Karen Horney and Sandor Rado were prime movers in the splits that in the 1940s tore apart the New York City psychoanalytic community. Rado, originally from Hungary and then on the faculty of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, was invited to New York in 1931 to become director of education at the New York Psychoanalytic Society's newly formed Institute (see TAP 24/2). At about the same time, Horney was invited by Franz Alexander, her former colleague in Berlin and then director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, to become that institute's associate director. But dissension developed, and in 1934 Horney moved to New York. Although opposed by Rado, she became a member of the New York Institute. At first glance, Rado and Horney would seem likely allies, as they had developed similar criticisms of classical analytic theory and technique, and disliked the New York Institute's strict orthodoxy. But they were never to see eye to eye.
Horney emphasized the importance of culture and differed with Freud on issues of female sexuality. Technically, she focused more on the here-and-now aspects of the transference. She and like-minded colleagues Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, Erich Fromm, and William V. Silverberg became core members of the “Zodiac group”—a study group that for years had met to discuss psychoanalysis and their shared interest in various cultural areas. Horney, in addition, began to teach at the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. Her theoretical ideas drew sharp criticism from members of the New York Institute, which was only intensified by the publication of her books, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time in 1937, followed by New Ways in Psychoanalysis in 1939.
In that same year a group of candidates at the New York Institute requested a number of changes in its policies, recalls John Frosch, who during those times was first a candidate and then a member of the Institute. The requests ranged from the simple—use of the library and a course catalogue—to the controversial. Candidates asked for case seminars taught from differing points of view, such as a course in severe psychopathology taught by Sullivan and another by Horney. However, the Institute did nothing to meet these requests. Some candidates, including those of Rado and Abram Kardiner, voiced concern about discrimination and intimidation for their nonadherence to classical theory. Horney and fellow faculty members Clara Thompson and David Levy took up their cause. The Educational Committee, chaired by Rado, had ongoing meetings to discuss these issues.
The committee reported that “various individuals of this dissenting group had repeatedly accused the Board of Directors, the officers, and the Educational Committee of high-handed and dictatorial methods, of excluding them from teaching by direct, or indirect maneuvers, of intimidating ‘their’ students so as to limit their freedom of choice and action, of discriminatory practices against ‘their’ students, of adopting methods of Machiavellian intrigue to achieve purposes which had to be hidden from the Society-at-large, of violations of academic freedom, and finally of rigid doctrinaire teachings.” The emotions engendered at the time were manifest in the report: “Your Committee is coming reluctantly to the conclusion that the ‘serious condition which exists among the students’ and the ‘something rotten which is going on’ referred to by Dr. Thompson is due to the fact that the minds of certain students are being poisoned by hostile and irresponsible members of the Society.”
Levy was enraged by this attempt to discredit the report of candidate intimidation and felt the Educational Committee was concerned more with preserving its prestige than with the welfare of the Society. Lawrence Kubie, who had just become president of the Institute, doubted Rado's temperamental suitability to chair the committee. At Kubie's suggestion, Rado was removed in December 1940. Soon afterward, the first split occurred.
Marianne Horney Eckardt, the daughter of Karen Horney, was herself in psychoanalytic training during those times. She chronicles how the conflict came to a head at the dramatic April 29, 1941, business meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. A vote was taken to disqualify Horney as an instructor and training analyst, 24 to 7 with 29 abstentions. Horney and four colleagues—Thompson, Sarah Kelman, Saul Ephron, and Bernard Robbins—walked out in silence, but once on the streets sang a spiritual celebrating liberation: “Go Down Moses, Let My People Go.” Eckardt relates that the walkout was not completely spontaneous; contingency plans had been made one or two months prior to the April meeting.
Fourteen candidates, among them Janet Rioch, Irving Bieber, Sidney Tarachow, Judd Marmor, and Frances Arkin, also resigned. Among the dissenters were analysands of both Rado and Kardiner, who, although expected to leave, did not. Frosch recalls that Tarachow, who later returned to the Institute, commented that he had “the courage of Kardiner's convictions.”
