The Trainings of the Psychoanalyst

Tardits reconstructs how psychoanalysis has organised its own reproduction, from Freud's first circle through the Berlin institute's teaching model to Lacan's break with it. She reads training not as a curriculum but as a recurring problem: if what matters is worked out in a person's own analysis, the institution that follows can standardise, examine, and certify little of it. Each chapter follows a different settlement, and the plural title marks that no single form has held.

Much of the book turns on the Lacanian devices built to keep the question open rather than close it. Tardits sets out the pass, in which a candidate's passage to analyst is testified through others, and the cartel, a small working group with a rotating fourth position, against the accreditation logic they were meant to unsettle.

For a clinician, it clarifies why competing schools disagree about what an analyst is, and what is at stake when a training claims to certify one. First published in French, the English edition appeared in 2010.