The Columbia University Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Clinic for Training and Research was established in 1944, at which time the department of psychiatry, under the direction of Nolan D.C. Lewis, provided space in the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Initial financial support came from a three-year Hofheimer Foundation grant, later supplemented by a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service.
Sandor Rado, then education director at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and George Daniels, head of the psychosomatic and consultation service at Columbia Presbyterian, initiated the new venture, together with Lewis. They were soon supported by David Levy and Abram Kardiner.
In his twentieth year, while still an undergraduate majoring in political science, Rado happened to read an article by Ferenczi, mistranslated as “The Analysis of the Soul.” As he later reported in interviews with the Columbia University oral history project (conducted by Bluma Swerdloff), he was fascinated by the fact that Sigmund Freud was investigating a part of the brain that could not be scrutinized by the inspective methods of physiology. Wildly enthusiastic, Rado could hardly wait to learn more, and from the bookstore ordered everything by Freud that was then in print. After devouring every word, Rado decided to become a doctor and to specialize in psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
This passion for learning psychoanalysis led eventually to his persistence in introducing psychoanalytic education in medical colleges, in making psychoanalysis a vital part of psychiatry, and in closing the gap between psychoanalysis and the medical sciences. It is of no small importance that in 1914, when Rado, a twenty-four-year-old medical student, delivered his first paper before a psychoanalytic society, it was entitled “The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Medicine.” His second paper, “The Paths of Natural Science in the Light of Psychoanalysis,” also emphasized what was to become his lifelong interest—the relationship between science and psychoanalysis, with a strong focus on methodology.
It was this emphasis that motivated Rado and his fellow founders to develop psychoanalytic training under medical and university auspices. Between 1941 and 1944 Rado devoted his energies to the implementation of this long-held dream.
The theme Rado had emphasized in his years at the Berlin Institute and during his years of teaching at the New York Institute, where he was the first educational director, was carried over to the new institute at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons: that the physiology of the brain and the psychology of the mind are inseparable, with the reservation that constructs used for physiology cannot be used for psychology.
Rado also fought to free the new institute from any possible political influence from the local analytic society. Remember that just a few years had passed since medical colleges had succeeded in separating themselves from local medical societies. Thus, the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine was organized as an entity independent of the Columbia institute. It was Rado's hope that by not assigning the Association exclusively to Columbia, a broader membership would develop, thereby enabling it to become a forum for a variety of psychoanalytic opinions and also
for workers in related scientific areas, such as biology, physiology, and neurology.
It was not the medical college per se that was Rado's great interest, though he did feel that progress in psychoanalysis would depend eventually on knowing more about the physiology of the brain. He felt that Freud's theories had been turned by his disciples and students from biology to what Siegfried Bernfeld had called the “romanticism of instincts.” Rado felt there was no conceivable alternative to analysts' availing themselves of knowledge from the biological sciences. This was his dream when he became the first director at Columbia. He brought in biologists, geneticists, neurologists, and other basic scientists, but unfortunately nothing substantial came of the effort. Rado, of course, was disappointed that this liaison with allied medical sciences did not have a greater impact on psychoanalysis. Yet to the end he believed that a mutually enhancing collaboration would come about, if not in his lifetime.
Rado constantly advanced the idea, stated first in that 1914 presentation, that Freud's technique of communicating deep introspection was a unique investigative method for the exploration of brain function. “In my naivete,” he reflected fifty-one years later, “I took it for granted that it must be self-evident to every medical man, so…I did not even bother to send [the paper] in for publication.” He believed he could do no better than to repeat his youthful call for “the full utilization of Freud's methods for the disclosure and description of processes of the mind in a language that will facilitate their correlation with activities of the brain.”
In 1944 the Columbia University Board of Trustees approved the organization of a formal psychoanalytic training program under its auspices. Rado was appointed director at a time when, as a result of Nazi atrocities and the ravages of war, the initiative in psychoanalytic training and research was shifting to the United States.
Since the bylaws of the American Psychoanalytic Association then prohibited more than one institute or society in any one geographic area, it was necessary to effect changes in the bylaws that would permit the creation of a second institute in New York. The voluminous correspondence on this issue between prominent psychoanalysts and between institutes of The American makes for fiery reading. The Columbia group fought hard to have these necessary changes brought about, a struggle to be replicated elsewhere in years to come, if not with the same acrimony and partisanship.
All the faculty members of the new institute were then members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society (with the exception of one who had resigned from it earlier for other reasons). Willard Rappleye, then dean of the Medical School at Columbia, had expressed his general impression that psychoanalysts were charlatans. However, since the early 1930s a group of analysts from the New York Society had been active in both clinical work and research at Columbia Presbyterian. As a result, various departments of the hospital and medical school had become acquainted with their approach and developed confidence in them. On the basis of this nucleus and a $100,000 gift, the medical faculty and the dean came to accept the idea of the new training facility. The deep commitment of the founders to the mind/body concept helps to explain the fact that the new institute's name originally included the word psychosomatic.
Rado had left the New York Institute to direct the Columbia Psychoanalytic Clinic, and there were several theoretical reasons for the move.
One was his conviction that analytic teaching should take place in a university setting to facilitate the interchange of ideas with other academic disciplines and to cement closer ties with medicine. Another reason was his belief, anathema to the conservative New York Institute, that analytic language should be closer to ordinary English; thus he referred to the ego as the “action self,” to the superego as “conscience,” to anxiety as “fear,” to guilt as “guilty fear,” to consciousness as the “awareness process,” and to the unconscious as the “nonreporting process.” Finally, he had become an ego psychologist with an emphasis on adaptation. Discarding libido as motivation, he substituted emotions, which he divided into “welfare emotions” (such as love, joy, and pride) and “emergency emotions” (such as guilt, fear, and rage). Called into action against danger, the latter could lead to “miscarried repair” (Rado's name for neurosis) or “descending dyscontrol” (his name for psychosomatic conditions). He thus stressed ego motivations—integrative and adaptive functions based on the need for safety—with the action-self as an independent center of initiative. These dynamic concepts were taught in the theory course at the new institute, where the curriculum also included such medically oriented courses as genetics, biochemistry, neurology, and psychiatric diagnosis.