Ruth Moulton, M.D.: An Affectionate Reminiscence

Cultures often have myths that define their origins and give meaning to their existence. The history of psychoanalysis is filled with such prized stories. Ruth Moulton, one of the first White Institute graduates, witnessed each step of the Institute's evolution out of schisms with the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the group headed by Karen Horney. Her accounts of those events1 complement the histories written by Clara Thompson and Ralph Crowley. Taken together, these stories helped to create the persona that characterizes the White Institute as fiercely independent and fully committed to a vision of psychoanalytic possibility. It happens that this description is quite appropriate to Ruth herself.

As a young psychiatrist, recently relocated from the Midwest, Ruth Moulton began her training analysis with Clara Thompson in 1941 and was admitted to candidacy at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Her introduction to the psychoanalytic world was as an observer of the political struggle and intrigue that roiled the Institute later that same year. To recap those events briefly, in 1941 Karen Horney was a popular teacher at the New York Institute, although she was developing ideas that diverged from Freudian doctrine. The faculty, which consisted predominantly of male émigrés who had worked with Freud, voted to suspend Horney's teaching privileges. In a grand gesture, she left the meeting along with Clara Thompson, William Silverberg, and several others. In the famously repeated tale, the dissenters marched down Fifth Avenue, arm in arm, singing hymns of liberation. They, along with a number of their students and analysands, ceremoniously resigned from the Institute and formed a new training group under Horney's leadership. This new group, the American Institute of Psychoanalysis (AIP), included Erich Fromm and the rebels who had left the New York group, as well as Harry