Psychoanalysis came late to Minnesota, the land of sky-blue waters and the home of Hiawatha and Minnehaha; the home of Garrison Keillor and his Lutheran heritage; the place “where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” The long and honorable history of being “Minnesota nice” is accompanied by a dedication to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and prairie dust-bowl empiricism or phenomenology, as DSM-IV would have it.
Organized psychoanalysis began with the incorporation of the Psychoanalytic Foundation of Minnesota (PFM) in 1970 by William Hausman, chair of the department of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. He was joined by Hyman Lippman, a 1931 graduate of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who was a pioneer in American child psychiatry and the founder of the Wilder Child Guidance Clinic in St. Paul. Hausman was recruited by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and its director, George Pollock, via Irving Harris, longtime president of the Chicago Board and a member of a prominent St. Paul family. Sidney Barrows, a distinguished lawyer, and his wife June Harris Barrows were instrumental in founding and recruiting Minnesotans to the PFM Board.
Adelaide Johnson, an outstanding Chicago teacher, had migrated to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, several years earlier, along with her internist husband. There she taught and analyzed several local psychotherapists. James Delano had also moved to Rochester, having trained in adult and child analysis in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, both Lippman and Johnson had died by the time Nathaniel London arrived from New Haven in 1972 to become the first local training and supervising analyst. In addition to Hausman and the PFM Board, which now included Delano, London had ready assistance from Robert Bush, Donald Daggett, Philip Fineberg, Marvin Sukov, George Williams, and others in the local psychiatric community.
London quickly immersed himself in both therapy and teaching in Chicago and in both psychiatry and social work at the University of Minnesota. He began to import other analytic notables to present their work, among them Heinz Kohut, Selma Kramer, William Meissner, and Robert Stoller.
In 1977 Myron Stocking was recruited from Boston to be the second training analyst. He too began an active clinical practice and taught both at the university and at the Chicago Institute. Both London and Stocking were assisted in moving by generous relocation grants from the Bush Foundation.
In 1978 Keith Horton relocated from Philadelphia, looking for greener analytic pastures and lower summertime humidity. He found the analytic climate, if not the humidity, very reasonable. Unfortunately, in 1981 the analytic climate changed significantly when Paula J. Clayton succeeded Bill Hausman as chair of psychiatry at the university. Clayton, trained at Washington University in St. Louis, returned Minnesota to the older emphasis on clinical phenomenology and halted its cosponsorship of academic offerings with PFM. Nonetheless, senior analysts and candidates continued to teach at the university and were regularly honored by residents as teachers of the year.
Horton became head of a program committee that greatly increased analytic exposure. Seminars were offered to mental health professionals on various clinical psychodynamic issues. Public lectures included Jerome Kavka's paper on his work with Ezra Pound during the poet's confinement at St. Elizabeths after World War II. George Engel's lecture on the biopsychosocial model was especially helpful in offering an update on “Monica,” and Paul Dewald and Otto Kernberg offered symposia that had a great impact on those present.
In 1982 Mark Leffert was recruited from San Diego and moved to Minneapolis. The next year Willem Dieperink became the first Minnesota commuter to graduate from the Chicago Institute, and in 1985 Robert Werner arrived from Los Angeles. Finally there were enough graduate analysts in the area to form an official study group, as these three joined Horton, London, and Stocking as charter members in the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Study Group, recognized by The American in 1986.
In 1985 the economic climate for analysis had changed dramatically, as the result of a “midnight coup” in which Blue Cross/Blue Shield and the state personnel head agreed to reduce state employee and university benefits for psychotherapy from unlimited coverage to a maximum of ten sessions per year, in return for better pediatric, OB-GYN, and dental benefits.
Following London's resignation as director of PFM that same year, Minnesota analysts suffered all of the familiar frustrations of being a very small group in times that were difficult politically, educationally, and economically. There
Keith Horton, M.D., is president of the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Study Group.
ensued a period of relative inactivity and lack of growth to the critical mass that would be needed to achieve “ignition and lift-off” of a psychoanalytic society ready to sponsor a provisional institute. During this relative moratorium, the Study Group continued to sponsor scientific sessions, case conferences, literature seminars, and courses for mental health professionals.
Although the courses declined in enrollment, the scientific symposia continued to attract large audiences. Otto Kernberg returned to share new papers on the treatment of couples and on pathological narcissism; Richard Simons came twice from Denver to share his tapes, films, and slides, all illuminating in a powerful way the issues of sexual abuse and object loss, and contrasted this psychopathology with more creative solutions to these traumas; Ruth Fischer came from Philadelphia to present an excellent symposium on newer views of femininity; and Theodore Jacobs offered a rich and characteristically undefended day on “Uses of the Self.”
