Who is an analyst?
As has been the case in the United States for the past 20 years or so, psychoanalysts have mainly a psychotherapeutic role. But the increase in number, with no control, of those who quote Lacan as their authority and who ‘proclaim themselves’ psychoanalysts, leads to the fact that their atypical behaviour—which involves, in particular, extremely brief sessions—tends to reinforce in the public mind of the image of psychoanalysis itself, in which the patient reclines on a couch in front of a silent psychoanalyst. This tends to heighten distrust of real psychoanalysts. In France, psychoanalysts’ long training, which, in general, lasts ten years in the institutes affiliated with the IPA, is why these people accede late to the title of psychoanalyst. Their theoretical and practical training includes supervised cures. Since few patients agree to submit themselves to this protocol, students of institutes are led to take difficult patients into supervised analysis—those who suffer from borderl
