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Present problems of psychoanalytic training and education bring to mind some of the travail which confronted the pioneers in this field in America, which had its beginning in New York City.
Nearly all the original members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society were, so to speak, self-educated in the theory of psychoanalysis and had supplemented their readings of Freud's work with clinical orientation obtained at Manhattan State Hospital under the encouragement of Drs. Adolf Meyer and August Hoch. Here the first, though short-lived, flowering of clinical psychoanalysis in America began in the study of the dynamics of functional psychoses and neuroses for the purpose of therapy.
Of the original members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society organized in February, 1911, only four maintained a sustained interest in its development: Drs. A. A. Brill, the spirited leader of the group; Horace W. Frink; C. P. Oberndorf; and Dr. Morris J. Karpas, who died while serving in France during World War I. These men all held positions in the outpatient neurological departments of the local medical schools. Brill led a lively campaign for recognition of psychoanalysis at the Vanderbilt Clinic of Columbia under Professor M. Allen Starr, who saw no good in Freud's theories. Frink and Oberndorf were at Cornell under Professor C. L. Dana, lenient and tolerant of psychoanalysis, and Karpas worked at New York University, then called the Bellevue Medical School.
These four men inevitably applied their psychoanalytic knowledge in the treatment of hysterical, neurasthenic, and neurotic cases in the outpatient departments, and as clinical instructors presented all functional cases to the students from their dynamic aspects, although it was necessary to moderate the sexual factors to avoid offense to the student body and the