Much of the credit for creating a climate favorable to the flourishing of psychoanalysis in the Washington-Baltimore area belongs to adolf Meyer, head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins from 1910 to 1950, and to William Alanson White, superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital from 1903 to 1937. Major forces in shaping the emergence of psychiatry as a distinct profession in the U.S., both were charter members of the American Psychoanalytic Association at its founding in Baltimore in 1911, two years after the landmark Clark University conference. White served four terms as President of The American (1915, 1916, 1927, and 1928) and in 1931 was principal speaker at a New York banquet honoring Freud's 75th birthday.
His Mental Mechanisms (1911) was the first book on psychoanalysis written by an American, while the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, which with Smith Ely Jelliffe he inaugurated in 1907, was an important early vehicle for psychoanalytic studies. In 1913 they launched The Psychoanalytic Review, the first English-language psychoanalytic journal. In addition to original articles, it provided translated abstracts of papers by European analysts.
In 1914 the first Washington Psychoanalytic Society was organized at St. Elizabeths, with White as its first president. Edward Kempf, his successor, had as early as 1910 employed Freudian principles in the psychotherapy of dementia praecox patients; from 1914 to 1920 he was a full-time psychotherapist at St. Elizabeths. In 1926, along with Jelliffe and Clarence Oberndorf, he drew up the first set of training standards promulgated by The American, only a year after the International Training Commission had been proposed at the Bad Homburg Congress.
Another early member of the Washington Psychoanalytic Society was Thomas Verner Moore, whose 1925 Dynamic Psychology was the first American psychology text to contain extensive discussion of Freud's work. Among other notable early figures were Bernard Glueck and Nolan D. C. Lewis. Glueck played key roles in the development of forensic psychiatry and psychiatric social work, while Lewis, who went on to a professorship at Columbia, became Director of the N.Y. Psychiatric Institute and helped establish the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute.
The first organized psychoanalytic courses in the Washington-Baltimore region were lectures presented to medical students at Johns Hopkins by G. Lane Tanneyhill from 1917 to 1925. During World War I, when many of the male staff were away on military duty, Lucille Dooley gave similar lectures to women on the psychiatric staff at St. Elizabeths.
Another forerunner of organized training was a remarkable informal case seminar formed in 1930 under the leadership of Clara Thompson in Baltimore. Held on Sunday mornings, it came to be called the “Miracle Club” because of its effects on the patients discussed. Among the club's members were Lewis Hill, Marjorie Jarvis, Bernard Robbins, William Silverberg, and Eleanora Saunders.
The original Society, inactive during the war, was revived in 1925 and once again held regular meetings. Impetus for refounding and affiliation with The American came primarily from Ernest Hadley, closely associated with A. A. Brill. For seven years Hadley was secretary of The American, while Brill was its president. In 1930 a meeting to reorganize the Society was held in Hadley's downtown Washington office, where he conducted one of the first full-time psychoanalytic practices in the area. Clara Thompson was elected president of a new Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society.
Hadley's prodigious energies and organizational skills were evident also at the national level, where he served as Chairman of the Committee on Standards of The American from 1934 to 1952. In addition, he chaired a committee that drafted new bylaws, creating the Board on Professional Standards in 1945.
The Washington-Baltimore Society was the fourth in the U.S. to establish a formal training program, following New York, Chicago, and Boston. William Silverberg, who had trained in Berlin, was Chairman of the Training Committee, and the first organized courses were given in 1933.
During the mid-Thirties the faculty was strengthened by the arrival from Europe of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Edith Weigert. From the beginning women played key roles in the development of the society and Institute. Dooley was a mainstay. Others included Anna Colomb, who in the early Forties moved to New Orleans, where she was instrumental in establishing psychoanalytic training, and Agnes Bruce Greig, the first child psychiatrist and child analyst in Washington. In Baltimore, Sarah Tower was a leader.
The Washington-Baltimore Institute was established in 1940, the fourth in the U.S., with Lewis Hill as Director. That same year Hill was President of The American.
From the mid-Thirties to 1949 the workings of the Institute were intertwined with those of the Washington School of Psychiatry. With some didactic classes of the two organizations conducted jointly, Institute candidates were put in contact with students whose primary affiliations were with such fields as social work and education. This arrangement eventually proved unsatisfactory, especially when, with the influx of enrollees after World War II, classes became overly large and even more diverse.
The Washington School of Psychiatry was primarily the brainchild of Harry Stack Sullivan, the linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir, and the political scientist Harold Lasswell, but had included in its founding the local analysts Dooley, Fromm-Reichmann, Hadley, and Hill, as well as Brill from New York and N. Lionel Blitzsten from Chicago. As the aims of the Institute diverged from those of the School, however, most of these analysts withdrew; in 1949, the year of Sullivan's death, all formal connection ceased.
