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In the 1930s, the hegemony of orthodox Freudian theoretical and clinical teaching and practice was seriously limiting the expansion and value of the field of mental health and pathology. Understandably, where conceptual challenge is heresy, intellectual growth is stifled. Karen Horney's walk with colleagues out of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute faculty turned out to be a fitting symbol for the antifascist social drive of the 1940s; her act was a counterforce against academic dictatorship. Correlatively many doctors back from psychiatric military service in World War II applied for psychoanalytic training in nonconformist institutes such as Horney's American Institute for Psychoanalysis, Clara Thompson's William Allanson White Institute, and Rado's training center at Columbia University.
When new institutes were established, dictatorial constraints on intellectual expansion became manifested in subtle ways. For example, active certified candidates and faculty, to have a forum for presentations of their own and invited speakers, formed the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts. Friends and colleagues from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute were invited to speak, and in the early years all such invitations were declined. Those who declined indicated that their participation would be economic suicide; they would risk cessation of referrals from their own society members.
Times and behaviors changed. Presentations and publications among the new groupings generated curiosity, interest, and even stimulation. During the next couple of decades invited speakers at the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts included three presidents of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
Eventually the spirit of academic freedom led to the collaborative formation of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis with its coming together of thinkers and practitioners of broadly varying concepts at regular semiannual meetings, in special conferences, and in a quarterly publication of the Academy's jour