Mystics and professionals in the culture of American psychoanalysis

In this article I shall focus on some important tensions in the contemporary American psychoanalytic culture, but my argument might strike a chord in other national settings as well. Psychotherapy in Britain, for example, is working towards a professional organization at the moment, and may face some of the same tensions as those discussed below. These tensions revolve around the contrasts between the roles of‘mystics’ in Wilfred Bion's sense (1970) — innovators, reformers or geniuses — on the one hand, and on the other the roles of professionals in the culture. In this context I shall discuss some consequences for the role and tasks of leadership in American psychoanalysis.

Organized psychoanalysis is faced with a central problem: how to organize itself as a profession without destroying its critical perspective. There is an essential tension between the professional and the critical side which demands that a balance must be struck so as not to destroy the critical foundations or an effective organization. Is it possible to have an organization which assumes a body of knowledge at the same time as allowing the other side to bloom: the importance of an unknowing attitude? Is it possible for the organization as establishment to value fundamental critics, outsiders, reformers and geniuses rather than expel them? How is it possible to organize the profession so that it facilitates the rise and assimilation of these critics without allowing them either to dominate