The Creation and Social Transmission of Psychoanalytic Knowledge

It is a great honor to have been asked to give this address. I thank the program committee for the invitation, and thank Dick Simons too for his warm and generous remarks. Dick and I go back a long way. In the early sixties, as he told you, we overlapped as residents at the Menninger School of Psychiatry. Menninger was unique in the American at that time, and a residency there was an intoxicating experience. Karl Menninger's biopsychosocial model of psychiatry, his commitment to psychoanalysis, and his support of an outstanding group of thinkers made Topeka an integrated community of researchers, scholars, and clinicians of all kinds. No distinction was made there between medical and nonmedical psychoanalysts. Psychologists held their own among the outstanding training analysts at the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute, and the analytic community itself was integrated with the surrounding academic world as embodied by the luminaries known as the Alfred P. Sloane Professors.

Menninger was a place where psychiatry and psychoanalysis were both part of a larger academic, scientific, philosophical, and cultural community, and its fertility can be seen in the astonishing body of published papers that came out of Topeka at that time.

My long concern with the place of psychoanalysis in the intellectual world is very much the fruit of my time at the Menninger. I started thinking about it when I came back to New York to start my analytic training and the broad Topeka focus had to give way to a narrower one. I was lucky, because the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic