Subject of Truth, Object of Power: The Emergence of the Analytic Training Dispositif

Our analysis, you may remember, came to a stop with your remark that you “could not submit to analysis without losing your authority.” These words are engraved on my memory as a symbol of everything to come. Jung’s letter to Freud
(Jung, 1912, as cited in McGuire, 1974, p. 526)

Psychoanalytic training is organized around the so-called “tripod”: personal analysis, control analysis, and theoretical seminars. This tripartite structure not only forms the basis of analytic certification but also constitutes a field of power wherein the analyst is gradually fashioned as both subject and object of institutional knowledge. However, this raises the first ethical and political issue: many psychoanalytic institutions require candidates to choose among accredited members who hold didactic roles. For some analysts, this requirement could contaminate or hinder the transference (Greenson, 1976; Kairys, 1964). Is it possible to empirically support the claims made about training analysis? What role do power relations play in the context of psychoanalytic training, and how can they be understood? There are various interpretations regarding the function of this pedagogical policy. According to Jung (1912/1994, p. 450), this analysis contributes to the molding of one’s character; for Balint (1954, p. 157), it serves as a demonstration of “proper analysis,” and Kernberg (1986, p. 810) asserts that it constitutes “deeply transforming emotional experience.”

Currently, there is a growing number of discussion forums on training analysis, many of which are initiatives emerging from within the psychoanalytic community. Gomberoff (2007) notes that debates regarding training analysis may imply tensions between the candidate and the institution. Sometimes, candidates may face rigid structures that strain their relationship with the institution and its instructors. Overall, complying with institutional requirements can be challenging, since it may represent a conflict between the desire to belong and the need to stand out for oneself. Contemporary critiques point out that psychoanalytic institutions have been criticized for fostering a culture characterized by idealization, fanaticism, dogmatism, the infantilization of candidates, and a fear of difference, among other aspects (Sugarman, 2023; Kernberg, 2016; Utrilla, 2010; Casement, 2005; Zimmer, 2003).

Does training analysis differ from one conducted independently? While both follow the same method, they take place in different contexts. Thus, institutional discourse and transference should be addressed psychoanalytically and examined with other interlocutors. Perhaps the normalization of particular dynamics and practices has been passed down over time without questioning. For this reason, it is necessary to review not the origins of psychoanalytic training itself but rather the conditions that fostered its emergence. By adopting a “Foucauldian attitude,” the aim is to identify the conditions that led to the emergence of the training analysis dispositif and to analyze the systematization of the analytic educational model. The line dividing these two aspects is a fine one. The pioneering analysts, such as Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs, and, above all, Max Eitingon, did not undergo a formal analytic process, nor did they follow a structured training curriculum themselves (Falzeder, 2015). This suggests they did not explore their “unconscious motivations” to systematize the training analysis and institutionalize clinical practice. This study seeks to retrospectively reinterpret training analysis as an exercise of power, one that aimed to homogenize candidates’ experiences and thinking. As a result, analysts may interpret their candidates as a disciplinary act based on a specific institutional frame. It is pertinent to note that this work problematizes the analytic training, rather than psychoanalysis itself.

Foucault was not hostile to psychoanalysis, particularly the Freudian tradition. On the contrary, he viewed it as a radical element within the human sciences, operating at the threshold of what can be known and what remains unintelligible. In The Order of Things, psychoanalysis disrupts the modern project of constructing a fully intelligible and coherent subject, exposing the fractures in our epistemological foundations (Foucault, 1966/2002). In Madness and Civilization and Psychiatric Power, Foucault (1974/2006; 1961/2008) cautioned that psychoanalysis, particularly in its clinical application, risks internalizing the very disciplinary techniques it seeks to critique. Through its technique, it may come to function as a mechanism of normalization and discipline. Rather than rejecting psychoanalysis per se, Foucault’s concern appears to be directed at the analytic training dispositif, the network of practices, discourses, and power relations that govern how psychoanalysis is enacted, validated, and transmitted.

Although psychoanalysis, as an epistemological intervention, subverts the biomedical model by foregrounding the unconscious and the irreducibility of subjectivity, its channels of legitimation remained tethered to medical authority (Foucault, 1974/2006). Emerging within the medical field and adopting its structures of validation, training, and supervision, psychoanalysis ended up reconstituting a regime of truth-production that mirrored the disciplinary functions it sought to critique. Thus, for Foucault, the problem is not psychoanalysis as an epistemology, but rather the discourses through which it gains clinical and institutional authority. What Foucault reveals is not the failure of psychoanalysis as a theory of the subject, but the emergence of an analytic training dispositif, a regime of power/knowledge that legitimizes who may speak psychoanalytic truth and under what institutional conditions, a dynamic that lies at the heart of this study. In this light, the problem lies not in the field itself, but in the institutional apparatus that legitimizes psychoanalysis.

Rather than reconstructing the historic facts, the goal is to reinterpret the past in order to critically reassess this discipline today. This study examines the emergence of the analytic training dispositif, which shapes candidates’ subjectivities within the context of analytic formation. It requires candidates to renounce their authority in order to enter their didactic analysis. It represents an ethical framework wherein the student accesses their unconscious truth by submitting to their instructor’s will. In this way, truth is materialized through power relations, resembling an initiation ritual such as baptism. Foucault (1980/2016) states the following:

It is clear that power should not be defined in terms of a constraining violence that represses individuals, that forces them to do one thing and prevents them from doing something else; there is power when there is a relationship between two free subjects and there is an imbalance in this relationship such that one can act on the other and the other is, or lets himself be, “acted upon.” (p. 129).

The power of psychoanalytic training is not necessarily explicit or easily recognized as such. On the contrary, the candidate accepts the institution’s conditions as their own desire. They submit by way of desire, allowing the institution’s desire to become their own. In other words, the training dispositif penetrates the candidate and establishes itself as their psychic reality. For this reason, this study aims to identify the subtle elements and details present in the emergence of the psychoanalytic training dispositif rather than focusing solely on its broader aspects.

Freud did not renounce his authority

According to Foucault, the goal of self-examination was to gain access to divine truth. This Christian tradition evolved from a performative act (exomologesis), such as the use of the cilice, to being articulated through discourse (exagoreusis): “(…) entails the sinner’s obligation to expose the sins he has committed to his spiritual director, and to do so verbally, in detail, and analytically in a relationship of total obedience to the latter’s will.” (Cremonesi et al., 2016, p. 10). In other words, self-knowledge necessarily requires the presence of a master, sorcerer, or spiritual director who interprets its truth.

