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(1985). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 21:150-155

On Becoming a Psychoanalyst: Education or Experience

John L. Schimel, M.D.

I WASN'T ABLE TO DECIDE what this panel was supposed to be about. It seemed to me that psychoanalytic training had to provide an education, during which the trainee had better have an experience. I thought over my own training and decided I had indeed been educated and I could talk about that. And what an experience! One of my supervisors wore black shirts and ties and smoked cigarettes in a very long, thin cigarette holder in an absent-minded way. I was afriad he would burn himself. I used to watch the ashes drop onto the carpet and wondered what the message was. I didn't like black shirts. I wondered if I would have to learn to like black shirts. And everyone, candidates and faculty, were either getting married or divorced, or remarried. The only stable faculty members seemed to be the bachelors and spinsters.

Erich Fromm told us, in all humility, that there was little to teach since little was known and, indeed that some people seemed to him to have therapeutic pers

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