Psychoanalyisis in the U.S.: Recovered Memories and New Experiences of a Former Editor

Psychoanalysis in the first decade of the twenty-first century seems a very different discipline than it was during my tenure as editor of JAPA . As a former editor, I will take this opportunity to examine the scene today in contrast to what was and thereby mark our current boundaries by comparison. I will describe what I experienced at the end of my tenure and then review the ten-year period of that tenure, referring to some of the issues that seemed important then, before moving to the present.

I wrote somewhat coyly in my final editorial, “A View from the Bridge” (Shapiro 1993), “Now there is no such thing as an analysand without an analyst” (p. 926). This paraphrase of Winnicott suggestively indicates what I then thought was the change in focus in psychoanalysis at the end of my term. I specifically did not say whether it was healthy for psychoanalysis or a regression to a less formed, even amorphous, infantile state. As an editor, I was viewing the transformations I had witnessed in a brief ten years from the earlier experiences of the first editor, John Frosch, and his successor, Harold Blum. I also noted in that final statement that self-observation had become as central as patient observation and that a two-person psychology and subjectivity seemed inevitable for future theories.

This strongly subjective point of view was challenged by a cautionary exhortation from the Committee on Scientific Affairs (cited in Shapiro 1993). They wrote that the traditional case reports and cases as exemplars of theoretical principles could not serve as data for any scientific compilation or metaanalysis that psychoanalysts might wish to use to demonstrate a proposition. The cases presented had been disguised and focused to make a point and thus were biased. Such warnings seemed irrelevant to the writing psychoanalyst of my time. In addition, hermeneutics had taken hold. Some of our star theorists, including Roy Schafer, frequently graced our pages with