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There are some people who like to sit in the audience and enjoy the theater. Other people like to view the production from backstage. Douglas Kirsner, an Australian academic, provides an intimate unpolished portrait of life in four psychoanalytic institutes.
As Kirsner unfolds his sometimes unsavory tale of backstage psychoanalytic life, the reader searches for the author's bias, in what from a quick reading might appear to be another attempt at “psychoanalytic bashing.” However, when one considers Kirsner's reliance on documents, his 100 interviews over a ten-year period, and his otherwise scholarly approach, the reader may reach his/her own opinion and/or evaluation of Kirsner's conclusions.
Kirsner studied the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the “Boston split” (the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England East), the Chicago Psychoanalytic, and the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
The history of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute is especially important for modern psychoanalytic students because it provides a view of the context in which Hyman Spotnitz trained. The multiple conflicts and power struggles between the American analysts and the European emigres are well delineated. A parallel power struggle over the selection of training analysts is especially fascinating. Well known