Psychoanalysis & Teaching

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan by Catherine Clément:

Teacher of what? Psychoanalysts have never gotten beyond this naïve question, rehashed time and time again ever since Freud. What can a psychoanalyst teach his colleagues? Nothing. That is, "normally" nothing, for psychoanalytic practice can only be learned on another analyst's couch. (p. 36).

The possibility/impossibility of teaching psychoanalysis is something I hear people talking about all the time.

The fact that you can teach about psychoanalysis (e.g., history, theory, vocabulary, etc.) is accepted as true. However, teaching about psychoanalysis is not teaching what it is to do psychoanalysis.

To learn how to do psychoanalysis one must experience psychoanalysis.

The same is true about driving a car. Someone could learn all about driving a car, but to really learn how to drive, one has to put their body through an experience of driving.

In the very next paragraph of the test, Clément writes:

Suppose you want to be a psychoanalyst. If you're in France, your first thought will naturally be, "There must be a school for that." Perish the thought. So you go look for one. You go to see the professors at the university. If they're honest fellows, they'll tell you that here and there you can find a course on Freud or on the unconscious or about psychoanalysis. But then, looking embarrassed, they'll drop a hint that taking one of these courses is not the way to become a psychoanalyst. How do you go about it, then? Well, you have to undergo psychoanalysis yourself. Disaster: you'd thought of everything but that. Nine out of ten applicants for psychoanalytic instruction make tracks when they hear the bad news. They were looking for a school in order to avoid the couch. The tenth embarks upon his quest for the Holy Grail. He will look all around and even inside himself for the courage to "go." And go he will. For four or five years he'll chat away on his little couch, and if at the end of that time he still wants to be a psychoanalyst he will then, but only then, begin his formal schooling.

The need to go through analysis does put lots of people off.

Personally, I don’t see that as a bad thing. It means only people who really love psychoanalysis will commit to doing what needs to be done to learn about it as an experience.