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Many young analysts may be quite unfamiliar with Lawrence Kubie's scientific writings and unaware of the influential role he played during the formative years of psychoanalysis in this country. Although one senses that his direct influence began to recede before his death in 1973, his indirect influence is very much alive—for example, the current experimental program for training a small group of nonmedical analysts at the University of California is based in large part upon ideas Kubie espoused during his lifetime.
Kubie belonged to the first generation of American analysts (if one looks upon the earliest group as "analytic pioneers"), many of whom came to analysis after training in other medical specialties. Often they went abroad for what one would now regard as brief analyses and didactic training. (Kubie went to England.) Their diverse interests and talents brought a vigor and color to the analytic movement which is missed. Kubie's interests were almost boundless. A hasty perusal of the bibliography of Symbol and Neurosis, which includes only a sampling of his more than three hundred published writings, demonstrates clearly his remarkably broad range of interests: hypnosis, sensory deprivation, combat exhaustion, the implications of transsexual surgery, the relation of art to psychotherapy, a critical review of the Kinsey Report, and his introduction to the publication of Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark. His references to the works of others are correspondingly broad, covering, in addition to psychoanalytic writings, the fields of psychiatry, neurophysiology, psychobiology, the arts and social sciences, to name but a few. Probably no analyst contributed as many articles to as diverse a range of publications as Lawrence Kubie—from The Psychoanalytic Quarterly to the Saturday Evening Post.
Of all these influences none was stronger or more prominent in his work than his sustained fascination with neurophysiology, which can