The dissidents quickly organized the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, with 15 charter members, and a new institute, the American Institute of Psychoanalysis, of which Horney was elected dean. Silverman joined the group, and Sullivan and Fromm became honorary members. Classes were held at the New School for Social Research (where Horney had taught since 1935) and, with the assistance of Stephen Jewitt, chairman of its Department of Psychiatry, at the Post Graduate School of New York Medical College.
In April 1943 Fromm, a lay analyst, resigned from the organization when his privileges as a training analyst were withdrawn, presumably because the new institute did not want to jeopardize its relationship with New York Medical College. Twelve members resigned in protest, including Thompson, Rioch, and Sullivan. Eckardt feels this split involved deeper issues—primarily a struggle for power between a “Horney group” and a “Fromm-Thompson group.” Rioch later insinuated that Sullivan encouraged the split in order to establish a branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in New York City. The splinter group did affiliate with the Washington School, and its members taught in both Washington and New York. In 1946, with increasing numbers of candidates entering training, the New York Division of the Washington School became the William Alanson White Institute for Psychoanalytic Training.
In 1944, a year after the first split, a second schism occurred within the American Institute.
Jewett had offered the fledgling group an opportunity to affiliate formally with his department, but Horney and her close associates were reluctant. Nonetheless, six members of the Association resigned and accepted the bid to form a new training institute. This group consisted of Silverberg, Ephron, Robbins, Marmor, Arkin and Isabel Beaumont. One reason for the split, according to Marmor, was a concern that the American Institute was becoming a “Horney group.”
In 1951, Eckardt reports, the idea of forming a new national organization was widely discussed. Thompson was the key figure in these plans, which culminated in an organizational meeting held in New York in December 1955. The following year saw the formation of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis at a meeting convened in Chicago. To prevent any repetition of the schism that had so plagued their profession, those assembled agreed that the Academy would not “license, supervise, certify, or accredit any training program or institution, thus avoiding power struggles related to all these activities.”
Eckardt comments that Horney was “charismatic, because of a blend of charm, of personality, lucidity of ideas and expression, marvelous clinical observations, and a gift for organizing her concepts,” but that she “lacked interest in organizational matters and brushed rules aside. … The combination of intellectual leadership … with an obliviousness to organizational matters tended generally to promote friction.”
Frosch recounts that Gregor Zilboorg was a central figure in the second split within the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, which led eventually to the founding of the Columbia Clinic for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the Association for Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Medicine. Zilboorg, newly appointed director of the New York Institute's Educational Committee, was accused of unethical behavior. He had proposed that a patient pay him five thousand dollars in advance for services as both analyst and “business consultant.” The matter was brought to the Ethics Committee, which voted 9 to 3 to condemn Zilboorg. It then had second thoughts, however, and reversed itself. David Levy was so incensed at this that he resigned from the Society.
Viola Bernard, a candidate and recent graduate of the New York Institute during these conflicts, was close to both Rado and Levy. As the sole survivor of the first Columbia faculty, Bernard is today its only participating witness. She comments that “split” implies an abrupt event, whereas the formation of the new center at Columbia occurred as a four-year process. It began June 12, 1942, at an informal gathering in Levy's home with Rado the catalytic force. Those present included Kardiner, Bernard, Carl Binger (eventual president) and George Daniels (eventual secretary), Richard Frank, Phyllis Greenacre, Max Mayer, John Millet, Bela Mittelman, M. L. Oberholzer, and Nathan Ackermann. (Bernard reports that published accounts differ somewhat in their listing of those in attendance.) Some of those who, with Rado and Kardiner, had departed from the New York Psychoanalytic Society, informed it that: “For several years there has been an atmosphere of bickering, slander, and gossip in which none of us felt that we could function profitably either to the Society or ourselves. For this reason, it is our declared intention to withdraw from the activities of the Society though not to resign from it.” Except for Levy, who had resigned in anger over the Zilboorg affair, Rado and those who had left the New York with him maintained their membership in order to remain in The American, as in those days membership in the national body was held only through membership in one of its constituent societies. This ultimately made it possible for the new society and institute to achieve the goal of acceptance and accreditation by The American.
