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Dear Candidate: Analysts from around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education, and the Profession

Editor : Fred Busch

Reviews and Endorsements

"It is possible that you will be surprised and educated by what you find in this book. Determination, kinship, wisdom (and some heartbreak) walk hand in hand through its pages with a rousing breadth, unlikely to be available at a single institute. The writers of the letters have been generous with their experience. Agreements emerge: the profound value of personal analysis, free from artificial institutional requirements, and the necessity of steeping oneself in the literature. Another voice is also audible. Readers of Dante will hear: "Retain all hope, ye who enter here--much hardship awaits you, as do human splendors'." - Charles Baekeland, I.P.S.O. President-elect.

"As I have done, I strongly encourage you to immerse yourself in the pages of this book. The words--I mean the thoughts, the feelings, tales and experiences--here come as in a dream dreamt at night; once afar, now close. We want to hear what they want to say. More than that, deep inside some place of ours, we need to. Our psychoanalytic/symbolic fathers, mothers, those who walked the path a little ahead, before us, turn back and tell us a bit of what they saw. So here they come.

As the I.P.S.O. current editor, I could not have hoped for more, than to tell you now: let's go there together. I invite you, my colleague, to this chorus: Dear analyst, 'Talk to me like the rain, I will lie here and listen', as the man in the play by Tennessee Williams would say. - Claudia Antonelli, GEPCampinas, Brazil.

"Dear Candidate is a truly moving book which brings to life the real and personal aspects of analytic training and life beyond training. Like a good analysis, the journey of reading through the letters stirs one up while at the same time provides encouragement and curiosity for the many conflicting emotions encountered during candidacy. Unlike any work thus far in analytic literature, this book is a guide on how to have compassion for one's internal and external world as a candidate and future analyst. A powerfully rich book that every candidate should read at the beginning and end of candidacy. Dear Candidate will surely prove to be a comforting companion to candidates around the globe during psychoanalytic training for years to come." Angela Vuotto, Secretary of the American Psychoanalytic Association Candidate Council.

"I enthusiastically read this compendium of analyst letters to candidates, hailing from the three I.P.A. regions (Latin America, North America and Europe), assimilating the work not as institutional missives but rather as personal communiques with building thematic overlays. I was impressed by their overarching tone of compassion and generosity of spirit. The letters are instructive to the current generation of candidates, emphasizing the evolution of analytic teaching and thinking. Many letters highlight the vital need for candidates to gain analytic exposure and training outside their institutes or societies, as being foundational and invaluable to their growth as analysts, with some letters emphasizing the crucial role of active involvement with the I.P.A.'s candidate organization, I.P.S.O. - Kathryn McCormick, I.P.S.O. President.