American psychoanalytic institute culture is fundamentally hostile to academic freedom, and to the scholarly and cultural norms that can promote it! I offer three illustrative vignettes as cases in point. I then extensively review the available historical, ethnographic, survey, interview, and anecdotal evidence for the claim that American psychoanalytic institutes are hostile to academic freedom by design, while offering an analysis of why this hostility to academic freedom has served the authoritarian interests of charismatic leaders in psychoanalysis. I conclude with some brief comments on what would need to change in the institutional structures, practices, and faculties of American psychoanalytic institutes to make them more amenable to academic freedom.