Becoming a Psychoanalyst: Advice from Anna Freud

Last week I pulled the trigger and enrolled into the additional training to become a psychoanalyst.

Part of me is so excited! I've been dreaming, thinking, and planning for so long on how to make this possible for myself. Everyone I admire in the field is a psychoanalyst and I cannot wait to learn and grow into one myself.

And another part is bummed that it'll take me at least another three years to get my license. It's a marathon.

🤔 Interesting thing I came across: Talking about becoming a psychoanalyst... In her book "Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy", which we read in the Patreon Book Club, Nancy McWilliams shares an excerpt from a letter Anna Freud wrote to a 14-year-old boy who asked her how to prepare for becoming a psychoanalyst:

"If you want to be a real psychoanalyst, you have to have a great love of the truth, scientific truth as well as personal truth, and you have to place this appreciation of truth higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they belong to the world outside or to your own inner person. Further, I think that a psychoanalyst should have [an interest] in facts that belong to sociology, religion, literature and history [...] otherwise his outlook on his patient will be too narrow. You ought to be a great reader and become acquainted with the literature of many countries and cultures. In the great literary figures you will find people who know at least as much of human nature as the psychiatrists and psychologists try to do."

📚 What I'm currently reading: I'm still fascinated by personality styles and have started diving into David Shapiro's "Neurotic Styles". So far it's a good read!

Best wishes,

Alina