Training at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis

The American Institute for Psychoanalysis, in its 69th year, is the second oldest psychoanalytic institute in the New York metropolitan area. It was founded by Karen Horney and her colleagues with the express purpose of creating a training program “in a democratic atmosphere which would tend to deter the development of rigidities in psychoanalytic thinking ….” The founding members further wrote that “It is the hope of the Institute that it will continue to avoid conceptual rigidities, and to respond to ideas, whatever the source, in a spirit of scientific and academic democracy.” The Statement of Aims was originally published in this Journal (AJPA, 1942, 2/1, pp. 28). To this day the institute has been working hard to fulfill this grand mission.

Different psychoanalytic points of view are represented among the faculty, and dialogue is characterized by a spirit of openness and mutual respect, fostering the development of new ideas and broadened perspectives on theory and technique. Unique to the institute is the emphasis given to Horney's view of personality and character, stressing interpersonal and cultural determinants and dynamic systems integrating self-psychological and conflict models of the mind. A split and conflicted Self organized around attempts to sustain an integrated identity if the face of irreconcilable conflicts and alienating, narcissistically invested self idealizations. Horney and her colleagues at the institute were among the first relationalists. They recognized the inter-subjective and interpersonal nature of the analytic relationship and its importance as a therapeutic agent for increasing self-awareness and providing constructive new experience. These principles provide the foundation for the curriculum of the institute, which is broad-based and comprehensive, including all the major psychoanalytic schools of