Bernard believes that the heated antagonisms of those days between analysts of the Rado group and those of the New York Institute was due to a number of factors, including both intellectual disagreements and personality clashes. But she believes that a significant determinant was Rado's removal, in 1940, from his position as chair of the Educational Committee. The leadership at the Institute was concerned that his developing ideas—the seeds of adaptational theory—deviated from Freudian orthodoxy. His removal certainly seemed to fuel she recalls, his intense motivation to establish and head an institute of his own.
The new group, which held monthly scientific meetings, was the forerunner of the Association of Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Medicine. Its history and that of the Columbia Institute are inseparably intertwined: it was in this nascent society that plans for the new institute were shaped and developed. “Our determination,” Bernard explains, “was that such an institute be accredited by The American, and thus in the mainstream of psychoanalysis, which resulted in a huge amount of negotiations and four years of Byzantinelike transactions.”
Opponents of such accreditation relied on the existing bylaw of the American's constitution that only one society and training institute could be established in a given geographic area—the so-called “one unit local rule.” When a bylaw change to eliminate the rule was first voted down by the affiliate societies, Rado and Daniels initiated informal meetings with Karl Menninger, incoming president of The American. They continued those meetings with his successors, Leo Bartemeier and Bertram Lewin. By 1945 a more friendly climate toward the Columbia group had developed within The American, where Franz Alexander of Chicago and Frieda Fromm-Reichman of Washington, D.C. were particularly influential allies.
Lewin, in his term as president, was of great help in overcoming the obstacles to recognition of the new institute. To implement a 1945 resolution of the Executive Council, he appointed and chaired an Expediting Committee with three members from the Columbia group (Daniels, Bernard, and Robert Bak) and three from the New York Institute (Sarah Bonnet, Susannah Haigh, and Heinz Hartmann) The Committee's report was favorable, and both the new institute (the Columbia Clinic for Psychoanalytic Training and Research) and the society (the Association for Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Medicine) were officially accredited as constituents of the American Psychoanalytic Association at its 1946 Fall Meeting.
Locating the new institute within the Columbia University medical school entailed another intricate process. Nolan Lewis, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, and Daniels, who headed the Psychosomatic Service there and at Presbyterian Hospital, were instrumental in achieving this goal, as they were also in
obtaining space from New York State at its New York Psychiatric Institute on the medical school campus. Before the success of their efforts, Alvin Johnson, president of the New School, had offered that institution as a home for the new psychoanalytic institute. While grateful to him, Rado and the rest much preferred the medical school setting.
On a personal note, Bernard adds that her main reasons for moving with the Columbia group—besides her compatibility with its theoretical interests—were the attractive features of the University and medical school setting. These included interdisciplinary opportunities for pursuing her interest in psychosomatic medicine, and the outpatient department, which offered a diverse range of patients (in terms of culture, ethnicity, and social status) that the private practice analyst seldom treats, to the detriment of clinical and theoretical knowledge. Also, the prospect of day classes held a strong appeal, as she believed that learning suffers when exhausted candidates and teachers meet in the evening, when analytic courses elsewhere were scheduled. Thus, she did not join Columbia because she shared the hostility of others toward the New York Institute, where in fact she had had a very positive experience as a candidate and young faculty member. As an implicit statement of her attitude, after The American's accreditation, when Rado and others resigned from the New York Society, she kept her membership both there and in the Association for Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Medicine.
The original Columbia faculty consisted of Rado, Kardiner, Levy, Daniels, and Lewis. Bernard, Ackermann, and Bak were junior faculty. Additional training was provided by a number of analysts from the New York Institute, some of them forming the so-called collaborating staff. Among them were Fanny von Hann-Kende, Fredric Weil, Nathaniel Ross, Jacob Arlow, Leo Stone, and Franz Cohen. Some on the collaborating staff augmented the central faculty by conducting training analyses in their offices, without any role in policy or administration.
