Panel Report History Of Psychoanalysis On The West Coast: Chaired By George Allison

The first panellist, Joseph Lifschutz, gave a history of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He first acknowledged the contributions of Nathan Hale and Daniel Benveniste, Bay area historians who have written on the history of psychoanalysis. He described how Bernhard Berliner came to San Francisco in 1936 as the first of a group of distinguished émigrés. Berliner had a spectacular educational background in psychology and psychoanalysis, which included an analysis with Wilhelm Reich. In San Francisco Berliner found a small group of analysts, including Lew Terman at Stanford University, Alfred Kröber, an anthropologist from the University of California and Joseph Thompson from the Washington-Baltimore Institute. In 1937 the group was joined by Siegfried Bernfeld, who had been analysed by Sigmund Freud, and his wife Suzanne Bernfeld, who was also an analyst. By 1940 other distinguished European analysts had moved to San Francisco: Emanuel Windholz from Prague, Anna Mänchen and Erik Erikson from Vienna and Jacob Kasanin. In 1940 Kasanin founded a department of psychiatry at Mount Zion Hospital, which retained great support and interest in psychoanalysis until recently. For many decades it was a tradition that psychoanalysts were on the staff at Mount Zion, and that their psychiatric residents entered the San Francisco Institute.

By 1942 there were enough psychoanalysts in San Francisco and the West Coast to receive a Charter from the American to form an Institute. There were Berliner, Kasanin, Windholz and three others from San Francisco (Barrett, Macfarlane and Kamm), Douglas Orr from Seattle, George Gero from Phoenix, and Otto Fenichel and Ernst Simmel from Los Angeles. However, the problem of lay analysis surfaced immediately. The American had declared in 1938 that only medical analysts could be trained, which meant that Siegfried and Suzanne Bernfeld, despite being leaders of the analytic study group, were excluded from being Charter Members of th