I had completed most of my analytic training in San Francisco by, 1979, but was having difficulty finding control cases. Dismayed by a survey indicating that Bay Area graduate analysts were seeing, on average, fewer than two cases, but determined nonetheless to practice psychoanalysis, I decided to move to Colorado Springs.
I had friends there, and its proximity to Denver allowed me to complete my training at the Denver Institute. No one was then practicing analysis in Colorado Springs, or ever had, so far as I could determine. Its reputation as a military center with conservative social and political views was daunting. Yet its population of a quarter million included substantial groups of educated, prosperous individuals and several small college communities. The low cost of living, with little pressure on patients to “keep up with the Joneses,” made analytic fees more affordable. Unlike the situation in San Francisco, where sophisticated people felt they knew all about psychoanalysis and often rejected it out of hand, in this small city I could work where the community's view of my profession would derive more from the work. I did.
I have now practiced in Colorado Springs for thirteen years. Though I miss San Francisco, especially in the thin cultural climate here, I have not regretted the move. I have been able, as was my wish, to practice psychoanalysis and have gained valuable analytic experience. Three other local therapists have now sought analytic training and are beginning to practice here.
My affiliation with the Denver Institute has been essential, but it was dearly important to have had a well-developed local identity as a psychoanalyst while building a practice outside of an analytic center. My practice has grown as a result of confidently engaging a handful of therapists and analysands despite the community's overall disinterest in psychoanalysis, a disinterest based more on benign ignorance than is San Francisco's seemingly sophisticated dismissal. Still, it took three years to find my fourth control case.
I have been much more active in teaching, writing, and planning programs than I had been in San Francisco, in part perhaps to consolidate an analytic identity. For me, as for my analysands, there are fewer cultural and social stimuli here to distract from the pursuit of analysis, and there has been ample time for recreation and writing.
I had once worried that my professional anonymity would be more difficult to maintain in a city of this size, but I have encountered fewer problems than existed in San Francisco. Here a “live and let live” attitude offers little support but ample independence.
That attitude will now be tested, as Colorado Springs has been billed recently as the “evangelical capital of the United States,” with over fifty right wing religious groups migrating here from Southern California. Small cities like this are much more vulnerable to marked social changes than are larger metropolitan areas. It remains to be seen how this development will affect the climate for psychoanalysis.
Gerald S. Stein