Nonetheless, psychoanalysis may have been invented through Sigmund Freud’s self-analysis between 1895 and 1902 (Anzieu, 1986). It is possible that becoming a father prompted Freud’s self-analysis. Additionally, in October 1896, his father’s death, Jacob Freud, marked a turning point in the neurologist’s life (Blum, 1990). Deeply immersed in mourning, Freud was driven to continue his process of self-exploration. He wrote to W. Fließ, stating that he was his own patient, yet he admitted that he did not understand his dreams and that his self-analysis seemed an impossible endeavor to sustain. This struggle is illustrated in his letter dated November 13, 1897:

My self-analysis remains interrupted. I have realized why I can analyze myself only with the help of knowledge obtained objectively (like an outsider). True self-analysis is impossible; otherwise there would be no [neurotic] illness. Since I am still contending with some kind of puzzle in my patients, this is bound to hold me up in my self-analysis as well. (Freud, 1897, p.280).

Although Fließ and Freud were entangled in a transferential dynamic marked by both encounters and disagreements, this study focuses on the impact of the narrative surrounding Freud’s self-analysis. Beyond his famous dreams, what stands out is Freud’s position concerning his own psychic processes. A first impasse can be identified: the practices of exomologesis and exagoreusis are based on the renunciation of one’s own truth. Its revelation is intrinsically tied to mortification and sacrifice, as it requires the renunciation of one’s own will. The juxtaposition of roles in Freud’s self-analysis clearly reveals a conflict with this structure. This suggests that Freud could not renounce his authority as a master; as a result, the truth of his unconscious remained largely inaccessible to him.

The first counterargument to this idea is, of course, that Freud discovered the unconscious and had no predecessor. That is a fact. However, it is significant that psychoanalysis emerged from a figure who could not apply his own method to himself. For his followers, however, he was seen as an enlightened figure who dived into the depths of his own mind without drowning. Freud ceased to be merely a man and became a “self-engendered master” who may have shaped the discourse of the psychoanalytic movement.

Invented in an attempt to get out of an impasse, the elusive concept of self-analysis met with success in the Freudian community, which received the idea that only Freud, as the “founding father” of the discipline, had really practiced an investigation of the self that could serve as an initiatory model for the entire genealogy of filiations to come. He was said to be “self-engendered,” and, as a result, any contextual history of the origins of psychoanalysis would have to be disqualified to the benefit of a mythology of the “great man.” (Roudinesco, 2014, p. 62).

Thus, Dr. Freud’s self-analysis not only allowed him to discover the unconscious but also transformed him into the figure of Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. It is worth noting that Ernest Jones’s work (1953) played a key role in shaping the narrative of this figure within the psychoanalytic movement.

Before proceeding with the analysis, a caveat regarding Carl Jung is necessary. Though he harbored deep ambivalence toward Freud, his so-called “crown prince” (Jung, 1973, p. 12), Jung was a central figure in the early psychoanalytic movement. Although Jung’s break from Freud in 1912 might suggest an outsider status, it is crucial to recognize that he was deeply embedded in the very institutional logic that he helped shape. As the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in 1910 and founder of The Zurich Psychology Club in 1916, Jung played a critical role in consolidating psychoanalysis as a professional and pedagogical institution. Jung asserts: “Freud himself accepted my suggestion that every doctor should submit to a training analysis before interesting himself in the unconscious of his patients for therapeutic purposes” (pp. 166–167). In “Fundamental Question of Psychotherapy,” Jung (1951/1984) also states, “ … anybody who intends to practice psychotherapy should first submit to a training analysis” (p. 243). Falzeder (2015) provides a key insight into the institutional genealogy of training analysis: “Be that as it may, it seems to be undisputed that all started with Sigmund Freud, who gave over his legacy to a few pioneers (…) but this person was not Freud, it was Carl Gustav Jung” (p. 54).

This evidence demonstrates that Jung was fundamental in establishing what would later become the analytic training dispositif. His eventual dissidence and isolation from the Freudian institution should not obscure his role in its formation. Rather than viewing him as a victim, it is more accurate to understand his marginalization as a reproduction of the very same logic that he helped construct. The founding of the Zürich school outside the IPA can thus be seen not as an escape from institutional logic, but as a reproduction of the same structure in a different form. In other words, there is an “outside” from institutions, such as IPA, WAP, or IAAP, but there is no “outside” from the logic that legitimizes and reproduces the institutions’ knowledge [saviour] (historically situated conditions of truth), the analytic training dispositif. This raises an essential question: What is it that the analytic training dispositif ultimately legitimizes and at what cost?

To fully grasp what the dispositif legitimizes, one must return to the tension between truth and authority at the heart of the Freud–Jung rupture. Both shared a trip to the United States in 1909. Freud and Jung frequently interpreted each other’s dreams, but when Jung requested more personal details to refine his interpretation, Freud refused:  “Our analysis, you may remember, came to a stop with your remark that you could not submit to analysis without losing your authority” (McGuire, 1974, p. 526). This incident was mentioned in a letter dated December 3, 1912, before they broke up their relationship. This moment, where Freud’s authority was shielded from interpretive scrutiny, anticipates the prioritization of hierarchical authority over unconscious truth that would come to shape the conditions for the emergence of the dispositif. Jung’s letter was not merely personal or emotional; it revealed his growing awareness that his marginalization was not just interpersonal but structural, rooted in the very logic of analytic authority. He accused analysts of devaluing his and his colleagues’ ideas by dismissing them as mere products of their complexes. Freud, in his response, agreed with Jung’s last point and proposed a “household remedy” (p. 332) that each analyst should pay closer attention to their own neuroses rather than those of their “neighbors.” Later, Jung commented on the following in his autobiographical book: “Freud was placing personal authority over the truth” (Jung, 1963, p. 158). Since Jung and Freud were entangled in the early analytic training dispositif, both were unable to recognize that their argument was not about the truth of Freud’s dreams, nor Jung’s postulates, but about what voice legitimized psychoanalytic truth. This scene illustrates the rupture between authority and truth.

Freud briefly addressed Jung’s initial remark, assuring him that he had not been affected by his neurosis at the end of the letter (McGuire, 1974). Likewise, in a letter dated December 18, 1912, Jung wrote to Freud:

May I say a few words to you in earnest? I admit the ambivalence of my feelings towards you, but am inclined to take an honest and absolutely straightforward view of the situation. If you doubt my word, so much the worse for you. I would, however, point out that your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies (…) (p. 534).

