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March 29, 1949. DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS IN AMERICA. C. P. Oberndorf, M.D.
In the first of the Brill lectures to be given annually at the March meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Oberndorf's paper traced the beginning and subsequent evolution of psychoanalysis in this country. He stressed the uniquely important rôle played by Brill in this development. He also paid tribute to Adolf Meyer, who introduced dynamic psychiatry at the Manhattan State Hospital in 1902, and to August Hoch, who played a similar rôle at the Bloomingdale Hospital (now known as the New York Hospital, Westchester Division) in White Plains.
Oberndorf remarked on the quick conversion of the Manhattan State Hospital staff to analytic principles, a conversion made possible by the ease with which Freud's postulates could be demonstrated in the seriously ill patients in that institution.
An early and important landmark was the visit of Freud, Ferenczi and Jung to Clark University in 1909. The New York Psychoanalytic Society was founded two years later as a result of a meeting called by Brill in February 1911. Oberndorf pointed out that a substantial proportion of the fifteen charter members were either alumni or then on the staff of the Manhattan State Hospital. At the time of Jung's visit here in 1912, he had already differed from Freud in his disapproval of the importance of sexual drives and in his development of a theory of the collective unconscious. When Federn visited in 1914, two members of the Society persuaded him to undertake their didactic analyses, unfortunately soon interrupted by the onset of war in Europe.
The interrelationships with the European analytic societies were sketched in some detail. Following the Hamburg International Congress in 1925, the New York Society organized courses in a systematic fashion for the training of physicians for analytic practice. Sharp differences of opinion regarding the problem of lay analysis created some tensions, the New Yor