Explanatory Note

The following letter has been sent to each member of the American Psychoanalytic Association by five resigning members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. This letter explains the reasons for their resignation:

“Dear Colleague:

When five individuals, all members of a professional society, feel impelled, for reasons not of a personal nature, to resign their membership in that society, an explanation to their professional colleagues is an obligation upon them and a matter of fundamental importance to those interested in the profession.

The resignations are a response to a situation which constitutes a crisis in psychoanalytic education. Psychoanalysis is a young science, still in an experimental stage of its development, full of uncertainties, full of problems to which anything approaching final and conclusive answers is still to be sought. As in all sciences, the solutions of these problems are directly dependent upon more voluminous and keener observations, as well as upon further weighing and consideration of observations already made.

Education in any field consists in a passing on from an older to a younger generation of the truth that the older generation believes it has learned, as well as a bequeathing to the younger generation of the problems left unsolved by their elders. In psychoanalysis as it is today, we cannot afford to subject the younger generation to any dogmatism, we should not mislead it with the illusion of certainty, where none actually exists.

There are two antithetical attitudes towards psychoanalysis today. One of these is based upon the awareness that psychoanalysis is still in an experimental stage of its development. The other attitude regards psychoanalysis as having in many respects passed beyond this stage and holds that training in psychoanalysis should begin with the learning of certain concepts and technics which are, as they sometimes term it, “classical,” and which represent psychoanalysis as they conceive it to have been handed down