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Ralph Manning Crowley was part of the history of the psychoanalytic movement in the United States. He shared its youth and early, spirited growth. He was deeply involved in its refreshing newness and excitement, and was passionate about the ideas of the intellectual innovative giants who were his teachers, colleagues, and later, friends.
Ralph was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1905. His father was an executive of a retail lumber business, his mother a housewife and, after her husband's death, a social worker and remedial reading teacher. He attended public and private schools in Madison, and later, the Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. At the University of Wisconsin in 1924, he studied under Norman Cameron. He was graduated from the University with honors, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He completed a M.A. in psychology in 1928, and soon enrolled in the Northwestern University Medical School to prepare for the study of psychiatry. Here he met Lionel Blitzsten, just returned from Europe and enthusiastic about his analysis with Franz Alexander. Encouraged and stimulated by this new wave of exciting psychoanalytic thinking, Ralph became an analysand of Blitzsten. In 1932 he began psychoanalytic training at the newly formed Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, where Alexander, French, Horney and Blitzsten were faculty members. It was a most impassioned time. Nazism was darkening the horizon in Europe and the arrival of emigré analysts began to infuse American progressive psychiatric thinking with new provocative and energizing ideas.
In 1934, Ralph began a residency at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore. Many of the staff became involved in the Washington School of Psychiatry (founded 1936). These included Lewis B. Hill, Alexander Reid Martin, Joseph Chassell, Janet Rioch Bard, Dexter Bullard, Sr., Douglas Noble, Bernard Robbins, Benjamin