California has long led the nation in psychoanalytic research training and has pioneered in institutional arrangements for its accommodation. The irony is that the group which in the big split of 1950 was distinctly medical became within fifteen years “an aggressive advocate of nonmedical training” (see TAP 25/2). When in that year the group resigned from the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and constituted itself the Institute for Psychoanalytic Medicine of Southern California, one of the manifest issues was to avoid affiliation with foreign-trained nonmedical psychoanalysts. In 1962 “medicine” was dropped and the name became the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. Under Sigmund Gabe, chair from 1964 to 1969, SCPI began to enlarge its academic research training program.
The man most responsible for envisioning, shaping, and ensuring the stability and success of the SCPI research training program is Samuel Eisenstein, who for eight years (1969–1977) chaired SCPI's Education Committee. He had been inspired by Freud's vision, as enunciated in The Question of Lay Analysis (1926): “If—which may sound fantastic today—one had to found a college of psychoanalysis, … analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material” (SE 20:246). Eisenstein had the genial idea of a Research Training Fellowship to help young academics pay for their training analysis. He followed through vigorously, year after year pushing an often ambivalent membership to renew the $10,000 stipend so that yet another university-based researcher could be trained in psychoanalysis. Today SCPI has voted an annual voluntary assessment of fifty dollars per member to finance the fellowship, and institutions such as the Marjorie Mosher Schmidt Foundation and the Joseph Drown Foundation have supported SCPI's Research Training Fund. The newly created Judd Marmor Research Tuition Fund will provide scholarships for academic researchers.
Apart from funding, the other major problem early on was the legal status of the clinical practices maintained by research students and graduates. The academics were not state-licensed clinicians. Psychologists, who had long been excluded from psychoanalytic training within The American, were envious. Complaints of practicing psychology without a license were filed in an attempt to marginalize the research candidates and keep them from seeing patients. The response of the researchers and the California institutes was to set up a Legislative Committee chaired jointly by Peter Loewenberg and Martin Levine. Levine's superb legal drafting skills were put to use in drafting a law that addressed the objections of the psychologists' lobby. The legislation was sponsored by the Assembly Majority Leader, Howard Berman, and carried through the Senate by its doyen, Senator Walter Stiern. Many analysts were impressed by how a small group of citizens, neither rich nor influential, could seek and successfully obtain hearing and redress on a complex legal issue. During 1976 and 1977 the California institutes fought their way through numerous drafting conferences and protracted legislative hearings, with institute leaders such as Leonard Comess and Irving Berkowitz taking time from their practices to fly to Sacramento at their own expense to testify.
On September 30, 1977, Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., signed the first Research Psychoanalysts Law, which marks the first time in the history of any jurisdiction that psychoanalysis was legitimated by a state. The new law explicitly named the four California institutes of The American as authorized to train psychoanalysts for “teaching, training, or research.” Graduates were entitled to call themselves psychoanalysts and to engage in psychoanalysis. When after protracted hearings the bill became law, Assemblyman Berman had this to say: “The people of the state through their legislature and Governor have carefully investigated and weighed the quality of your training and the ethics of your practice and found it of such a high standard of excellence that we are granting you a privilege that we do not grant to the graduates of our own law schools and medical schools—to practice your profession without any further state examination or scrutiny. The standards of your institutes alone satisfy us.” Upon hearing the news, Anna Freud wrote, in a letter to Loewenberg, “I think this legal decision is a wonderful thing and will mark an important development in the history of psychoanalysis in America.”
Over the past qarter century 23 academic researchers, from UCLA, USC, and Cal Tech, have received psychoanalytic training in the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute: Gordon M. Berger, Japanese Studies; Louis Breger, Psychology; Robert Dallek, History; Stuart A. Ende, English; Janet R. Hadda, Yiddish Literature; Robert Hill, History; Douglas Hollan, Anthropology; Albert D. Hutter, English and
Comparative Literature; Martin Jay, English; Allen Johnson, Anthropology; Lorraine Kaufman, Anthropology; Benjamin Kilborne, Anthropology; Peter Loewenberg, History; Jay Martin, English; Mauricio Mazon, History; Herbert Morris, Philosophy and Law; George Pigman, Classics; Andrew Rolle, History; Janice Rule, Theater; Fredelle Spiegel, Religious Studies; Louise Tyler, Education; William J. Winslade, Law; and E. Victor Wolfenstein, Political Science.
The Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute has trained seven academics from UCLA and USC: Peter Berton, Political Science; Jerome Cohen, Social Welfare; David J. Fisher, History; Christoph Heinecke, Psychology; Martin Levine, Law; Estelle Shane, Education; and Edith Swerdlow, Law. Another seven, from Berkley, Hastings, and San Francisco State, have trained at the San Francisco Institute: Nancy Chodorow, Sociology; Naomi Janowitz, Religon; Enrico Jones, Psychology; Melissa Melken, Law; Philburn Ratoosh, Psychology; Neil Smelser, Sociology; and Michael Zimmerman, English. The San Diego Institute, founded in 1977, is training, from UCSD and UCI, Judith Hughes, History; Nadine Levenson, Dentistry; and Melford E. Spiro, Anthropology.
The intellectual and institutional problems of academic research graduates are different from those of purely clinical psychoanalysts. The former have come to psychoanalysis from the social sciences and humanistic disciplines and commit their professional lives to those frames of reference, and to teaching and research agendas. Their point of entry into institutionalized psychoanalysis follows a socialization process shaped by a graduate school apprenticeship and a university career marked by frequent peer review in disciplines whose empirical imperatives set rigorous standards for competitive external grants and for the ascending of university promotion ladders. Each discipline imparts its own styles of thought, an historically conditioned coded language, research traditions, cognitive assumptions, canons of evidence, and ways of perceiving the world, just as does psychoanalysis.
The academic researcher's task of integrating clinical psychodynamics with teaching and research is exceptional and quite different from what most clinicians face in an institute seminar class. Much of the academic's most difficult and fruitful work is the translation of painfully acquired but invaluable insights regarding the clinical setting from the esoteric language and concepts of psychoanalysis into their application within the discourse of another discipline.