This book is concerned with the question of what psychoanalytic training should look like today. Should we go on with the system that has developed over time? Or should we abandon it, and for which reasons?

It provides a detailed and compelling account of the ongoing, sometimes heated, international debate about psychoanalytic training. After nearly a century since the onset of formal psychoanalytic training in the 1920s in Berlin, experiences with the prevalent Eitingon model are presented and looked at from different perspectives. Experienced psychoanalysts from all the regions...

The term -psychoanalytical process-, though occurring but rarely in Freud's works, has become firmly established nowadays despite being hard to define, explain, or pin down in conceptual or in meta-psychological terms.

Although -psychoanalytic process- is often employed as equivalent to -psychoanalytic work-, currents of thought that draw on the idea display a certain ambivalence, for it can relate both to a theory of treatment (the practice of analysis) and to a theory of mind (a theory of psychic functioning).

Hence, after examining the conceptual developments in the...