Commentary

First, full disclosure. These comments are being written by someone who graduated from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute fifty-three years ago, surely by any standards a certified—or certifiable—old goat, dinosaur, or anachronism, depending on one’s preferred designation for someone who came of age, psychoanalytically-speaking, in another century, another era.

This was a time in America when psychoanalysis, although declining in popularity and prestige from the exalted and idealized place it held in the post-war years, still remained influential in American life.

For recent graduates, as well as their senior colleagues, analytic patients were not hard to find. Many of my contemporaries had five or six, and often as many as eight or nine patients in analysis at any given time. American analysis still was dominated by the European émigré analysts, most from Austria and Germany, who fled their countries during the war. Many settled on the East Coast and quickly became the dominant voices at several institutes. The New York Institute, for instance, could boast of a faculty that included such luminaries as Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Isakower, Bok, Jacobson, Mahler, Kronold, Annie Reich, Nunberg and a number of others. Among the Americans trained by these émigrés and highly influenced by them, were Arlow, Brenner, Stewart, Furer, Rosen, Greenacre, Galenson, and Fisher.

The curriculum consisted essentially of immersion in Freud’s oeuvre to which were added some articles by his contemporaries and selected contributions by their followers. There was unquestioned devotion to the Professor and strong reactions against revisionist thinking. Even Arlow and Brenner, mainstays of the faculty and major figures in American psychoanalysis, were severely criticized, and to some extent demeaned, because their views, particularly with regard to psychosis, differed from Freud’s. As for relational analysis, this was regarded—and largely disregarded—as an American invention that reje