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Until quite recently it was common for psychoanalysts in the United States, and for their organizations and training institutes, to express concern about a specter known as the “slippery slope.” According to this view, psychoanalytic theories and methods are constantly at risk of being corrupted or diluted (“going down the slippery slope toward … ”), because of unconscious resistances that are present in everyone. These forces work against recognizing and preserving the truths revealed by psychoanalysis, and they impede efforts to use its methods effectively in pursuit of those truths with patients.
Robert Waelder (1960) articulated the matter clearly: “In science, as in most other affairs, we should first try to keep what we already have—cultivate the land that has been cleared and guard it against a return of the jungle and against corrosion—and then try to improve on it or to enlarge it… Psychoanalysis—its intellectual substance and the categorical imperative of ceaseless self-exploration which provides its moral mainspring—is always in jeopardy because it arouses strong resistances from which nobody seems to be exempt …” (pp. x, xii; emphasis added).
To ward off the risk posed by these resistances—that is, for what were understood to be very good reasons—virtually every psychoanalytic organization and institute, and many individual analysts, took measures, consciously and unconsciously, to protect the discipline and its institutions through regulations and controls. For example, it was