Although I was not part of the Center's founding, I had been teaching and working within the department of psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons since the 1930s, so I was there when the plan unfolded. At that time I was in psychoanalytic training at the New York Institute, which I completed, later joining both the New York Society and the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine.
At the instigation of Bluma Swerdloff, I conducted the first follow-up study of treated patients that had been done at the Columbia institute. The patients studied had been analyzed on a four-to-five-times-weekly basis. All cases had been supervised by an experienced analyst, and the patients had been terminated for over two years. The interviewing was done by graduates of the Center, including Ruth Easser, Janet Kennedy, Joseph Lubart, Robert Senescu, and Daniel Shapiro. Bluma, our first social worker (whom Nathan Ackerman had brought to the Center in 1947 from the Jewish Board of Guardians), was involved particularly in the methodology of the study and in setting up the interviewing teams.
We met as a group to do the final rating, using a revised scale of changes. Sandor Rado attended
all of these meetings, though, as I remember, somewhat reluctantly.
A marked improvement was seen in all areas rated, with the exception of sexual pleasure/satisfaction, which remained essentially untouched by the analytic experience or by the length of treatment. More sophisticated follow-up studies were done at later dates by others, particularly John J. Weber.
David M. Levy and Joseph Zubin were interested in having applicants for training exposed to a two-day battery of psychological tests, essentially for general intelligence, cultural background, attitudes and interests, and personality assessment. The general purpose was to provide additional data for a study of the selection process; the results were not used in the process of selecting individuals and were in fact unavailable to the interviewers, except under special circumstances. For several years—not including the sample year described below—the findings were introduced when the selectors met to make the final group decisions regarding eligibility for acceptance. Later the battery of tests was discontinued. However, I was able to conduct a study of one year's candidates. I took advantage of the fact that their analysts, their supervisors, and their teachers knew me and trusted that I would honor their confidentiality.
A variety of data (from selection procedures, records of grades, comments by instructors, reports from supervisors, the records of all patients treated, and other information) was collected from supervisors and analysts. These data were then compared with our measures of success, derived from the history of the students' development during psychoanalytic training. In 1951, just prior to our study, Miles, Barrabee, and Finesinger had published “Evaluation of Psychotherapy” in Psychoanalytic Medicine, which provided us a basis for constructing our research scales. The Columbia study, including the psychological workup by Zubin and his colleagues E.I. Burdoch and F. Cheek, was published privately through the support of the Hofheimer Foundation, later supplemented by grants from the U.S. Public Health Service and significant contributions by David Levy and Viola Bernard.
In later years I became close to Levy and to Rado. We met every Thursday at the delicatessen at 86th Street and Madison Avenue. Whenever George Daniels was free, he joined us. But rain or shine, the three of us met weekly until their lives ended. Both families requested that I conduct the memorial services, and I did so, Rado's at a regular meeting of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine, and Levy's at a special gathering at the Academy of Medicine.
I close with an excerpt from an informal talk Sandor Rado gave at his seventy-fifth birthday dinner in 1965: “My work—and with it my happiness—reached its high phase with the ten years I was allowed to spend…in the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic. I cannot be grateful enough to Columbia University. In our revised theoretical structure of psychoanalysis, the emphasis falls on the exploration of man's emotional life, but the truly scientific exploration of this aspect of man's life has hardly begun.”