The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is preparing to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary as the fourth oldest psychoanalytic training center in the country. The organization dates its existence back to its acceptance as a training center by the APsaA in December, 1933.
To commemorate the occasion, a symposium, “Psychoanalysis Today: The Integration of Theory and Practice,” will be held on October 29 and 30. Among the principal speakers will be Drs. John E. Gedo, Sanford Gifford, Philip S. Holzman, Selma Kramer, Karl Menninger (who delivered the 25th anniversary address), Arnold H. Modell, Paul G. Myerson, Charles A. Pinderhughes, Morton F. Reiser, Gregory Rochlin, and Robert S. Wallerstein. Professor Roger Fisher of Harvard Law School and Paul C. Warnke, Esquire, former chief U.S. negotiator in the SALT II talks, will participate in a special panel on aggression and its alternatives in international relations, chaired by Dr. John E. Mack.
The history of analysis in Boston goes back at least to 1906, when James Jackson Putnam, a leading neurologist and Harvard's first Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System, published “Three Cases of Hysteria Treated by Freud's Method of ‘Psycho-Analysis.’” Although Putnam's paper was critical of Freud, his empirical application of Freud's method was the first psychoanalytic paper in English.
Putnam's interest in analysis came from this background and from his extensive reading in European neurological literature. In 1908 he was impressed by Ernest Jones, already Freud's emissary and then a temporary Canadian, when they met periodically at Morton Prince's house to discuss “psychotherapy.” Early in 1908, at a meeting of the American Psychotherapeutic Association, Putnam hailed “the genius of Freud” and Jones sharply defined the distinction between psychoanalysis, based on free-association, and all other psychotherapies of the day. In September of the same year, at the famous Clark University lectures in Worcester, Putnam met Freud and, in the lively correspondence that followed, became a leading advocate of analysis. When Jones founded the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911, Putnam was persuaded to be its first president.
In 1914 the first Boston Psychoanalytic Society was founded by Putnam, who died four years later. Isador H. Coriat, the only “Freudian”, held occasional meetings and then re-established the second Society in 1928 by uniting three small study groups representing followers of Jung, Otto Rank, and Paul Schilder. This Society was itself reorganized in 1930 and joined by a fourth group of young Americans, led by Ives Hendrick, who had just completed their analytic training abroad. Franz Alexander was the group's first training analyst in 1931, followed by Hans Sachs in 1933.
The next five years was a tumultuous “age of reform,” in which the heterogeneous membership was “regularized” by new and approved training analyses. A committee structure modelled on the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was imposed, complete with an Education Committee, seminars, and supervised analyses.
Over the next decade the young Society was gradually transformed by a succession of eminent European analysts, begining with Felix and Helene Deutsch in 1935. By the end of the Second World War, over half of the membership were European, nearly all from Vienna.
Then a long period of post-war expansion began, initiated by the increased interest in analysis among returning veterans and sustained by the “GI Bill”, as well as ample federal support for psychiatric training and research. The next two decades were a halcyon era, in which the Society increased from 68 members in 1953 to 250 in 1973.
The high tide began to ebb during the last years of the Vietnam War, with a reduction in federal funds for psychiatry. A levelling off of new applicants for analytic training was experienced as a decline, yet paradoxically associated with economic anxieties about an oversupply of analysts and a diminishing number of patients suitable for analysis.
A new reformist spirit arose, with various proposals to broaden the activities of the Society and to reduce the traditional power of the Education Committee. These issues were debated with mounting intensity, culminating in a May, 1974 declaration from five respected training analysts that a new Institute was being formed.
All the passionate energies and frustrated anger of the reformist debate were instantly diverted into an even more intense struggle over secession. Although the new Institute comprised less than 10% of the membership, the influence of powerful personalities and institutional or personal allegiances generated the rancor, hurt feelings, and divided loyalties of a civil war. The ending came in May 1975, when the new Psychoanalytic Institute of New England (PINE) was given provisional approval by the American Psychoanalytic Association, with final approval expected in May 1983.
Despite the painful struggle, both Institutes are now flourishing and theoretically in peaceful coexistence within the same Society. PINE seems to be thriving as the small, intimate training center to which its leaders aspired. Notwithstanding predictions that Boston was too small to sustain two Institutes, both PINE and the BPSI have maintained the same relative size. Fears that the analytic community would be “flooded” with unqualified new members and training analysts have not materialized.
As in other institutes, both PINE and the BPSI face a continuing shortage of suitable analytic patients for both supervised training and private practice. The trend toward increasing the partial training of nonmedical candidates, which rose from one nonphysician member in 1953 to 23 in 1973, has since slowed its pace.
Some of us still await the return to Freud's ideals of 1926: psychoanalysis as a small independent profession, open to all with sincere scientific interests, no longer “a mere handmaid of psychiatry” and medicine. This may seem an unattainable goal, after long-term changes in the uses of analysis and psychotherapy. But we may entertain the more modest hope on our 50th Anniversary, that eventually both Institutes will live in peace within the bosom of one Society, sharing some facilities and scientific programs and pursuing independently the aims of our Viennese past.
Sanford Gifford, M.D.
Boston