Making Room

From 1934-1945, the Rundbriefe was a top secret newsletter that circulated among a small group of socially and politically committed refugee psychoanalysts. Otto Fenichel, its founder and one of Freud's most eminent followers, urged this small group of analysts not to isolate themselves. He wrote in the Rundbriefe, “Where there is still truth, it will be preserved, even if it must fling far… the fate of psychoanalysis depends on the fate of the world.”

The world survived but the fate of psychoanalysis took a turn Fenichel couldn't have predicted. The power of psychoanalysis to address man's conflicted, rapacious desires and the dehumanizing impact of civilization degraded over the decades. Many of the revolutionary aspects of psychoanalysis that were not aligned with the economic or political aims of new host cultures were repressed or marginalized.

For the past sixty years, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) promoted a radical classical analytic position often at odds with the internal and external pressures facing psychoanalysis. When psychoanalysis in America was monopolized by the medical profession, IPTAR provided rigorous training to social workers and psychologists. As more mental health practitioners gained access to training, IPTAR opened its doors to individuals from non-mental health backgrounds

and to foreigners without access to analytic training in their native countries. When available community mental health services dwindled, IPTAR's clinical center provided thousands of New Yorkers access to low fee psychoanalytic treatment. The Clinical Center has also provided individual and group treatment in six schools over the past fifteen years and has partnered with other agencies to provide free treatment to refugees and asylum seekers.

But what does all this have to do with IPTAR's newsletter ROOM: a sketchbook for analytic action?

As it turns out, everything. At root, psychoanalysis holds that making