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May 9, 2001. As someone who has long been involved in the organizational life of the American Psychoanalytic Association, I wish to applaud Marvin Margolis's forthright exposition ( J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 49:1) of the past decade's transformation of the American's functioning toward increasing democratization, inclusiveness, transparency, outreach to the mental health professional world and the wider concerned community, and involvement in the political process and public policy.
However, I also want to point to some errors in portraying the long, difficult, and often contentious relationship around the issue of so-called “lay analysis,” between the American and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), of which the American has been from its start a component organization. This is a history about which too many, even among of the leaders of the American, have traditionally been ill informed. Margolis speaks to this history and to its culmination in the famous lawsuit against the American, in the course of which description several errors are made.
The IPA did not grant the American the exclusive right to establish new IPA groups in the United States in 1938, as Margolis stated it did (p. 13). Over the 1920s and 1930s, there had been an ongoing struggle between the Americans, who wanted to restrict psychoanalytic training to physicians (psychiatrists), and the Europeans (then the dominant majority in the IPA), who wished, following Freud's position, to keep training open to all suitable individuals, from whatever educational background.
The Americans came to the 1938 IPA Congress in Paris demanding that they be accorded the right to bar nonphysicians from psychoanalytic training in America (and to bar European-trained “lay analysts” from membership in the American should they immigrate to America), with the threat of secession from the IPA if their demand was not met. Faced with this threat of splintering, the IPA, of which the Americans then represented