Supervisors in the Distance Format, The Psychoanalytic Process in Distance Analysis, and The Experience of Candidates in Distance Analysis were written by me and my colleagues David Scharff, Dennis Shelby, Molly Witten, Nahaleh Moshtagh, and Xiao Shao for the Report of the Task Force on Distance Education of the APsaA Department of Psychoanalytic Education. Some slight modifications have been made for this article. I thank them for their permission to use these sections here. I thank them also for their collaborative enthusiasm and dedication to the work of the Task Force.

² A reflexively negative objection to distance analysis was made at the IPA First Asian Psychoanalytic Conference in Beijing in 2010, where Fred Levine, Lana Fishkin, and I presented a paper on Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis using Distance Modalities. Following the presentation of the paper, a senior, internationally prominent training analyst who was very opposed to distance analysis, criticized distance analysis because, among other reasons, you could not smell the patient. We originally included this example in the Report of the Distance Education Task Force but were prevailed upon by advisors to leave it out because “it made the unnamed analyst sound like an idiot.” Maybe so, but it was actually said, and I think it deserves to be reported as a specific example of an unreasonable objection, whatever the cause might have been.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ralph E. Fishkin

Ralph E. Fishkin, D.O., was Secretary of The American Psychoanalytic Association from 2013–2019 and has been a member of its Board of Directors for many years. He serves as North American Representative to the Board of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is a Supervising Analyst and Co-President of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia (2019–2021), and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Thomas Jefferson University. He has served on the CAPA Board of Directors and is currently a member of its Ethics Committee.