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Psychoanalysis is not only a crucial means of understanding human nature and treating mental illness but also an intellectual discipline with pretensions to scientific status. Ideally, general investigations within the discipline together with scientific differences between the different schools of psychoanalytic thought should be addressed in scientific ways by subjecting the ideas to empirical and theoretical examination and evaluation of methods and evidence. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis is also a social movement with bases in many countries which, since Freud, have divided into several competing schools. Central to this competition is the struggle to obtain and retain intellectual authority, to inherit the mantle of legitimacy. How far has the “movement” dimension of psychoanalysis, and the competition among Freud's inheritors, undermined theory and practice? How far has politics encroached on and even compromised the intellectual discipline?
The basic rule of psychoanalysis is to be straightforward and honest. At least on a scientific basis, this involves the cut and thrust of argument with evidence rather than political campaigning under the guise of open scientific debate. This article, based on archival research at UCLA and the Library of Congress, demonstrates the level of political encroachment on a scientific approach in a particular period of the “Klein wars.” In this context, I neither advocate nor criticize Kleinian approaches. Instead, I point to historical evidence that illustrates the extent of the incursion of a political campaign into what ought to be and is often presented as a scientific debate that progresses through argumentation and intellectual and clinical evaluation. Since we do