Jung’s attitude toward Freud shifted; he decided to express his thoughts and feelings. Moreover, it becomes evident that the Swiss analyst identified a pattern in Freud’s attitude, probably a blind spot in his neurosis. The paternalism of the Viennese neurologist fostered unquestioned adherence among his followers, which Jung observed from a distance, but without being outside the logic of the dispositif. Later, in another section, he told Freud: “You know, of course, how far a patient gets with self-analysis: not out of his neurosis-just like you” (McGuire, 1974, p. 535). Jung authorized himself to interpret the father of psychoanalysis. Here, the stakes were no longer about the accuracy of an interpretation, but about who had the institutional and symbolic right to interpret whom, a struggle over the legitimacy of authority itself. This scene reflects what Foucault (1972/1980) asserts: “We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth” (p. 93).

In the context of analytic formation, the apprentice accepts instruction because their desire is shaped through the will of their instructor. Likewise, power, as a relation, is bidirectional. Freud and his followers interpreted and criticized Jung for expressing dissenting ideas from psychoanalytic doctrine, an exemplary disciplinary mechanism of the analytic training dispositif. Ultimately, the relationship between Freud and Jung fully ruptured in 1913 (Doran, 2017). While the history of psychoanalysis may regard Jung as a dissident, his figure is crucial to understanding that authority and authorizing himself to speak are different. The “heir” ended up resigning from the Freudian institution, but not from the logic of the analytic training dispositif. Jung’s “dissidence” serves as a paradigmatic example of what happens to analysts who attempt to think differently within the field. This rupture marked the analytic training dispositif by not including Jung’s texts within the formation or creating specific narratives about him. However, he had the symbolic agency to found his own institution and was, in fact, one of the earliest proponents of training analysis as a prerequisite for clinical work. Lacan captured the structural nature of this conflict when he stated: “He [the analyst] is only authorized by himself—and I would add: and by some others” (Lacan, 1974/n.d., p. 189). Jung’s resignation from his IPA membership in 1914 meant a way to authorize himself (Falzeder, 2015); then, after a period of isolation, he started giving lectures to his followers. It was very similar to what happened with Jacques Lacan and his “excommunication” from the IPA in 1963 (Marini, 1992). Nevertheless, regardless of whether an analyst is Freudian, Jungian, or Lacanian, these institutions share the very logic in terms of form, the “psychoanalytic power”, whose content is secondary. Their marginalization ultimately allowed Jung and Lacan to establish a parallel authority structure, institutionalizing their own form of analytic knowledge and thus perpetuating, rather than escaping, the analytic training dispositif. These approaches can be even opposite in how they think and perform clinically and train future analysts; yet, they are cut by the same scissor. One could say that Jung and Lacan had to relinquish their institutional membership in order to fully authorize themselves, a political cost that reveals how analytic authority is never separable from the power structures that legitimize its discourse.

During the 2nd Congress of Psychoanalysis, held in Nuremberg, Freud expressed the following words regarding self-analysis:

Now that a considerable number of people are practicing psycho-analysis and exchanging their observations with one another, we have noticed that no psycho-analyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit; and we consequently require that he shall begin his activity with a self-analysis and continually carry it deeper while he is making his observations on his patients. Anyone who fails to produce results in a self-analysis of this kind may at once give up any idea of being able to treat patients by analysis (Freud, 1910, p. 144).

Strachey’s footnote notes that Freud’s position on this matter was inconsistent throughout his work. The passage underscores the relationship between the analyst’s role and self-knowledge. Analysts were expected to engage in constant self-analysis, even though analysts’ own neuroses often prevented access to the deepest corners of the mind.

This force [truth] lies in the rhetorical quality of the master’s discourse, and this rhetorical quality depends for a part on the exposé of the disciple, who has to explain how far he is in his way of living from the true principles that he knows (Foucault, 1980/2016, p. 37).

By this point, Freud may have become a mythical figure due to his self-analysis. However, he was not free from his own neurosis and complexes when developing his theories and engaging in relationships. His paternalism and the idealization of his followers may have been transmitted across generations of analysts, as part of the technologies of the analytic training dispositif. It has shaped institutional dynamics in ways that eluded internal and external feedback. Regardless of which analyst one takes as a starting point, tracing a genealogical tree of didactic analysts will always lead back to Freud, an observation that should be critically considered.

The Analytic Training Dispositif

The first school where Freud’s early formulations were put into practice was not in Germany, nor was it in Vienna, but in Zurich, Switzerland. The Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital became the epicenter of psychoanalysis, and several renowned figures passed through its halls, including Carl Jung, Adolf Meyer, Abraham Brill, Emil Oberholzer, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Hermann Rorschach, and Sabina Spielrein, among others (Bleuler, 1951). During its golden era (1898–1927), the hospital was directed by the renowned psychiatrist Joseph Bleuler (Kallivayalil, 2016). It can be said that the Zurich school was a pioneer in psychoanalytic research within a hospital setting and in clinical training. Jung, for his part, required each student to undergo analysis with someone more experienced. In 1912, the Swiss analyst showed his advocacy for training analysis in his lectures at Fordham University (Jung, 1912/1994). He frequently analyzed colleagues, such as Otto Gross and Leonard Seif, with the intention of incorporating them into the movement; he also urged that the psychoanalytic community should treat their students as patients (Falzeder, 2015). Freud asserts:

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. (Freud, 1912, p. 115).

According to Falzeder (2015), Carl Jung pioneered the training analysis. To some extent, it is understandable why he did not receive much credit or recognition for it. He claimed that the controversies emerging from analysis could not be resolved through theory alone (Borch-Jacobsen & Shamdasani, 2012; Selesnick, 1966). The Swiss analyst likely experienced both sides of power relationships, occupying a dissident position and treating his students as patients, specific positions within the analytic training dispositif. The “Secret Committee” formation in 1912, from which Jung was excluded, illustrates how a system of thought produces mechanisms to regulate minds and behavior. The original members were S. Freud, K. Abraham, S. Ferenczi, E. Jones, O. Rank, and H. Sachs. Eitingon joined the group in 1920. The purpose of this group was to protect and further develop Freud’s theories (Falzeder, 2015; Barratt, 2013). In this context, alternative readings or interpretations could be dismissed as distortions caused by personal neurosis or complexes of the colleague in question. This was the case with both Carl Jung and Otto Rank. Freud reproached the latter for not having undergone his own analysis, repeating the very criticism previously claimed by Jung: “The elimination of the father in your theory strikes me as revealing much too much of the influence of personal factors in your life, I believe I’m familiar with” (Liberman & Kramer, 2012, p. 208, Freud to Rank, personal communication, 1924). This extract exhibits how unconscious truth is subordinate to the exercise of the psychoanalytic authority; hence, while the act of interpretation reveals one’s neurosis, it disciplines divergent thought.

