Reuniting the Psychoanalytic Movement

On the evening of April 29, 1941, the New York Psychoanalytic Society met for a business meeting that was to have long-range consequences for the psychoanalytic movement in the United States. Karen Horney was notified that she was being disqualified as an instructor and training analyst, because she was disturbing the candidates with her cultural ideas. As a consequence, Karen Horney angrily got up and walked out of the meeting, accompanied by Clara Thompson, Sara Kelman, Saul Ephron, and Bernard Robbins, all of whom resigned from the Society.

During the 1940s separate analytic institutes split off throughout the country and were not part of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 1955 Clara Thompson organized a meeting of eminent psychoanalysts, including Sandor Rado, Jules Masserman, Franz Alexander, Abram Kardiner, and others to organize a national psychoanalytic organization, in which there would not be conformity to an ideology but freedom to exchange ideas with the scientific disciplines. Following this meeting, on April 1956, the American Academy of Psychoanalysis was formed. Franz Alexander (Alexander and Selesnick, 1966), who had been a president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, stated that the premature standardization and rigidity in teaching in the American psychoanalytic institutes was too past oriented and not sufficiently creative or future oriented. The aim of the Academy was to be open to the exchange of ideas, clinical experiences, and research in psychoanalysis as a developing field and to encourage communication with other disciplines in science and the humanities. Individual analysts, not institutes, would be admitted, so as not to interfere with each institute's approach and politics. These institutes were free to take into account biological factors; intrapsychic dynamics; as well as interpersonal, social, and cultural factors that affected personality development and functioning.