The date is January 18, 1911. Ernest Jones, then of Toronto and later Freud's biographer, speaks to a combined audience of the Chicago Medical Society and the Chicago Neurological Society. His topic, “Reflections on Some Criticisms of the Psychoanalytic Method of Treatment,” suggests an ironically ambitious effort; he seems to have assumed that his audience had somehow already accepted “that psychoneurotic symptoms are the product of underlying dissociated mental processes which are unknown to the patient, or in Freud's sense, unconscious.” In the course of his brief introduction to Freud's thought, Jones anticipated those who might find the treatment harmful or unreliable, and tried to answer those who would find “the whole method vague, uncontrolled, and speculative.” But he also warned untrained physicians not to rush blindly into psychosexual investigations in the name of psychoanalysis, a method of treatment that requires “careful and disciplined study before it can be adequately applied or judged.”
Jones's warning appears not to have been premature. While most of the discussants responded with at least guarded optimism, a number of physicians had already applied the method with poor results. Jones's severest critic, Dr. Sidney Kuh, challenged the sexual basis of neurosis and argued that suggestion could account for the method's therapeutic effectiveness. This most vocal critic admitted that “psychoanalysis will do … just exactly what any other suggestive measure will do, if properly used, namely it will remove symptoms. It will not cure the disease, … and in view of the fact that I have had in one instance, which I cannot describe in detail here, an exceedingly disagreeable and unfortunate experience with the psychoanalytic method, I feel it is not a safe method of treating cases of hysteria or cases of psychoneuroses” (Illinois Medical Journal, Vol. 19, p. 377).
The other discussants were considerably more open-minded, or at least politely tolerant. According to Roy Grinker, Sr., writing in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1963, Hugh Patrick “had studied the subject of psychoanalysis assiduously and on the basis of his own experience … found it interesting and worthy of serious consideration” (p. 398).
A neurologist named Mettler had this to say: “Formerly in psychiatry we have been too prone to depend on the symptoms per se and to establish classification on mere groups of symptoms. Under the psychoanalytic method symptoms are analyzed and accounted for. This is a decided advance in psychiatry” (IMJ, p. 378). A number of other physicians had already tried the method. One named Moyer reported very good, results. Another, Podstata, was going to try it on a dementia praecox patient even though he regarded that disease as basically organic.
Thus, on the whole, Jones and his message were most welcome. As one member, Butler, put it, “with this method we will treat the individual as such and see where the symptoms lead and why and get at the root of the trouble” (IMJ, p. 381). Jones himself reserved most of his closing remarks for his most outspoken critic: “Doctor Kuh tells us he has had bad results by using what he calls psychoanalysis. All I can say is that I am not very surprised” (Grinker, p. 399).
On March 26, 1912, Dr. Julius Grinker, Roy Sr.'s father, gave an academic lecture entitled “Freud's Psychotherapy” before the South Side Branch of the Chicago Medical Society. He concluded by saying, “This new psychotherapy has as its basis a plausible psychology, splendid reasoning and a profound acquaintance with the innermost depths of human nature.” As before, Dr. Kuh attacked the method as “dangerous.” Roy Grinker, Sr., was later to surmise “that a female patient developed a strong erotic transference from which Kuh fled in panic.” (Although Julius Grinker ultimately became antagonistic to psychoanalysis, his son had the distinction of being the only psychoanalyst in Chicago to be analyzed by Freud, while his grandson Roy Jr. is a second-generation psychoanalyst.) Dr. Ralph Hamill, a North Shore socialite who may very well have been in that audience, eagerly adopted the psychoanalytic point of view and began to use it in his teaching and in what he considered to be psychoanalytic practice. It is said that he had a date to begin analysis with Freud but could not keep it because of the onset of World War I.