At an epistemological level, this raises critical questions: Does interpretation always carry these two faces, unconscious truth revelation and discipline of dissent? Is there such a thing as unconscious truth independent of power? Or is that its very truth, produced and mediated through power relations? The analytic training dispositif, as Foucault might argue, may condition what counts as “truth.” Thus, possibly unconscious truth cannot be found outside of power; it is the effect or production, and instrument of how it operates. Perhaps this is precisely what Foucault sought to critique in clinical practice: not the idea of the unconscious in itself, but the institutional structures that regulate what is considered a personal neurosis or not. Under these same structures, an analyst can interpret to their candidate, but simultaneously, they are disciplining the apprentice. For instance, Dr. Ellis Toney’s training analysis illustrates this idea (Luna, 2022; Stoute, 2017). He was the first African-American candidate at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and his training analyst was Ralph Greenson in 1948. Since Toney had to commute to Beverly Hills, sometimes police officers stopped them. That is why he used to come late to his sessions. One day, Toney requested a change to the schedule; yet, Greenson interpreted his request as a “paranoia” of castration, with no awareness of racial profiling. This vignette illustrates how the analytic training dispositif, as Foucault warned, can easily align with broader dispositifs, such as those of race, authority, and surveillance, rendering its interpretive content ultimately secondary. Nevertheless, the impact of Greenson’s interpretation affected the analytic relationship.

After the founding of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in 1910, Jones and Freud organized this unofficial group, which held significant political influence. It was the central site of political surveillance within the psychoanalytic guild (Borch-Jacobsen & Shamdasani, 2012; Wittenberger, 1966). Furthermore, Freud gifted each member a ring engraved with a Greek deity, lending the group a cult-like aura. Freud bore the image of Zeus (Rolnik, 2018). This “Fellowship of the Ring” is not merely an anecdotal detail; it embodies a key dimension of the psychoanalytic training dispositif. The Secret Committee was a mechanism of control and censorship, exerting power over the production and regulation of psychoanalytic knowledge (Rand & Torok, 1977; Foucault, 1980). The theoretical proposals of Jung, Rank, and Ferenczi provoked two expected reactions from Freud. First, he interpreted the first two as saying their ideas were products of their neuroses. Second, in Ferenczi’s case, was a form of erasure: Freud “advised” him not to publish Confusion of Tongues. When Ferenczi tried to read part of the manuscript to him, Freud left the room in silence, showing his discomfort. It was the last time they saw each other (Borch-Jacobsen & Shamdasani, 2012; Mészáros, 2008; Rand & Torok, 1977). Thus, Freud’s reactions may have reflected the functioning of the psychoanalytic training dispositif: interpretation and dismissal, strategies that could still be employed today.

It is hard to overlook that candidates have, at some point, been interpreted by colleagues, professors, or supervisors without their consent. Among earlier generations, this practice may have been normalized, passed down as part of the institutional legacy inherited from their own instructors. The act of interpretation is intended to reveal the candidate’s neuroses, yet it may also function to normalize dissenting thought. Here, the mind was disciplined, not the body; something that occurred to Rank and Jung.

The analytic training dispositif is structured around the internalization of interpretation as a psychic function of surveillance: candidates are encouraged to look both within themselves and at one another. Here, surveillance induces self-regulation (Foucault, 1975/1977). Over time, this function may gain psychic efficacy and become part of their subjective reality. It must be remembered that the “apprentice” status already implies a renunciation of one’s authority. This means the master is authorized, by virtue of their position, to reveal the apprentice’s truth. The pupil is thus placed in a state of permanent examination and self-analysis through the master’s gaze, eventually internalizing that gaze as part of their psychic structure (Foucault, 1980/2016).

Neither the master nor the pupil constitutes a “being”; this is not an ontological matter but an ethical position. This marks a crucial distinction between being an analyst and holding an analytical position. Some senior analysts may carry this position beyond the office, as if the master’s function continues to operate within them. In such cases, they may authorize themselves to interpret without consent, acting as if the truth no longer requires the subject’s participation. Within the analytic formation, there may be an overlap between position and being, resulting in divergent outcomes within the formation context. Candidates are trained to “become” psychoanalysts. Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference between conducting an analysis and assuming an ontological identity. This distinction deserves renewed attention. The analytical position is indeed fundamental to the therapeutic process, including the training analysis itself. Yet within the formation context, the boundary between position and being often becomes blurred, fostering rigid and hierarchical relationships within the psychoanalytic guild. Despite these institutional dynamics, psychoanalysis has remained a valid and clinically relevant practice.

Regarding Freud’s dismissal of Ferenczi’s work, it was likely more connected to preserving a dominant discourse than to a theoretical disagreement. Today, there are numerous psychoanalytic training institutions worldwide. Each is unique, even though most adhere to a standardized model, contributing to the richness and diversity of analytic formation. Nevertheless, this heterogeneity can also give rise to political and academic disputes within the guild. Analysts may be aware of colleagues’ work outside their academic circles. However, such work is often excluded because it originates outside their community or is not aligned with the institution’s theoretical orientation. This process leads to the establishment of “official” books and translations, and consequently, the emergence of apocryphal texts, as seen in the case of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Some figures gain the authority to define and transmit what psychoanalysis is—and what it is not. Some analysts may prioritize institutional coherence over responsiveness to the analysand’s process; for others, the institutional position may secure a sustained analytic practice. The main point is that discursive conformity and compliance may carry more weight than psychoanalytic knowledge. Ultimately, this is a discursive effect; I am not claiming that a more academic or scientific stance would be better.

There may exist a form of institutional discomfort that remains unspoken: “I believe that Psychoanalytic education is suffering from serious disturbances, which, by analogy, might be examined as an illness affecting the educational structures of psychoanalytic institutes and societies.” (Kernberg, 1986, p. 799). Dr. Kernberg observes that these institutions tend to adopt authoritarian and rigid structures. There is a decline in creative thinking and scientific production, alongside a marked tendency among candidates to self-censor regarding their teachers and analysts. During a panel meeting at the Tenth Conference on Psychoanalytic Training in France, the following intervention was given: “Why, Meyer asked, do analysts persist in a practice that stifles originality and promotes submission? He proposed two hypotheses: first, that training analysis functions as a fetish; and second, that it serves as a form of ideological structure (Zimmer, 2003, p. 145). Analysts have been examining how training analysis operates within the context of formation; it may produce and reproduce power dynamics. It shapes how candidates can speak, think, and relate to themselves.

