Symposium on Psychoanalytic Training and Education: Editors' Introduction

This paper offers an intimate account of a long-term analytic process and a detailed presentation of one pivotal session to illustrate and explore the issues of love, dissociation, and discipline in a therapeutic relationship. Organized around the concept of impasse, this paper presents a relational perspective on the potential in transference and countertransference love to facilitate or curtail the forward progress of therapeutic work. Love may bring life or impasse to a person in analysis. One key to the dynamics of therapeutic love and impasse is the problem of weak dissociation (Stern, 1997) and the impact of the analyst's noticing, or not noticing, a moment in the onrush of familiar clinical process that is ripe for questioning. A new concept is introduced and elaborated in this paper that relates to the resolution of preoedipal and oedipal transference love: The paradoxical analytic triangle.     

A Componential Approach to Training Reading Skills: Part 2. Decoding and Use of Context

This is the second of two articles that describe the development and evaluation of three component-specific instructional systems for improving critical reading skills. The skill components that were the focus of training have been shown in prior research to represent particular sources of processing difficulty for young adult, poor readers and, based on a model of component interaction, were predicted to have a potentially strong impact on the performance of other component processes. Part 1 presented the evaluation of SPEED, a system designed to develop automaticity in the ability to perceptually encode multiletter units that appear in words. Part 2 describes the evaluation of the RACER and SKI JUMP systems, which focus respectively on developing automaticity in phonological decoding of orthographic information in words and the use of context frames in retrieving and integrating word meanings. In both the RACER and SKI JUMP training studies, all subjects achieved highly accurate and efficient levels of performance in the skill that was the focus of training. Furthermore, SKI JUMP training had an impact on word analysis components and on a measure of inferential comprehension. An analysis of the patterns of transfer of skills acquired in training is presented, and conditions for optimizing skill integration are discussed.     

A Survey of Consultation Training as a Part of Counselor Education Programs

A survey was devised to obtain feedback from counselor educators throughout the country regarding the teaching of consultation skills in their master's degree programs. This survey was mailed to 410 counselor education departments, with the request that the faculty member most closely associated with teaching consultation at the master's level respond. Usable survey forms were returned by 144 programs. A phone follow-up survey of selected nonrespondents substantiated the indicated findings. Reported survey results indicate the extent to which counselor education programs include training in consultation skills, the number of students involved, and the emphasis placed on various consultation skills.     

Education,Conflict and the Political: Introduction to the Special Issue

In recent years the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has addressed the predicament of artists and curators who, in their eagerness to convey a critical message or engage their viewers in an emancipatory process, end up predetermining the outcomes of the experience, hence blocking its critical or emancipatory potential. In this essay I consider Rancière’s writing on this topic and draw out the parallels with the predicament of teachers and curriculum designers who have critical and emancipatory objectives. The risk of education that strives for emancipation is that it can become so directive in steering students to the “right” outcomes that it does not leave these students any intellectual room. Rancière’s work is helpful in reminding us that teachers and curricula with explicitly critical, political, emancipatory objectives can defeat their own purposes and become stultifying if they do not leave the student room to use her or his own intelligence.