Metropolitan Portland with a population of 700,000, is the educational, financial and cultural center for parts of three other states with a total population of 3.5 million. Psychoanalysis has been represented in private practice since 1952; shortly thereafter, seminars were open to anyone seriously interested. By 1974 six analysts, two of them training analysts of the Seattle Institute, and three candidates were practicing in Portland. A regular but informal study group had congregated by 1973.
The Oregon Psychoanalytic Foundation, directed by a lay board, was organized in 1975. A public lecture by Leo Rangell in April 1975 announced the existence of the Foundation to the public. In October 1975, there was a symposium: Children Before the Law. Speakers included Dr. Albert J. Solnit, and the Oregon Court of Appeals justice who is most vigorously pursuing the issues of the legal rights of children, the Honorable Virgil Langtry.
Currently, the group is planning an expansion of training facilities for psychoanalysts in connection with the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute, a psychoanalytic library for the community, a low fee psychoanalytic clinic and psychotherapy clinic for children, and a child psychotherapy training program for lay therapists.
Isolation from an established psychoanalytic institute or society poses important professional and technical difficulties, along with real benefits. It is necessary to create relationships and vehicles that match the uniqueness of a community with the special requirements of psychoanalysis. The numbers of analysts are likely to remain small in such a community even with the devotion of interested and enlightened lay supporters. Yet properly to attend to all of the tasks required by a mature psychoanalytic group demands a certain critical mass. Each individual analyst carries the burden of many diverse tasks and conflicting aims as he attempts to balance the various aspects of his professional, personal and community life. A threatened quantitative and qualitative overload dictates a heavy reliance on the lay group for policy direction, priority setting, fund raising and maintenance of organization.
Harold Boverman, M.D.