You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Robert Wallerstein's Lay Analysis: Life Inside the Controversy is an extraordinary and illuminating book about a potentially shattering crisis in the institutional history of psychoanalysis. It is also a testament to the capacity of an intimate witness to maintain a thoughtful and objective balance in reporting events that evoked the most passionate of arguments and the most virulent of accusations. This was because the controversy involved arose from fundamental splits within the professional community on an issue that resonates in our professional collective unconscious: what qualities and qualifications are required to be a psychoanalyst?
On 1 March 1985 an explosive landmark class action law-suit was filed in New York State by four PhD psychologists on behalf of 3000 members of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association. The action named as Co-defendants the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), and two New York City Institutes accredited by the American, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
The plaintiffs claimed to have been illegally denied access to quality training, and therefore to subsequent practice and remuneration in their profession of choice by the American Psychoanalytic Association because that organisation maintained an unfair and inappropriate monopoly based on a prerequisite medical degree for training and subsequent practice. The defendants were, therefore, accused of illegal ‘restraint of trade’.
The IPA was named as co-defendant on the basis of a 1938 agreement in which the IPA had granted to the American what Wallerstein describes as an