O. Kernberg (1996), near the end of his term as president of the IPA, published a list of methods by which psychoanalytic education stifles the creativity of candidates—a tacit call for institutional reform. In Point 8, he writes: “(…) keeping a clear hierarchy of older and younger members of the faculty” (p. 2), highlighting how senior analysts often occupy an unquestionable position of authority, implicitly discouraging junior members from challenging the status quo. Point 9 extends this concern, noting that senior analysts dominate discussion spaces and institutional committees. The scarcity of publications by younger analysts, he suggests, may stem from fear of disapproval by these institutional figures.

Point 16 is especially aligned with the present thesis: “Ideally, exposure of the students to alternative psychoanalytic schools should be avoided for as long as possible. In seminars for advanced students particular papers representing dissident or deviant approaches should be reviewed briefly, in the context of balancing opposite views, and appropriately criticised” (p. 5). Kernberg thus reveals how authority and institutional authorization become collapsed in the figure of the senior analyst, or as they are colloquially called in Peru, “sacred cows.”

The analytic training dispositif operates through such technologies of control, preventing candidates from authorizing themselves to speak, critique, or innovate. Throughout psychoanalytic history, self-authorization has come at a cost—often exile—as the cases of Jung and Lacan illustrate. Their departures from institutional frameworks enabled them to found new schools of thought, but only by stepping outside the recognized structures of legitimation. In this sense, Kernberg’s critique substantiates the argument that power within training is not merely hierarchical, but is structural.

This hierarchical logic is not merely theoretical; it has been observed in empirical research as well. In a study exploring attitudes toward critique and tradition in psychoanalysis, Luna and Romero (2022) found that younger analysts tend to align with theoretical openness and critical reflection, while senior analysts are more likely to uphold traditional and orthodox views. Another critical finding was that analysts trained in institutional settings (e.g., IPA or WAP) scored higher on attitudes favoring tradition than those trained through “independent” pathways. These findings reinforce Kernberg’s thesis: the analytic training dispositif curtails creativity and innovation to maintain coherence and authority. From a Foucauldian lens, the problem is not the analytic training per se, but the dispositif through which it operates. Depending on the training path one takes—whether institutional, group-based, or mentorship—the subject encounters different conditions of formation; none operates “outside” the analytic training dispositif.

The controversy surrounding didactic analysis stems from its being conducted by the same professors or society members responsible for evaluating candidates. In other words, the emergence of analytic treatment coincides with institutional training. It is difficult not to relate this role overlap to Freud himself. He was both analyst and analysand, just as candidates today are both students and analysands. In both cases, two structurally distinct positions collapse into one. Candidates renounce their authority over themselves in two ways: first, by entrusting their analyst to interpret the truth of their unconscious; and second, by refraining from theoretical dissent, since institutional membership can depend on alignment with one’s instructors. After completing the training process, the candidate is authorized to replicate the institutional truth that has been internalized in them.

Probably, Freud enacted the role of the “analysand zero” during his self-analysis, revealing a silent structural impasse that shaped all subsequent relations in the analytic field. On his 1909 voyage to the United States with Jung, he reportedly said: “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 336). Regardless of its factuality, this moment became part of the foundational myth of psychoanalysis, the “psychoanalytic outbreak” that not only redefined the modern subject but instituted an epistemic and institutional order. This outbreak had a double effect: on the one hand, it disrupted dominant scientific rationality by introducing the unconscious as a new epistemic terrain; on the other, it enabled the institutionalization of psychoanalysis as a conduit for normalization and discipline. Here lies the paradox: interpretation, rather than being a neutral tool, operates as a kind of germ, a living organism that lodges in the analysand’s psyche and multiplies according to their positionality within the training dispositif and other dispositifs. This interpretive germ may be liberating for the subject or, conversely, bind them more tightly to institutional discourse. As Foucault (1972/1980) argues, “Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it” (p. 59).

The dispositif ensures that the unconscious truth is not simply discovered but produced through institutional power/knowledge. Thus, the psychoanalytic interpretation is not simply curative or revelatory; it is a conductor through which other dispositifs, such as familiar, racial, medical, pedagogical, or sexual, are in tune with the analytic training dispositif. As such, interpretation is always already contaminated, and perhaps this is what Foucault criticized about psychoanalysis: its production is bound to institutional structures that regulate and reproduce forms of subjectivity, rather than being detached and independent from them. However, this formation led to a rethink of the impossibility of psychoanalysis as a profession. Freud’s (1912) metaphor of psychoanalysis as a “surgical operation” becomes untenable under this light. The analytic training dispositif infiltrates discourses and power relationships of other dispositifs.

As a result, the psychoanalytic training dispositif could function as a hermetic and isolated system, sustaining a fantasme of generalized neutrality. Foucault (1972/1980) suggests that the aspiration to neutrality may be a powerful mechanism for maintaining existing power structures. By presenting certain institutions, practices, or discourses as neutral and objective, their inherent biases and the power relations they embody become less visible and difficult to challenge. Defining neutrality is never value-free; it always reflects underlying assumptions and power dynamics. What appears to be a neutral stance often implicitly favors the status quo or the perspectives of those who exert power. He prefers to analyze power at the micro-level, examining the specific techniques and practices through which it operates in concrete situations (Foucault, 1966/2002; Stemmler, 2021). The perceived neutrality of didactic analysts and institutions makes them ideal conduits for power, and their primary technology is the analytic interpretation. Through interpretation, neutrality is staged, power is exercised, and the candidate’s subjectivity is produced. Therefore, training analysis, supervision, and evaluative feedback are all micro-practices that embody institutional power.

According to Foucault, reason manifests in various forms of rationality, which constitute knowledge and the pursuit of truth. However, the tension between reason and forms of rationality allows for the identification of the limits of the latter through a critical reflection on reason itself: “Rationality in its technoscientific and political forms is undoubtedly linked to mechanisms of coercion and excesses of power, but this in no way suggests that reason is the source of irrationality” (Iliopoulos, 2017, p. 6). In this light, the content of a psychoanalytic interpretation, particularly one directed at a candidate or colleague, embodies a form of rationality that not only seeks to uncover truth but also stabilizes it. The very act of interpreting produces and installs that truth within the subject’s psychic reality, an act of establishment that disrupts the idea of interpretation as purely revelatory.

