Discussion of Angel Garma's Article, Group Rivalry Between Analysts and Its Influence on Candidates in Training

Dr. Garma is to be congratulated on venturing to stick his toe in the heated water of antagonisms between competing groups of psychoanalysts. He introduces his analysis of the phenomenon with the statement: “Psychoanalysts are no different from other people and, regardless of the quality of their psychoanalytic work, they tend to form into rival groups.” One might perhaps take issue with the first phrase. Psychoanalysts lay claim to a fuller understanding of their own and of others' mental processes than is

available to people who have not sought the experience of a personal analysis and of a special set of educational requirements. In some sense, this assumption, pretentious as it often is, has a claim to general consideration. It would indeed be hard to find disagreement with the second phrase, “regardless of the quality of their psychoanalytic work, they tend to form into rival groups.” In fact, so general is this tendency that it has become a byword among those alike who consult psychoanalysts and those who bitterly oppose their specialty.

From the standpoint of many reasonably unbiased critics, it does little credit to the profession that such manifest antagonisms should continue to characterize the attitudes of leaders in the specialty. It is this rivalry which affords the most potent of arguments to those who oppose our profession's claim to scientific recognition and is among the forces responsible for the increasing tendency to swing away from emphasis on psychodynamics in programs of undergraduate psychiatric teaching and residency training to more easily controlled observations in the field of biological psychiatry.

Who has not been asked by more than one new patient or by a new acquaintance on some social occasion, “What school of analysis do you belong to?” or, “Are you a Freudian or a Jungian?” It is evident that all but the most sophisticated and broadly educated members of society still look upon psychoanalysis as something between a religion and a