Fifty years ago, Herbert Hoover was President of the United States, Dick Tracy proposed to Tess Trueheart for the first time, and a small group of men sat in a private club in Chicago putting through a trans-Atlantic telephone call (then new), so that Franz Alexander could talk with an astonished Karen Horney and ask her to move to Chicago.
Alexander had, himself, first come to Chicago in 1930 at the request of the president of the University of Chicago. He was offered a visiting professorship in psychiatry for one year in order to introduce psychiatry into the medical curriculum. Alexander suggested the title “Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis” instead, and the University agreed. The world's first university chair in psychoanalysis had come into being. Freud expressed his appreciation of Alexander's insistence on being called Professor of Psychoanalysis, but foresaw that this might increase the difficulties of being accepted by the university. Freud's prediction was confirmed, and Alexander left Chicago after the year to do research work in Boston.
But the imprint of Alexander's Midwestern visit remained, and during his Boston year a group of interested people, led by Mr. Alfred K. Stern (then a director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund), joined to ask him to return to Chicago to head a psychoanalytic institute. This he did in 1932. Stern had access to funds, and his enthusiasm for Alexander and for psychoanalysis was tremendous. For many months he spent a substantial amount of his time at the organizing task and at assembling a lay Board of Trustees. It was some of the original Board members who sat by, while Alexander influenced Horney to join them.
When the Institute for Psychoanalysis of Chicago opened its doors on October 3, 1932, the staff included Franz Alexander as Director, Karen Horney as Associate Director, and the following as lecturers and clinical associates: Thomas M. French, Helen Vincent McLean, Catherine L. Bacon, N. Lionel Blitzsten, and Karl Menninger. In Alexander's initial statement of the purpose and scope of the Institute, he said, “The Chicago Institute is the first psychoanalytic institute to be founded and supported by persons who recognize that psychoanalysis is an intrinsic part of modern therapy and research. … The work of the Chicago Institute will make for a better understanding of psychoanalysis. Its guiding principle will be the pursuance of psychoanalytic research, bold and uncompromising, in its search for truth.” The possibility of such research—“free from the exigencies of private practice”—was not in existence anywhere else at that time.
Alexander had great imagination, but one wonders whether at the founding of the Chicago Institute in 1932 he would have envisioned that the Institute fifty years later would have a faculty
of 62, 326 psychoanalytic graduates, a lay Board of Trustees of 51 prominent individuals, and an annual budget of over a million dollars.
It is significant that a small group of private citizens—none of them psychiatrists or psychoanalysts—was responsible for the founding of the Chicago Institute. Active community involvement remains a Chicago hallmark. The Institute's clinic provides nearly 30,000 patient hours of reduced-fee psychoanalysis, consultation, and referral to Chicago-area residents each year. The Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Therapy Program of the Chicago Institute trains practicing professionals in the fields of social work, counseling, and psychology, many of whom work in neighborhood agencies. The Teacher Education Program was established to help inner-city teachers cope with the emotional problems of their students, and by now over two thousand teachers and other educational personnel throughout the Chicago area have participated. The Barr-Harris Center for the Study of Separation and Loss During Childhood helps children and their families where there has been a parent loss through death. This program is now expanding to include families where divorce has occurred, and it has an active research component.
The Postgraduate Education Program of the Chicago Institute serves the continuing education needs of psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals. And the Institute's Helen and Franklin McLean Library maintains a collection of over 30,000 books, journals, and reprints on psychoanalysis and related fields; its Gitelson Film Library makes a wide range of visual materials available. The Institute publishes The Annual of Psychoanalysis and, most recently, has begun publication of three monograph series; one entitled Emotions and Behavior, another devoted to reprinting psychoanalytic classics, and a third on the history of psychoanalysis. The Chicago Psychoanalytic Literature Index, a comprehensive guide to the psychiatric literature, is issued quarterly and is another of the Institute's ongoing publishing projects. There are other special community programs as well; consultation at an inner-city high school, a conference for business executives, and seminars with divorce-court judges, addressing the unique needs and problems of children involved in custody decisions.
Through the terms of its three directors (Drs. Franz Alexander, Gerhart Piers, and currently George H. Pollock) and seven Board presidents (Messrs. Alfred K. Stern, William Ogburn, Lawrence F. Stern, Willard Gidwitz, Irving B. Harris, Alex Elson, and now Thomas L. Nicholson), the Institute has been fortunate in the
active support received from state and federal grants—and most especially the substantial generous support from private contributors. The Institute feels proud of its fifty years of accomplishments, and in gratitude to its friends, colleagues, and supporters has planned a year-long series of events to celebrate its golden anniversary. The festivities opened in November with a conference on “The Vital Issues,” jointly sponsored by the Institute and the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society (which celebrates its own fiftieth anniversary in 1981).
In the firm conviction that psychoanalysis has had a decisive influence upon all disciplines that deal with the processes and products of the mind, celebrating conferences have been planned by the Chicago Institute, all to take place during its fiftieth year, on psychoanalysis and anthropology, psychoanalysis and biography, psychoanalysis and social work, and political science, and the law, and religion, and psychology, and medicine, and adolescence, and creativity; conferences on separation and loss, on business, on aging, on infant psychiatry, on borderline syndromes, on motivation and learning; as well as a lecture series to introduce psychoanalysis to an even wider public audience.
Alexander noted that the historical function of the Chicago Institute was to liquidate the last remnants of mistrust and tension which had separated psychoanalysis from the rest of medicine, from psychiatry, and from the other social sciences. Much has been achieved towards this aim. However, the Chicago Institute continues in its teachings to make students of psychoanalysis constantly aware of the vast unknowns and to have a great reverence for what is still undiscovered in the complex field of human nature.
George H. Pollock, M.D.
Chicago