Foucault (1980/2016) explains that in the Greco-Roman era, consciousness guidance was utilitarian; that is, the process of learning about oneself aimed at achieving autonomy and mastery. However, with the rise of Christianity, this guidance became totalizing, extending into all areas of the disciple’s life. Obedience was absolute and in constant pursuit of God. Perhaps the psychoanalytic training dispositif occupies a liminal space between these two traditions:

The exhaustive verbalization of one’s thoughts, in the presence of the spiritual director to whom the monk owes absolute obedience, has the aim therefore of exposing these thoughts to the divine light and thus forcing them to show what they are, while at the same time purifying the monk’s soul (Cremonesi et al., 2016, p. 31).

The training analysis, viewed through a Foucauldian lens, occupies a paradoxical space between a utilitarian requirement and an ethical formation. On the one hand, it is a requirement bounded by a fixed number of years or effective hours; on the other, it instills a lifelong personal hermeneutic and ethic: the obligation to know oneself and to speak the truth about oneself. However, this desire must be articulated through the will of a spiritual guide. With Christianity, the imperative to “know yourself” was embodied in the practice of confession: “confess, to your spiritual guide, each of your thoughts” (Foucault, 1980/2016, p. 27). Psychoanalysis, while framed differently, enacts a structurally equivalent demand: “Say whatever comes to mind.” Despite their differences, both imperatives function as ethical technologies that require the subject to disclose themselves within an asymmetrical relation.

Psychoanalytic interpretation is not only the quintessential therapeutic tool but also functions as a technique to validate power dynamics and knowledge within the analytic training dispositif. The candidate’s discourse is framed within a symbolic structure; everything they say or do is subject to interpretation. However, power should be understood as a condition of existence (Butler, 1997). In this sense, power is not simply repressive but constitutive; it produces both the figure of the analyst and the analysand, and even conditions the form through which the unconscious may be revealed. In this sense, every analysis may likely encounter a constitutional impasse: power relations. Without them, there is no analysis; however, with them, other discourses and technologies are filtered through them. Thus, from this perspective, it will never be a “pure” analysis. Power relations precede the analytic interpretation.

The controversy lies in the fact that the institution may deploy subtle strategies of control and discipline throughout the training process, even within personal analysis. Kernberg (2016) notes that critical students tend to be interpreted due to their negative transference; furthermore, they are often advised to return to their own analysis. However, this reflects mechanisms of control, surveillance, and normalization of dissident thought. Hence, one subjective response to these technologies is identification with the analyst. In order to be like them, one must think and replicate a particular truth and practice:

The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power (…) Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true (Foucault, 1980/2016, p. 131).

Kernberg (1986), through a meticulous analysis, argues that psychoanalysis is better understood as a Weltanschauung [worldview]. This idiosyncratic framework identifies the neuroses and complexes of those who dissent. Inexorably, it becomes “(…) a powerful ideological instrument in combating the unfaithful, in using unconscious motivation of others as a social weapon” (p. 825). According to Borch-Jacobsen & Shamdasani (2012), the didactic analysis ensured that candidates would interpret Freud’s theories without distorting them through their own neuroses. Consequently, it represents a standardization of the theoretical and clinical technique. As they write: “Henceforth, analysts would no longer be free to decide the meanings of their dreams by themselves. Better still, they were no longer free to decide whether they were neurotic or not, or even if they had been fully analysed” (p. 48).

Foucault (1980/2016) refers to this when addressing the renunciation of one’s own truth: the individual enters into a position of deep dependence on the master. In this light, analytic subjectivity may be structurally tethered to a master figure, whether Freud, the institution, or the didactic analyst. To be assimilated by the institution, one must renounce critical thinking, creative readings, or innovative proposals. The repetition of the power mechanisms is key: candidates are trained like their professors and analysts were once trained. Thus, senior analysts may reproduce the very practices once imposed upon them with their students.

In this sense, didactic analysis works as both a ritual of initiation and a process of subjective adaptation for the candidate concerning the psychoanalytic training dispositif. In other words, the dispositif seeks to homogenize its new members through a form of subjective “hygienization,” which describes the symbolic purification of subjectivity within training; It implies the removal or correction of unruly, excessive, or dissenting members to conform to the institutional ideal. In this way, control, surveillance, and discipline produce a particular kind of student experience.

The Structural Impasse

Before the IPA’s founding in 1910, Freud’s approach to training analysts was more “artisanal” than providing a structured educational curriculum. This informal training was heavily based on personal interaction with Freud and the students’ self-analysis. This practice had a special place in early psychoanalysis; even Freud, in 1910, stated that those who failed in this enterprise should give up seeing patients. For almost thirty years, the IPA granted membership to those who had not undergone a personal analysis (Falzeder, 2015; Erős, Szekacs-Weisz, & Robinson, 2013). Overall, it served as a precursor to training analysis, despite its limitations. Also, it was seen as cultivating honesty towards oneself by confronting one’s own unconscious.

The analytic dispositif may have revived and articulated two genealogical forms of the “examination of conscience”: Greco-Roman antiquity and early Christianity. In antiquity, the practice was episodic and focused on self-mastery, an exercise of personal freedom. In contrast, Christianity was a ritual of submission aimed at confessing one’s interiority to a spiritual guide; even for some people, such as monks, it was obligatory (Foucault, 1980/2016). It was permanent and did not aim at self-mastery; on the contrary, it became an instrument of compulsory extraction of truth about the self. Thus, self-analysis is not an anecdotal part of psychoanalytic history; it represents the vestiges of self-examination that lead to self-mastery. An analyst who confronts their neuroses and complexes is more likely to be suitable for analyzing patients. Currently, the training analysis represents an ethics of permanent confession to a master. Both traditions are not mutually exclusive; in fact, each has a role within the analytic training dispositif. First, the candidate analyzes their neurosis with their didactic analyst. Second, the analyst, as a spiritual director, remains a function within the candidate’s psyche, having the effect of self-examination, even outside the office. Additionally, it appears that it is no coincidence that both traditions coexist; they are like a “fold,” in which the candidates’ subjectivity is produced. In Foucauldian terms, the subject of analytic training emerges at the fold between freedom and discipline. The dispositif does not resolve the contradiction between mastery and obedience; it structures the candidate through it. As a result, the analytic position is not simply one of neutrality or authority, but that of a subject who has been subjected to a double ethic: the imperative to govern oneself and the expectation to remain governed.

