Written for aspiring and prospective psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, this book provides an in-depth exploration of what psychoanalytic training entails and what motivates one to undergo this extensive training. Analytic training is rigorous, expensive, and time-consuming, yet despite the prestige it may afford, provides little or no assurance of professional success. An Analyst in Training follows the experience of author Graeme Daniels, a mid-career psychotherapist, who has undergone training in San Francisco, California, USA while maintaining an ongoing consultation practice with a training candidate in Lisbon, Portugal. It covers institutional policies (and politics), program graduation requirements, and training standards, as well as their interplay with COVID-era restrictions and diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. Daniels brings an international and historical flavor to these topics, with his distinctively satirical yet sincere voice.

Graeme Daniels, MFT, has been a practicing psychotherapist since 1996, is an instructor at the East Bay Year Long satellite program of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP), and is a post-seminar analytic training candidate at SFCP. He has written several novels, as well as three non-fiction works, including Getting Real About Sex Addiction: A Psychodynamic Approach to Treatment, co-authored with Joe Farley (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). He has provided annual trainings at San Francisco Bay Area mental health agencies and is a former faculty member within the West Coast Masterson Institute.