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It is especially the case in psychiatry that the continuous encounter between the thinking of the natural scientist and that of the philosopher is very productive and exciting.
The present article aims to initiate and stimulate a general discussion about the identity of American psychoanalysis and more specifically about the identity of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. Everyone agrees that the field of psychoanalysis is undergoing a widespread dispersion and dilution these days with many schools of thought and many new opinions being offered. In order to maintain our sense of identity we need to have a clear notion of what we regard to be psychoanalysis and what it stands for.
As a contribution to the resolution of this crisis in the field of psychoanalysis and to address the issue of what the American Academy of Psychoanalysis represents, I will first discuss the decline and closing of the most famous academy of all time, that of Plato, and review historically how and why this academy disintegrated. Historians agree this disintegration represented a failure of nerve in the thinkers of the time as a consequence of their efforts to fit into the prevailing Christian cultural milieu which increasingly replaced that of classical Greece and the Roman Empire. I suggest that a similar failure of nerve is taking place today in the era of global capitalism and managed care in which, as Foucault (1973; Chessick, 1992) pointed out, the nature and structure of the human sciences are generated by the prevailing political power of the particular era.