Another post-war development was a move to form two separate Societies and eventually two separate Institutes. As with all psychoanalytic organizational splits, a variety of factors were involved. Increasing numbers of practicing analysts and candidates made it feasible for the two cities to have separate societies and institutes. Wartime gas rationing had accentuated an awareness of the burden of traveling between the cities. Probably more important, however, were ideological, genealogical, and personal differences. One of the sharpest conflicts was between Sullivan and Jenny Waelder-Hall, who had come to Washington in 1943. In addition to the clash of their strong personalities, they differed in their theoretical emphases. Sullivan, who at times termed himself a social psychologist, gave great weight to social and cultural factors in shaping personality, while Waelder-Hall focused
more exclusively on instinctual drives. It is tempting to speculate that their differences personified a pure Viennese psychoanalysis in contrast to a home-grown American variety, but it would be a gross oversimplification to characterize either of the Societies or Institutes to emerge as the extension of these two personages.
The Society divided in 1947. For the next five years the Institute was conducted jointly by the two Societies, until in 1952 separate Institutes were established. In 1955 they received accreditation by The American.
The growth of psychoanalysis in the Washington-Baltimore area benefited enormously from the presence of numerous major university medical schools (Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, Johns Hopkins, Maryland, and Virginia, in addition to the newer Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences), and of important government hospitals and research institutions (National Naval Medical Center, Walter Reed, Army Medical Center, and the National Institutes of Health). Since early in the century the histories of psychoanalysis and St. Elizabeths Hospital, which in a sense was a national hospital, have been inextricably linked.
Another strong influence came from two private hospitals that developed as important centers of psychoanalytic thought and practice—Chestnut Lodge and Sheppard-Pratt.
The Lodge, with Dexter Bullard, Sr. as Medical Director and Marjorie Jarvis and later Frieda Fromm-Reichmann on staff, came to specialize in the psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy of psychotic patients. Other early analysts on the Lodge staff were Mabel Cohen, Robert Cohen, Ralph Crowley, Edna Dyar, Leslie Farber, Alexander Halperin, Josephine Hilgard, Robert Morse, Douglas Noble, and Alfred Stanton. Later on the roster were Marvin Adland, Donald Burnham, Jarl Dyrud, Robert Gibson, John Kafka, Ping Nie Pao, Clarence Schulz, Harold Searles, Roger Shapiro, Joseph Smith, Helm Stierlin, Alberta Szalita, and Otto Will. Dexter Bullard, Jr. succeeded his father as Medical Director and has continued a vital psychoanalytic emphasis.
Sheppard-Pratt took on a significant psychoanalytic cast in 1920, when Ross Chapman, who had been a member of the first Washington Psychoanalytic Society and was first assistant to White at St. Elizabeths, became Medical Director. Under Chapman's aegis Sullivan from 1922 to 1930 conducted a remarkably successful research project on the psychological treatment of young schizophrenic patients. Silverberg took over the direction of this unit in 1930.
Lewis Hill was Clinical Director of Sheppard from 1929 to 1931, and in 1932 traveled to Budapest for supervision with Ferenczi. He returned to Sheppard in 1949, where he remained until his death in 1958. An outstanding teacher, he influenced many young psychiatrists to enter analytic training.
Ives Hendrick, a staff member at Sheppard, is remembered particularly for his 1934 Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis, a landmark publication. Other Sheppard alumni who achieved psychoanalytic prominence include A. Russell Anderson, James Bing, Joseph Chassell, Mabel Cohen, Robert Cohen, Marshall Edelson, Rudolph Marburg, Francis McLaughlin, Samuel Novey, Janet Rioch, Olive Smith, and Edith Weigert.
The psychoanalytic: tradition at Sheppard continued when Robert Gibson became Director and was joined by Clarence Schulz and Lawrence Kubie as key teachers and supervisors.
The National Institute of Mental Health at Bethesda, through its intramural and extramural programs, has long been a substantial force in the development of psychoanalytic education and research in the U.S. It is fair to say that nearly every major psychoanalytic researcher and program in the country has at one time or another been funded by NIMH. A very partial list would include the Menninger Psychotherapy Research Project, John Benjamin, Margaret Brenrnan, Merton Gill, Leo Goldberger, Mardi Horowitz, Otto Kernberg,
George Klein, Peter Knapp, Lawrence Kubie, Lester Luborsky, Morton Reiser, Herbert Schlesinger, Donald Spence, Alfred Stanton, and Robert Wallerstein.
NIMH has strongly supported the development of psychoanalytic education, partially funded the Lewin-Ross survey, and for several years provided grants to the Institutes of The American.
The NIMH intramural research program, with Robert Cohen as Director of Clinical Investigations, contributed variously to the sustained growth of psychoanalysis. Many of its projects were either conducted by analysts or took their form from psychoanalytic ideas and questions. Projects included studies of family interaction and communication patterns, child development studies, sleep and dream research, cross-cultural studies of mother-child relationships, and a major study of audio-video recorded psychotherapy. A number of senior analysts have served as clinical consultants to the researchers and patient care staff of NIMH and have contributed substantially to its research projects, including those not directly related to psychoanalysis.
In 1948 Hadley and Hill, together with Rex Buxton, were instrumental in the Washington-Baltimore Institute's initiating and sponsoring a Training Center in New Orleans, at the invitation of Samuel Barkoff and Anna Colomb, who had moved there from Washington. These efforts culminated in a fully accredited New Orleans Institute in 1961.
In 1958, again under Buxton's leadership, the Washington-Baltimore Institute undertook to sponsor a training center at Duke and the University of North Carolina. UNC-Duke became a Provisional Institute in 1965 and was fully accredited in 1973.