In 1938, institutes approved by The American existed only in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Chicago. When John Benjamin and his wife Hertha moved to a small ranch some twenty miles west of Denver, it was for a reason that brought other distinguished Coloradans to the area: tuberculosis; John had pursued his medical training in Switzerland, but the disease interrupted his studies and he was required to undergo many months of the “balcony treatment.”
Benjamin did not open a practice but instead worked the ranch. Only later did he become affiliated with the University of Colorado Medical School. His first association there was with the Department of Pediatrics, where Alfred Washburn was involved with long-term developmental follow-up studies of children. Only later, particularly with the arrival of Herb Gaskill in 1953, did Benjamin become more actively involved in the Department of Psychiatry. Later he became the third president of the Denver Society.
By the end of the 1940s there were still only eleven institutes credentialed by The American, seven of them in the Northeast corridor and one each in Chicago, Topeka, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Psychoanalysis seemed to he developing in the biggest cities, where the intellectual ferment and medical schools provided a natural lodging place for psychoanalysts fleeing Europe. Even Topeka, which owed so much to the brilliance and dedication of the Menningers, traced its lineage to Chicago.
By the end of the war Denver, “Queen City of the Plains,” with a population of less than 350,000, would have seemed a long way from becoming a center of psychoanalysis. Servicemen who had been stationed there saw an attractive city with easy access to the Rockies and resolved to give it a closer look. Nonetheless, it was still a frontier town, probably more famous for its stock show than for its medical school.
It is perhaps a little surprising, then, that the Department of Psychiatry should have attracted the national attention it did. However, psychiatry was taught in all four years of the medical school curriculum, and an energetic liaison program linked psychiatry to the other services. Postgraduate training in psychiatry was deemed good enough to receive funding from the Commonwealth Foundation, which provided stipends for such Fellows in Psychiatry as John Romano, Jack Ewald, Henry Brosin, and Bob Felix. Colorado Psychopathic Hospital had been established on the medical school campus for the study and treatment of patients with mental illness and for clinical teaching.
All of this was presided over by Franklin Ebaugh, who had trained at Johns Hopkins in the “psychobiology” of Adolf Meyer. Although outpatient treatment of mental patients had not yet been established in the mid-forties, Sam Kennison, who attended the medical school in those days, recalls hearing references to psychotherapy from Ebaugh, the principal ingredients of which were explanation and reassurance.
Another token of Ebaugh's willingness to go along with the new fad, about which he was always ambivalent, was his invitation to Elizabeth Goldner to join the department and provide analysis for some of the residents. Goldner, a European analyzed in Switzerland, had immigrated with her husband to Chicago, where she studied at the Institute. She worked in Denver for two or three years during the forties and analyzed some members of Ebaugh's staff. Later she and her husband moved to New York, where she became a training analyst at the New York Institute.
Jules Coleman represented the new wave of psychiatrists whose early exposure to Freud as undergraduates was augmented by psychiatric military experience and the teaching of a psychoanalytically oriented psychiatry. While stationed in Atlanta during the war, Coleman was exposed to the teaching of Moe Kaufman, an experience which led him eventually to the New York Institute, where he received the bulk of his training. He then went on to the University of Colorado Medical Center to complete his clinical work in the years 1946–1950. There he analyzed two patients, taking the train twice a month to Topeka to trade a day's work at the Winter General Hospital, teaching in the Menninger program, in exchange for supervision.
Despite Ebaugh's contributions to the psychiatric curriculum, there was still no move to establish outpatient programs. Happily, Coleman recalls, Ebaugh “let us do anything we wanted,” so an all-purpose psychiatric clinic was soon set up for treating both children and adults. This was the first step toward the nationwide establishment of outpatient psychiatric clinics for children—clinics where new ideas about development and psychopathology could be directed to the most common emotional problems of children and adolescents. These ideas found their way also into medical school teaching, and Coleman was able to develop a course for medical students in which the child's normal psychological development was correlated with the most frequently seen clinical conditions. New therapeutic
approaches were also presented. Cotter Hirschberg, who later became a training analyst at Topeka and helped to develop the child analytic program there, worked closely with Coleman in these tasks. Extension programs, both educational and clinical, were carried on in connection with the National Jewish Hospital a few blocks away, and at Fitzsimons Army Hospital a few miles further off. In addition, the provision of diagnostic and consultative services to the Denver public school system opened up increased opportunities for the supervised teaching of psychiatric residents, psychologists, and social worker's.
By the late 1940s, Colorado was beginning to join other parts of the country in establishing the American Association of Psychiatric Clinics for Children, of which Coleman became the second president. The organization quickly became a standard-setter in child psychiatry, in both practice and training. In 1950 Coleman left Denver for New Haven, just as Jule Eisenbud, another graduate of the New York Institute, decided to move west. Eisenbud had received an invitation from Ebaugh to join the staff and analyze residents, but chose instead to establish a private analytic practice. He did join the clinical faculty, however, and for many years conducted a weekly case conference.
Eisenbud recalls that most of his early analytic patients were physicians. Although there was a great deal of general interest in psychoanalysis in Denver at the time, he notes that there were two competing attitudes, not entirely dissimilar except in their estimation of the new therapy's value: some tended to see it as a quick, magical solution, whereas others dismissed it as mystical nonsense. Also in the late forties, Alan Hurst, father of David Hurst, currently director of the Denver Institute and secretary of The American, moved to Denver to become Medical Director of the National Jewish Hospital, where he worked closely with both Coleman and Benjamin. Hurst credits his own early association with Eisenbud as an important factor in his development.
Another figure from that period is Arnold Eisendorfer, who was born in Denver and attended the University of Colorado School of Medicine. During his psychiatric studies there, he became acquainted with psychoanalysis and was advised that he should go east to be analyzed, which he did, eventually becoming a distinguished member of the New York Society and Institute. In addition to Eisendorfer, Coleman, and Eisenbud, New York had other ties to Colorado. Mary O'Neil Hawkins was born in Denver, and Bernard Pacella attended the University of Colorado Medical School.