“Open-System” Psychiatry

When I left chicago in 1932 to undertake a personal psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, I knew that Dr. Karen Horney had been invited by Dr. Franz Alexander to join the faculty of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. It was, however, only during my analysis that I learned that profound differences had developed between Alexander and Horney, which culminated in her departure from the Chicago Institute and the Midwest after only two years. When I reported this to Freud he stated bluntly that he was hardly surprised.

Later when I met Dr. Horney in New York on my way back to Chicago, she was very friendly to me and evinced a great deal of interest in my experiences with Freud. Unfortunately, I did not have much time to communicate with her, nor during the remainder of her life did I take the opportunity to discuss Freud in relation to her own organization founded in 1941. It was natural that I should have had, at that time as a neophyte, the usual Freudian attitude toward the so-called splinter groups which had separated from the main body of psychoanalysis.

Indeed, when I became aware of the serious controversies among psychoanalysts taking place in Chicago later, I experienced anxiety about the possibility of the main body of the Chicago Institute splitting into an “orthodox” and a “liberal” group. As I look back now, it would have been far better if such a split along ideological lines had occured, since after Alexander's retirement from Chicago, the forces which he temporarily and successfully controlled, attained power, and Chicago has now only a classical psychoanalytic institute.

As all of you realize, it takes a very long time to become thoroughly educated in any special branch of knowledge and probably analytic training requires more time than any other scientific or cultural field. The completion of formal education, however, does not make an analyst, for it takes many years to acquire enough analytic experience to the point where one feels at home with unco