Psychoanalytic training in South Africa: Attending to the marginalia.

This paper aims to contribute to recent reflections on training in psychoanalytic practice in South Africa and internationally in response to growing recognition that psychoanalytic practitioners need to be well equipped to deal with contemporary mental health challenges. Rather than add to the central and recurrent themes that authors have already identified as important areas of development in psychoanalytic training my aim is to take a more deconstructive approach. This approach involves engaging with the ways in which contemporary psychoanalytic training is constructed and the kinds of assumptions that could be described as 'haunting' these constructions. The approach also involves conceptualising these constructions and their assumptions as non-accidental. While they are clearly based in extensive engagement with experience and already existing knowledge, they might also be understood as serving particular unconscious purposes. In particular, this paper draws on psychoanalytic theorising on sibling relationships to think about the possible unconscious libidinal attachments to these constructions. In line with a psychoanalytic inquiry, my aim is to draw attention to the elements that are lurking in the margins of future training directives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]