If psychoanalysis, for Freud, was an impossible profession, what consequences would this have for psychoanalytic training? And if one's own personal analysis lay at the heart of psychoanalytic training, how could what one had learnt from this be transmitted, let alone taught? In this groundbreaking book, Annie Tardits explores the many attempts that analysts have made to think through the problems of psychoanalytic training. Moving from Freud and his first students through to Lacan and his invention of the "pass", Tardits charts the changing conceptions of psychoanalytic training. With clarity and elegance, she shows how different ideas of what psychoanalysis is will have effects on how training is understood. If psychoanalysis involves each person's unique unravelling of the unconscious and of sexuality, what kind of training would be appropriate, or even possible?

Annie Tardtis is a psychoanalyst practising in Paris and a member of the +cole de psychanalyse Sigmund Freud.