Sometime around 1930 Hamill had established a speech clinic for children at Rush Presbyterian Hospital, where he attempted to treat stuttering by encouraging the youngsters to say unspeakable words. When he did something similar at Children's Memorial, putting four-letter words on the blackboard, he was dropped from the staff for outrageous conduct. Douglas Orr, whose unpublished memoirs are drawn on freely here, recalls attending a lecture by Hamill in the winter of 1930: “he told us of the sexual rhythms of the church bells in Italy (where he had been during World War I), gave us an analytic interpretation of Jack and the Beanstalk, and generally boggled us with news of the Unconscious.”
In 1921 Hamill published, in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, a not unsophisticated paper entitled “The Role of the Risque Story,” and on December 28, 1924, he gave a paper on “the transference” at an American Psychoanalytic Association meeting in New York. He also wrote a number of papers on pediatric care that had a decidedly psychoanalytic flair. As it happens, he had been the Chicago representative at The American's founding in 1911.
Hamill, clearly a rather dashing figure (he had played football at the University of Chicago, once scoring six touchdowns, the last after his leg had been broken, against hometown rival Northwestern), had been one of the psychiatrists testifying for the defense in the Loeb-Leopold trial, as had William Alanson White, the forensic specialist and superintendent of St. Elizabeths in Washington. White would later chair the advisory board of the fledgling Chicago Institute; the National Archives contain his entire correspondence dealing with the establishment of the Institute, mostly letters to and from Alfred Stern of the Rosenwald Foundation.
But the Windy City was not yet ripe for psychoanalytic development, and nothing much happened until after World War I, though some Chicagoans had been traveling to Europe for firsthand acquaintance with the new psychology. Perhaps the most important of these travelers was Lionel Blitzsten, who during the twenties dominated psychoanalysis in Chicago. His mentor, Hugh Patrick of Northwestern, sought advice from William Alanson White as
An earlier version of this paper has appeared in The Bulletin of the Institute for Psychoanalysis, summer 1992.
to whom Blitzsten should see for analysis, Jung or Freud. There is a story afloat that Freud rejected Blitzsten because he arrived fifteen minutes late for his appointment, despite the excuse of a stalled taxi. However, it has not been confirmed that Blitzsten had analysis with anyone but Franz Alexander in Berlin, where he attended some courses at the Institute. According to Orr, Blitzsten “went to Europe in the early twenties, was after some years graduated from the Berlin Institute, and returned to Chicago in 1925 as a psychoanalyst.”
Blitzsten was elected to membership in The American at its fifteenth annual meeting, held in Cincinnati on May 31, 1927. In 1929 he was listed as one of forty-six members of the International Psychoanalytic Association, with addresses in Chicago and at the Hotel Hassler in Berlin. In 1931 he helped found the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society and became its first president. A year later he began to teach in the newly established Institute for Psychoanalysis, but soon parted ways with its director, Franz Alexander, who had been his analyst. Blitzsten remained the gadfly in relation to the Institute, which he regarded not so much radical as wrongheaded, yet he refused to establish a separate institute, on the ground that he had no administrative talent (personal communication from Alexander).
At a January 27, 1976 meeting of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, an attempt to define Blitzsten's theoretical contributions, particularly in the realm of narcissistic problems, evoked intense partisan passions reminiscent of the vitriolic battles that took place in the early days of the Society between Blitzsten's adherents and members of the Institute. “Charismacide,” charged one Blitzsten follower, while those disagreeing warned against the idealization of an unworthy figure. A useful point was made by Heinz Kohut, who felt that Blitzsten hadn't much capacity for conceptualization and was essentially an impatient “man of action.” He contrasted him with Alexander, whom he considered a very careful conceptualizer; yet the latter seemed unable to focus meaningfully on human issues, something the former did easily. Whether or not Kohut was correct in his estimation, the psychoanalyst naturally will suspect unresolved transference where violent public debate involves analyst and analysand, as was the case with Blitzsten and Alexander. Later, Maxwell Gitelson, who had analysis with both, appears to have taken Blitzsten's side. He did not join the Institute faculty until 1956, when Alexander finally left Chicago.