It was to this collaborating staff that Bernard moved from the central faculty some years later, in a deliberately quiet “mini-schism” of her own. She felt that Rado's authoritarianism violated the very principle of academic freedom for which he had fought so hard at the New York Institute. Nevertheless, she maintained a long personal friendship with Rado and his family, and continues to value his outstanding abilities as theoretician and teacher, and his consuming commitment to psychoanalysis and to science generally. “In building the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research,” she believes, “he contributed creatively to what has become, out of the turbulence of its beginnings, a major generator of psychoanalytic advancement.”
Henriette Klein was also close to Levy and Rado at the time the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute was formed. She was on the staff of the New York Psychiatric Institute, an affiliate hospital of the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and worked closely there with Rado. For years Rado, Levy, Klein and occasionally others met every Wednesday at the 86th Street Delicatessen. She reports that Levy felt strongly that psychoanalytic institutes should be entirely separate from psychoanalytic societies and should instead operate under the auspices of a medical school or university. Rado felt that changes were needed in psychoanalytic theory and that the field would benefit if it allied itself more closely with basic scientific disciplines. The affiliation with Columbia was attractive on both accounts. Klein disagrees with Frosch's and Bernard's characterization of Rado as an autocrat.
In 1956, a third “split” occurred in the New York Institute: the Division of Psychoanalysis at Downstate Medical Center was approved as a full training institute by The American. Klein, who was directly involved in its founding, relates that in 1947 Howard Potter, then in line for the chair of psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, decided instead to lead the Department of Psychiatry at Long Island Medical College (soon to become Downstate Medical Center). Klein accompanied him across the East River and described the initial conditions as “working in the vineyard of the Lord.” Her “office” was a corner of the GI clinic. Because psychoanalysis was very prestigious at the time, Potter was quite receptive to the idea of a division of psychoanalysis within his department. Richard Frank followed Potter and together they drew up the initial plans for the division. Later Klein joined them and helped in the development of a curriculum; afterward she returned to Columbia.
Frosch mentions that Sandor Lorand (a former president of the New York Society), Sylvan Kieser, Ruth Loveland, and Nathan Root were among the earliest analysts interested in staffing the new institute. Others from the New York Institute joined them, while retaining their membership there. These included Jacob Arlow, Mark Kanzer, Max Shur, and Frosch himself.
Unlike previous analytic separations, here there were no claims of theoretical differences. Klein believes the motives of the new faculty were mixed: there was an opportunity to found a new training institute and to be at an university-affiliated institute; there were also possibilities for teaching and more rapid advancement. The incoming group rejected Frank's leadership, possibly because they wanted a more established leader or perhaps because of his association with Columbia. Shortly afterwards Lorand was chosen to be the institute's first director and Frank departed.
Frosch tells of Downstate's move in 1977, to New York University Medical Center, an institution with a distinguished history of analytic involvement from the time of Paul Schilder in the mid-1930s. Analysts, including Zilboorg, Bettina Warburg, Nathaniel Ross, Keiser, and Frosch himself, had long been associated with NYU. In the mid-seventies, when the Division of Psychoanalysis at Down-state was considering leaving Brooklyn for an affiliation with Hillside Medical Center, Frosch spoke to Robert Cancro, then chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at NYU, who was eager to make an affiliation. He contacted Roy Lilleskov, director of the Down-state Institute, negotiations began, and finally the institute moved to NYU, where it resides to this day.
Klein reflects on the figures who played these dramatic roles in the development of psychoanalysis in New York: “There are [now] new voices, not all of the caliber of those romantic pioneers.” These early giants, she urges, should not be forgotten, nor their full measure of devotion to the science and profession of psychoanalysis.
This article is based on the Oral History Workshop, “Psychoanalysis in New York, Part II: Institutes and OrganizationalSplits 1931-1956,” held May 10, 1990, at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Robert Grayson chaired the workshop. Panelists were John Frosch, Marianne Horney Eckard, Viola Bernard, and Henriette Klein.