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I trained at the william alanson white institute from 1988 to 1992. I decided to go to White because, at the time, it was a first-rate institute where psychiatrists sought training and the only one that accepted openly gay candidates. The three New York psychoanalytic institutes affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association, where many of my teachers and supervisors were affiliated, would not open their programs' doors to openly gay candidates until 1991 (Drescher, 2002a).
I did not know at the time that being discriminated against would have a silver lining. In applying to White, I knew nothing about the language and theories of Interpersonal psychoanalysis or the evolving relational turn that would affect my future scholarly work. Instead, my dynamically oriented psychiatric training at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn was steeped in traditional analytic orthodoxy, and our psychotherapy classes extolled the highly abstinent therapeutic framework of Robert Langs (1977). As residents, we were not exposed to the work of Sullivan or Fromm—a one-year course on Melanie Klein's work was considered daring enough. Finally, despite the fact that the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from the DSM in 1973 (Bayer, 1981; Drescher & Merlino, 2007), teachers still spoke of homosexuality in psychopathological terms. Needless to say, as residents we were not exposed to Steve Mitchell's already published critiques of what analysts at Downstate were teaching (Mitchell, 1978, 1981; Drescher, 2002b).
I came to White five years after the publication of Steve Mitchell and