Group I for Study of Curriculum and Didactic Teaching—A Sketch of their Meeting and their Work

The principal purpose of my presentation is to offer you an opportunity to see, as reflected in the work of Curriculum Conference I, something of the immense importance and usefulness of the Educational Program of our Association. In 1959, as the Survey drew toward a close, even those of us who had participated only by offering moral support, and by responding to the efforts of the Survey team to get at the "truth, " could take great pride in the realization that American psychoanalysts were the only group to have undertaken such a task of stock taking. Moreover, it became clear immediately that ways must be found for capitalizing on our new information; and you know, or have heard this morning, what has thus far been done in that connection.

As Dr. Lewin has said, a study of curriculum by active teachers from the institutes appeared to COPE to be a good place to begin to involve the several faculties. The Group with which I participated in this work included Robert Cohen from Washington, Samuel Guttman from the Philadelphia Association Institute, Aaron Karush from Columbia, Eugene Pumpian-Mindlin from Southern California, Sarah Tower from Baltimore, and myself from the Philadelphia Society and Institute.

I shall quote from some of the briefing material in order to present the scope of the problem:

We shall need to descry and to describe, as a base upon which a curricular structure can rest, the place of psychoanalysis as a science in itself that is related in a unique and dynamic fashion to a host of other sciences and disciplines. From one standpoint it may be viewed, for example, as a sister science to such others as anthropology and sociology, capable of a lively and useful interchange of data and ideas; but from another—and this is unique—psychoanalysis, with its roots in biology, alone can offer not only a coherent view of individual psychic development and functioning, but also source data upon the reflections of those that form the subject matter of other d