Erős, Szekacs-Weisz & Robinson (2013) state that “[Freud] experienced the pain of honesty towards oneself and said that self-analysis has limits” (p. li). Since it has limitations to self-exploration, training analysis may presuppose a guarantor that corrects that flaw. In 1918, with Freud’s approval, Max Eitingon established that anyone wishing to analyze others must first undergo analysis themselves. Subsequently, artisanal or independent analyses were prohibited as IPA-recognized societies began to regulate educational policy (Schröter, 2001). Some controversies emerged, such as the legitimacy of who is allowed to speak the truth about the unconscious. IPA-member institutions recognized and authorized analysts who had gone through their educational curriculum. Of course, there were its detractors, such as R. Lowenstein, who claimed that the training model was too rigid, adhering too closely to the German style. Ferenczi spent several months between 1926 and 1927 in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, training independent groups of non-medical professionals (Mészáros, 2008; Schröter, 2002; Millet, 1966). The analytic training dispositif may have transformed from what constitutes psychoanalytic knowledge to what analysts were trained in an IPA institution. Analytic truth was mediated by institutional network, discursive, and ethical precepts; it was a privatization of knowledge and was regulated by authorized analysts. Hence, analysts did not necessarily interpret texts; they interpreted what their institutions identified as interpretable: power as a condition of truth (Foucault, 1975/1977; 1980/2016). Thereby, the question of “what counts as psychoanalysis” became inseparable from “who belongs to where”.

Another reason to initiate mandatory training analysis was to prevent acting out erotized transference. Many analysts began romantic relationships that later evolved into analyses, or vice versa: Michael Balint and his second wife, Otto Rank and his wife Beata, August Aichhorn and Margaret Mahler, Rudolph Löwenstein and Marie Bonaparte, and Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein (Falzeder, 2015, p. 67). Analysts were not indifferent to their sexual drives; in fact, they often acted on them. Interestingly, Freud wanted his text about countertransference to be circulated secretly among analysts (Falzeder, 2015). This probably means that the analytic training dispositif not only regulates the psyche but also the body as an ethics of the self, implying a normative body, especially regarding sexual drives. Training analysis aims at the self-mastery of the body, mind, and even desire. This marks a moment when the training dispositif takes on a biopolitical dimension, intervening not just in discourse or knowledge, but in managing bodies, minds, and desire. The fact that Freud wished to circulate his text on countertransference only among close colleagues further reveals how certain knowledges, especially those that expose the analyst’s vulnerability, must remain privately policed within the institutional life (Sokolowsky, 2022; Foucault, 2004/2007; 1982/2005; 1972/1980).

While deployed to regulate the analyst’s subjectivity, the analytic training dispositif should not be read exclusively as a disciplinary mechanism. It is both disciplinary and ethical: biopolitical and transformative (White, 2014; Foucault, 1988). Although training analysis is a mandatory requirement, it also implies a discussion about the care of the self, which aims at the care of the analysand by transitivity (Imber, 2020; Kleinberg, 1987). Thus, self-examination and self-mastery were not enough; it is necessary to undergo self-transformation, which may imply changing the relationship with oneself as a future analyst. When analysts engage in this process meaningfully, they develop more than just skills; they become ethically attuned practitioners who care for others from a place of self-awareness and responsibility. This may explain why training analysis is often a transformative experience, regardless of its outcomes. “Good analysts” aren’t simply those who have mastered theories or the analytic technique. Instead, through the discipline and self-cultivation imposed by the training dispositif, they may also develop an ethical position: a reflective subjectivity that allows them to accompany their analysand, listen, tolerate uncertainty, and question themselves.

“The essential function of self-practices is to dispel inner illusions, recognize the temptations that form within the soul, and unleash the seductions to which one may fall victim” [personal translation] (Castro, 2014, p. 108). This quote describes the ethical aspiration of training analysis: not simply to confess or reveal one’s fantasies, but to transform the relationship of self-care and desire. Within the training dispositif, this transformation is often structured through renunciation and conformity, which aim to regulate the candidate’s access to unconscious truth. The risk lies in how such practices of self-purification (e.g., through conformity and compliance or psychic normalization) may serve as conduits for institutional power, under the guise of neutrality. The challenge, then, is to sustain a practice of self-relation that resists the installation of psychic neutrality as the norm.

As a condition of truth, power does not stand outside care; it emerges through the tensions that care of the self must continuously navigate. Power shapes the conditions of care, but caring for the self may resist, negotiate, or transform the operations of power. For instance, the admission of lay analysts into the analytic field can be read as a moment in which the care of the self and others found a way to resist the totalizing logic of institutional authority, rooted in the medical tradition. It represented a possibility to open the field to heterogeneous voices and professions, especially in the United States. It was a reform that emerged within the analytic movement; nevertheless, this political disruption reflected how medical power, in a way, contributed to the legitimization of psychoanalysis. Rather than abolishing the dispositif, it reconfigured it (Bigras & Peraldi, 1978; Millet, 1966; Wallerstein, 1998). It opened the field to non-medical professionals and challenged the discourse that only physicians were authorized to conduct a psychoanalysis properly.

Considering the aforementioned, there is a constitutive tension within the analytic training dispositif: it operates both as a biopolitical apparatus regulating desire and as an ethical practice aimed at self-transformation. What matters, then, is not escaping the dispositif, since there is no “outside” to power, but cultivating a relation to oneself and to others that resists totalization (Foucault, 1980/2016). In this sense, the impasse is not a dead end, but a site of subjective ethical position. There are no power-free spaces; nevertheless, many candidates and analysts have learned to move through the analytic training dispositif. As Freud once noted, psychoanalysis is among the “impossible professions,” as it reveals the fragility of mastery. The analyst must maintain an ethical relationship with themselves and with the analysand while navigating institutional demands that are never fully neutral. Within the training dispositif, one may find small gestures of ethical resistance, creativity, and critical reflection, acts that do not reject formation itself but reorient it from within. Otherwise, psychoanalysis would not have changed over time, nor produced such diverse and divergent theories as those of Klein, Lacan, Winnicott, or Bion.

In this direction, interpretation holds a privileged place in psychoanalysis. Training analysis may support the development of ethical resistance to institutional demands or satisfy them. There is no guarantee. Within the analytic training dispositif, interpretation should be understood as both content and an act that subjectivizes the candidate, serving as a tool of discipline. While interpretation is often seen as a therapeutic intervention, it can also produce normalization and discipline, foreclosing an open relationship to one’s truth, similar to what happened to Rank and Jung.

