Psychoanalysis came to the southeast United States in the 1940s. Prior to the end of World War II, the area south of Washington, DC and east of the Mississippi River was analytic terra incognita.
The first of the pioneers, Bingham Dai, arrived in North Carolina in 1943. A sociologist who had trained with Harry Stack Sullivan, Dr. Dai was the only analyst in his native China from 1935 to 1939. After his appointment to the faculty of Duke University's Department of Psychiatry, he offered to analyze medical chief residents—a training perk suggested by Eugene Stead, Chairman of the Department of Medicine.
A second analyst, David Young, a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, arrived in North Carolina in 1945. He was returning to his native state to resuscitate a moribund state hospital system.
The first analytic outpost in Florida came when Herman Selinsky settled in Miami after his military service there during the war. Dr. Selinsky, trained at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, wrote, “It was obvious that the community was not yet ready for conventional psychoanalysis.” In fact, when he advised three-times-weekly therapy for a patient, the referring physician accused him of operating a racket.
But when the University of Miami School was established in 1952, Dr. Selinsky became chief of the clinical faculty in the Department of Psychiatry. His appointment was evidence of a growing analytic influence within those departments at developing medical schools. Not surprisingly, psychoanalytic advocates looked to enlist like-minded physicians to teach and train.
In 1951, George C. Ham, a graduate of the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, was recruited to become the first Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina's Medical School. In turn, he imported Lucie Jessner, a child and adult training analyst from Boston. Analysts were also arriving at Duke University's Medical School. They included Bernard Bressler, from Chicago, and John Rhoads, from the Philadelphia Institute.
Back in Miami, Dr. Selinsky was influential in the appointment of John Caldwell, from the Washington Psychoanalytic Society, as the University's Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry. Other analysts appointed to the faculty were Harry Dean, from Philadelphia; Silberto de la Torre, from Chicago; Ivan Berlien, from Detroit; and Herbert Glicksman.
In 1956, a decade after the first analysts arrived in North Carolina and Florida, a Topeka graduate, William Rottersman, opened practice in Atlanta. Two years later, Bernard Holland was named to head the Department of Psychiatry at Emory University. Dr. Holland, trained at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, planned to develop a psychoanalytic institute, and several colleagues from Columbia joined him.
The birth of institute-sponsored training in North Carolina was unique. The infant program was sponsored by two different medical schools—the University of North Carolina and Duke University. Its godparent was the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and candidates could apply there and attend classes; they were analyzed locally by Lucie Jessner. In 1959, a new training facility was opened at UNC headed by Milton L. Miller, a former Director of the Southern California Institute. Provisional accreditation was granted to the UNC/Duke Institute by the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1965.
That same year saw a dozen analysts, including two who had fled Castro's Cuba, practicing in southern Florida. They applied to The American for affiliate society status and won approval in 1967. In the late 1960s, seminars in the Venice (FL) home of Jenny Waelder-Hall culminated in a program which became the Florida Psychoanalytic Training Facility under the auspices of the Baltimore-Washington Institute. Joseph Gurri, of the Boston Psychoanalytic Insitute, and Gabriel Causso, from London, became Geographic Supervising and Training Analysts.
Columbia University Center's-sponsored program at Georgia's Emory University saw 25 applicants for the first two classes in 1965 and 1967. The institute's first director, Lee Hall, was among the training analysts, who also included Bernard Holland, Downing Tait, Richard Ward, and Samuel Lerner. A study group was formed in 1967.
Psychoanalytic teaching was also coming of age in South Carolina. Benjamin Riggs became the first psychoanalyst in the state in 1968. Later that year he was joined by Lebert Harris. Over time they were able to establish full time practices while remaining active teachers at the Hall Institute in Columbia, SC.
By the 1970s, as candidates from new institutes began to matriculate, the growth of psychoanalysis in the Southeast no longer depended on graduate analysts' moving into the area.
John Rhoads, now retired as director of the University of North Carolina/Duke University training program says, “The psychoanalytic
program is now entirely in the capable hands of its graduates.” The institute has graduated 58 candidates. A child analysis program, first organized by Lucie Jessner with Helen Ross and Syd Salus, achieved autonomy in 1987. By 1990, the North Carolina Psychoanalytic Society had grown to 35 active and 26 affiliate members.
The Florida Psychoanalytic Training Facility graduated its first candidate in 1976. That graduate, Peggy Hutson, is the current director of the program. A total of 16 candidates and one candidate from the child analytic program have completed training. The first class taught entirely in Miami will begin in the 1992-93 academic year.
The migration of analysts to areas of Florida other than Miami resulted in the formation of the Tampa-Southwest Florida Psychoanalytic Study Group in the early 1980s. The Florida Psychoanalytic Society in Miami now has 27 active and life members. The Society and Institute have formed the Florida Psychoanalytic Foundation, an organization to support psychoanalytic education.
The 70s and 80s saw the Atlanta Psychoanalytic Society accepted by The American. The Emory University program was revamped. Burness Moore, a past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Ralph Roughton, a Columbia/Emory graduate, were named Training Analysts. Dr. Roughton and then Lawrence Inderbitzen (Washington-Baltimore) were appointed directors. The Institute, with a faculty of 17, was granted provisional status in 1989. Last year, the Atlanta Psychoanalytic Society had 31 members. Over half are graduates from the Emory training program.
The South Carolina Study Group, recognized by The American in 1983, includes analysts from Savannah, Augusta, Hilton Head, and Charleston. The UNC/Duke program was approached to sponsor training in South Carolina, and Eugene Kaplan, of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, was appointed a Geographic Training Analyst.
Psychoanalysis in the Southeast has progressed slowly over its 50-year history. It has moved forward from an era of psychoanalytic pioneers, who, fortunately, were welcomed by academic psychiatry because of the popularity of psychoanalysis at the time. Analytic societies formed, and training institutes developed. The initial success of the institutes depended on the recruitment of enough training analysts and faculty until the institutes own graduates could fill these positions. The UNC/Duke Psychoanalytic Institute was the first to reach this level. The Florida Psychoanalytic Training Facility and the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, provisional or near-provisional institutes, are moving toward this goal. Significantly, the new UNC/Duke-South Carolina psychoanalytic program is being sponsored by one of the recently established southeastern institutes.
There are now about 100 psychoanalysts in the southeast United States. The development of three societies, two study groups, and four training programs—and their impact or psychiatric education—is an achievement that stands as a testimonial to the few, but dedicated, psychoanalysts in the Southeast.
NB: The information in this article comes from the Oral History Workshop held in Miami on December 6, 1990, at the American Psychoanalytic Association's Fall Meeting. We thank the workshop's organizer, Stanley Needell, and speakers John Rhoads (NC), O. Townsend Dann (FL), Ralph Roughton (GA), and Benjamin Riggs (SC) for a fascinating and enlightening discussion of the growth of psychoanalysis in the Southeast.