The Question of Lay Analysis-Revisited*

Is psychoanalysis a specialty of medicine or a separate profession? This question has never been answered in an entirely satisfactory manner by psychoanalysts. It was not particularly urgent in the early years when Freud was enunciating his discoveries and gathering about him his first followers. Then there was little need for concern about the qualifications of those who were willing to commit themselves to a body of ideas and a method which were highly controversial and which offered little prestige or advantage. However, by the 1920's, when there was clearly value in being accepted as a psychoanalyst, the problem produced a crisis which threatened to tear apart the fabric of the movement which Freud had built. In 1926, Freud wrote The Question of Lay Analysis, which I am taking as the starting point for a re-examination of the issues with which it deals (Freud, 1959). In the aftermath of the book's publication, passions rose to such a pitch, especially between the Europeans — generally (although not unanimously) supporters of Freud's position — and the Americans, fiercely opposed to it, that A. A. Brill, then leader of American psychoanalysis, threatened to withdraw the American from affiliation with the International Psychoanalytic Association (June, 1957). A compromise was achieved by a Committee headed by Ernest Jones in 1929 which in effect abandoned any attempt to resolve the issue at the level of the International and empowered each constituent society to make its own decisions about membership requirements (Eisler, 1965). As European psychoanalysis was virtually destroyed