Freud interpreted Otto Rank’s birth trauma theory as a neurotic deviation from psychoanalytic orthodoxy (Falzeder, 2015). A more contemporary testimony is Fernando Barrios’s case, a Uruguayan analyst, whose membership was rejected after his 14-year high-frequency analysis. He received a vague explanation concerning his “aggressiveness;” however, it was widely known in the institution that he was openly gay. So, he just connected the dots (Ferba, 2020). He eventually joined a Lacanian school. These cases illustrate how interpretation is not a neutral act, but one mediated by the demands of the analytic training dispositif. Interpretation can subjectivize while simultaneously disciplining; it can create spaces, but also exclude. The ethical stakes of training analysis lie not only in its technical mastery but also in the position of the analyst as one who interprets from within a structure of institutional authority. If the analytic encounter offers no guarantee, why must candidates be analyzed by didactic analysts from the very institutions that will later evaluate them? Could this not risk producing institutional conformity as subjective truth? Might an analysis outside the institution prevent a less determined transference and a more open encounter with one’s unconscious truth? Unfortunately, there is no guarantee.

Perhaps self-analysis, in this context, may serve as the counterbalance to the totalizing power of the analytic training dispositif. It is not a path to self-knowledge in the classical sense, but an ethical practice of resistance; it may be a way for the subject to reflect critically and ethically on their own position, especially in relation to normalizing interpretations. Whether within a training analysis or any analytic encounter, self-analysis may affirm the subject’s capacity to say: “I do not think so.” Self-analysis is directly related to the awareness of the disciplinary gaze of the dispositif. Throughout analytic history, self-analysis was diminished or perceived as an unproductive enterprise. However, under the Foucauldian lens, its role is to conduct a counterbalance between the dispositif and the candidate. Self-analysis does not reveal unconscious truth as such; rather, it marks the subject’s encounter with the limits of authorized interpretation. It is an operation within power relations, an ethical gesture that reveals how even resistance is conditioned by the very structures it attempts to govern the self.

As Freud writes in Constructions in Analysis (1937), “We claim no authority for [the construction], we require no direct agreement from the patient, nor do we argue with him if at first he denies it (…) It will all become clear in the course of future developments” (p. 254). He does not frame the patient’s rejection as necessarily resistance, but treats it as insufficient grounds for validating or not the interpretation. For him, the truth of the construction lies in its long-term effects, not in immediate agreement; thereby, it should be assessed in après-coup. While he leaves the door open for rejection, he may see the analyst as the keeper of unconscious truth, waiting for the patient’s complexes and neuroses to become clearer.

Possibly such truth never becomes clear, and maybe that’s precisely the point. The ethical force of psychoanalysis lies not in eventual agreement, but in the capacity to hold disagreement as part of the analytic process. In this sense, the analysand’s dissent is not a gesture of rejection of analysis, but the sign of a subject who does not allow institutional authority to become indistinguishable from truth. In this sense, self-analysis functions not as a mirror, but as a counter-conduct: a way to sustain difference, dissent, and singularity within a structure that risks normalizing them or even disciplining (Foucault, 2004/2007). Its value lies not in what it reveals, but in what it holds open. It is aligned with the Lacanian notion of interpretation, in which the analyst does not seek meaning; instead, they produce disruption in the signifying chain. That is, the unconscious remains “open” as an effect of signification. As Apartín (2014) alleges, it is not about adding an S2, but isolating an S1.

Self-analysis does not change power relations, but it allows analysts and analysands to engage with them differently. In this way, the candidate may confront the process by which the institutional gaze is internalized as one’s truth, generating a subtle but necessary ethical counterweight. This is not about a critique, rebellion, or dissenting attitude; it is about seeing the gaze that is seeing one, and being able to point it out. Self-analysis, as an ethical practice, is pertinent in the analytic field; it locates analysts in social, cultural, and political coordinates. The risk of repeating colonial relations or fixed roles through interpretation remains high, especially today. Yet there are no guarantees, and perhaps that’s precisely the point. This is why self-analysis must remain an open, ongoing practice: one that not only resists closure, but observes with caution the operations of the analytic training dispositif. In this sense, self-analysis offers a way to inhabit the analytic dispositif critically, making its mechanisms of power visible without allowing them to determine the entirety of the candidate’s formation and their future analysands.

Perhaps one day, self-analysis can be recognized as the fourth element of the analytic tripod, not merely a private endeavor, but an institutionalized practice of ethical and political reflection. Rather than focusing exclusively on unconscious drives, psychoanalytic institutions could foster self-analysis as an ethical practice that confronts their own power, responds to contemporary social realities, and resists becoming a closed, self-authorizing system. Perhaps the future of psychoanalytic formation lies in making room for what cannot be fully institutionally seen, a space to acknowledge the existence of blind spots, despite their content remaining opaque. Isn’t that what psychoanalysis is about?

Conclusions

This analysis reveals a foundational paradox in the analytic training dispositif: it demands that candidates renounce authority over themselves within a structure originally founded by someone, Freud, who never did. Rooted in both Greco-Roman and Christian ethical traditions, the training dispositif operates as both a path to self-mastery and a ritual of submission, producing analysts through a double movement: care for themselves and others, and control over body, mind, and drives. The myth of Freud as the “self-engendered master” underpins this structure, embedding unresolved authority within analytic institutions.

While central to clinical practice, interpretation becomes a mechanism through which institutional power operates, producing conditions of truth, always mediated by institutional regulations. Thus, the act of interpretation is far from being neutral; in fact, it is fertile ground for power to flow without disruptions. The unconscious truth is subaltern to the truth of the analogous dispositifs, such as familial, medical, or sexual.

Since the analytic dispositif installs the structural impasse, the candidate is a subject of truth and an object of power. Although there is no outside of power dynamics, it also opens possibilities. Returning to self-analysis may be necessary to inhabit this contradiction ethically as a care practice of the self. As such, it can function as a liberating gesture that remains partially outside the gaze of institutional power. Self-analysis is not equivalent to freedom, but it creates a psychic space from which to resist the normalizing effects of the analytic training dispositif and others. Self-analysis is a political act, not an analytic one, as Freud thought. Although both self-analysis and psychoanalysis have their own limitations, the first one enables analysts to remain closely attuned to the structural impasse of the analytic training dispositif.