Notes on transmission of psychoanalysis

trails and remains that interest us

Abstract

This article aims to reflect upon the conditions and possibilities in the professional training of a psychoanalyst. Assuming the tripod comprised of training, supervision and personal analysis as a starting point of fundamental conditions to the psychoanalyst’s training, we will seek to argue that such conditions, if taken merely in their formal sense, prove themselves insufficient. Freud’s fundamental rule, which demands free association on the part of the analyzed and fluctuating attention on the part of the analyst, will lead us to interrogating any dogmatic position in the course of a training. The idea of transmission, found in the works of Walter Benjamin, will also aid us in revisiting said tripod in different terms, since the word as a component of experience points to an ethical position that doesn’t consider the past as motionless, but rather as a field of meanings that carries in itself possibilities of transformation in the present.