The History of Lay Analysis: Emendations

In “The Lawsuit Revisited,” Richard Simons quotes from my plea in the last paragraph of the preface to my Lay Analysis: Life inside the Controversy (1998), which begins with the sentence, “This accounting is thus very much my own eyewitness account of the events in which I was an inside participant, and therefore my truth” (p. xii); it goes on to state that others of the central protagonists, having different perspectives and divergent interests, would necessarily have different understandings of salient reasons and causes surrounding the issues at stake; and it ends with the expressed hope that my account might stimulate some of them to offer their own historical recountings and interpretations, since “the issues involved are so fundamental to the nature of our discipline, to its identity and its place among the various avenues of intelligence of humankind, that it deserves no less than the fullest and most multisided accounting” (p. xii).

At the time of that writing I had the psychologist plaintiffs most distinctly in mind, because clearly they felt enormously aggrieved at having, over all the years of existence of the American Psychoanalytic Association, been denied equal access to full clinical training in its institutes, and finally undertook after those many years to sue the American on Sherman Antitrust grounds, alleging the unfair exercise of an exclusionary monopoly over high-quality psychoanalytic training in the United States—with many statements of the ramifying ways in which this exclusionary policy had been implemented, all recounted in detail in my book. I, as president at the time of the International Psychoanalytical Association, which was secondarily sued for allowing its American component organization to engage in these allegedly illegal practices, and therefore as a defendant in the lawsuit—in partnership with the American—was never privy to the deliberations and strategies