I'd agree with Bob's "patient-and-therapist"; one doesn't exist without the
other.   Winnicott took his responsibility to the person he was treating
VERY seriously, and there wasn't any question about that person needing
care, being ill, etc.  But he also had the utmost respect for the person in
his care; whatever our language, we need to retain that attitude, too, I
think.

Can I also suggest that we be a little more careful about trashing social
workers, please?  Some of us have quite a lot of training and are very
serious about our work.

Someone said (and the message keeps being repeated. . .  am chagrined that
the social workers     >and> psychology majors wh) >"o call their practice
"psychoanalysis" have neither had> years o f analysis or training in
analysis.  They should call themselves> counselors, and practice counseling
- that is a respectable field but it is> not psychoanalysis.>>

This passage seems to put several things together which need to be
differentiated.  My experience of people who refer to "psychology majors"
has to do with people in an undergraduate program.  No one with only a BA
from the USA -- no matter what field -- is equipped to practice anything
without a good bit more training and supervision.  We shouldn't be so quick
to judge how things were in the early days of psychoanalysis or in other
countries today; the situation  might be quite different.

In most states the term "social worker" is governed by law and requires at
least a master's degree; there are getting to be quite a few of us with
PhD's.  And traditionally a MSW, because of the content of the training,
has been a *practice* based training, so social workers got much more in
the way of psychotherapy training in a master's level curriculum than
people in the related fields of psychology, etc.

**The bottom line is that the way someone works defines what is done, not
their degree.  So the words "counseling", "psychotherapy", "
psychoanalysis", etc.  refer to a  way of working and of thinking about
that work. (The definition of "psychoanalysis", while having room for
discussion, will be a LOT more clear than the definitions of
"psychotherapy" or "counseling.")  A psychoanalyst (someone who has had
formal psychoanalytic training) could take a "counseling" role.  A poet who
has had the requisite psychoanalytic training could work as a
psychoanalyst.

It also sounds to me as if the above passage contains a confusion between
the use of the work "psychoanalysis" and the word "psychoanalytic."  I
don't know social workers or psychologists who call what they do
"psychoanalysis" unless they have completed a formal psychoanalytic
training at a psychoanalytic institute in addition to their basic training.
However, there are psychologists (for me, that means a PhD in clinical
psychology) and clinical social workers (with a MSW or PhD) who call what
they do "psychoanalytic psychotherapy".  That is different than
psychoanalysis and it is quite appropriate for them to use the term
"psychoanalytic psychotherapy."

Although psychoanalytic training programs generally (always?) require that
candidates be analyzed, this is not true of social work trainings or any of
the psychology trainings I know about in the USA. In fact, I've been told
that it is against the law for degree-granting programs to require a
"treatment" of trainees. I STRONGLY recommend personal therapy, preferably
personal analysis, for anyone who is going to work with people (I'd include
even teachers, doctors, nurses, but certainly anyone in the mental health
professions.) But there isn't a requirement in the MSW programs I know, and
I don't think this is true in the clinical psychology programs I know
either. . .   In England, if one is doing a psychotherapy training (a
program which is usually separated from the academic degree), then one may
be *required* to be in analysis or an intensive therapy as part of the
training. . .   Apart from the analytic institutes in the USA, and maybe
some free-standing institutes that teach psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I
don't know of programs with a treatment requirement. ( I could be wrong
about this.)

And, I'd also like to suggest that the person talking about the Houston
psychoanalytic scene might like to check some facts.  It sounded to me as
though several groups of people were being treated as though they were one,
that the system of training for research candidates was not understood, nor
was the nature of the difference between training requirements in the
various mental health fields. . . . also, you might want to check out the
requirements needed to apply and be accepted for psychoanalytic training.
I suspect it has a good bit more to it than ability to pay and affiliation
with a HMO (which I can't imagine has any value at all to a psychoanalytic
institute since most HMO's hardly pay for psychotherapy, much less
psychoanalysis).  I also had a rather different read on Dr Mittleman's
messages than you did. . .

Harriet