Identification & Idealization: What is the Group to You?
Reading Freud's "Group Psychology" in the context of psychoanalytic training and formation
To read Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego as a psychoanalyst in training is to immediately question the impact of the group on the individual’s subjective formation. Freud’s text demands that we question the role of the institute, the potential presence of identification and idealization – of theorists, schools of thought, and local leaders – and how these dynamics show up at every level of training from the academic to the administrative to the clinical, the social, and the personal, as well as in the candidate’s unconscious and their desire.
An individual’s analytic formation begins before the demand for training, before the start of their own analysis even, but it is only once you have become immersed in the group dynamics of an institute that you come to know something psychoanalytic about the ways you’ve always related to groups before. The position you’ve always taken up inside, outside, or adjacent to a group will come into question as it’s never needed to before. This unfolding of realizations about oneself occurs simultaneous to the linear timeline of course progression, but the unconscious is not a linear phenomenon. This is one reason why it’s deceiving to put a timeline on the course of psychoanalytic training, as many institutes do. Especially in New York, where institutes are churning out graduates each year who then sit for the state licensing exam in psychoanalysis, it’s necessary to question what we believe these institutes are delivering within the field of psychoanalysis, and how easily one could believe that this five-year course of study leads to mastery. In fact, there is no predetermined timeline for becoming a psychoanalyst, and to misunderstand this is to misunderstand something crucial about our inability to control the unconscious. Any institute that does not take seriously Freud’s discovery that we are not masters in our own house (or, for that matter, the patient’s house) is at great risk of positioning psychoanalytic training as a process of gaining mastery. This can also convey the message that receiving one’s license from the state makes one a master who is then entitled to act from a place of authority. Graduation from the institute makes one eligible to teach and supervise, stepping into the position of master for the new analysts “beneath” them. It takes a great amount of self-analysis to sustain the questioning position of the analyst even after one has been esteemed by the authorities. But this work at the individual level is crucial to sustain the profession as one in which learning is never passive and teaching does not insist on its own authority.