The Study Group also offered two spectacularly successful symposia entitled “Being with Children,” which featured videotaped interviews with preschool children in day care and with latency-aged kids who either were in afterschool programs or were “latchkey,” “home-alone” children. Patricia Libbey, an educational psychologist and member of the PFM board, and the staff of KSTP-TV did the filming. Estelle Shane of Los Angeles, Marvin Ack of Children's Hospital Medical Center in Minneapolis, and Gillian MacNamee of the Erickson Institute in Chicago discussed the preschoolers' developmental issues. James Herzog of Boston was the major discussant of the latchkey children's issues, delivering an incisive paper on empathic and disruptive attunement. The evocative and beautifully edited videotapes captured the essence of many childhood dilemmas and were reminiscent of Mahler's films.
Nathaniel London's death in the fall of 1989 from a virulent form of cancer stunned and saddened the group. Nonetheless, during the same year spirits were raised by the appointment of Leffert and Dieperink as training and supervising analysts.
The group's Chicago “cousins” have always been exceptionally generous in offering their insights and time to their Minnesota colleagues. They are prominent on the honor roll of visiting analysts (see sidebar), who have all been helpful in sustaining the group's passion and curiosity vis-à-vis the discipline of psychoanalysis. They have also shared practical advice gleaned from their experience in their own societies and institutes, including tips on how they have marketed themselves in these times of decreased insurance coverage and increased claims of medical cures for psychiatric illnesses.
The Study Group has been greatly strengthened by the graduation in the early nineties of the first generation of younger candidates. Margaret Keenan, Nancy Kobrin, Michael Moore, and the current candidates have energized the Study Group with their enthusiasm and desire to create greater community awareness of analysis and its continuing usefulness. In 1992 David Stagner arrived from Boston and immediately immersed himself in the university and analytic teaching communities.
In 1991, while talking with Anton Kris of The American's Committee on New Training Facilities, Mark Leffert picked up on the idea of developing a psychotherapy training program roughly following the Boston and St. Louis models. Through sheer serendipity, Edythe London, Nathaniel's widow, had just joined the board of PFM and independently proposed that it begin a similar program. The idea galvanized all involved, and within a year Leffert, working with Kobrin, Moore, Stagner, Alan Serposs, and others, had evolved a curriculum and had begun to select a class. Board members London and Harry Niemeyer were exceptionally helpful: London with her close connection with the social work community and its needs, Niemeyer through his careful work on the legal aspects of this complex undertaking.
Now in its second year, the psychotherapy training program has ten bright and animated candidates who challenge the faculty to be ever better teachers and colleagues. Community response suggests that another group of similar size may be ready to begin once the current group graduates.
The experience of teaching and supervising these trainees has helped members of the Study Group further consolidate their analytic identities and has increased their enthusiasm for founding an institute, even while reminding them of the enormous commitment of time and energy it would require.
The Study Group has been blessed by the fact that in 1992 the daughter of Detroit analyst Mel Bornstein, the editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, moved to the Twin Cities with her husband, theatrical producer Bill Connor. Since then Bornstein has come to town regularly and has met with interested members and candidates. Those who met with him smiled at his notion that they were supervising his work, but soon came to appreciate the group process and the delightful truth that indeed they were doing peer supervision.
Bornstein's was one of several voices that led the group to invite Marvin Margolis to Minnesota, in the fall of 1993, to give a public lecture on the treatment of patients abused by their therapists. He spent the weekend talking with the Study Group and the PFM board, advising them on how to develop an institute and giving them the benefit of his experience with the highly successful community outreach efforts of the Michigan Society.
The PFM board responded enthusiastically to Margolis's ideas. By May 1994 it had established a Community Outreach Committee of analytically informed intellectuals who have offered the public insights into normal childhood development, have sponsored analytically oriented discussions of film, and most recently have begun peer supervision groups. These activities are a reminder that psychoanalysts do not hold exclusive rights to psychoanalytic theory and its applications.
Last fall the Study Group cosponsored a symposium on memory with the Minnesota Historical Society. Bornstein, Peter Blos, Jr., and Howard Shevrin, all of the Michigan Society, delivered papers and responded to comments and questions from Historical Society staff members and other participants. The event was so well received that Margaret Keenan, the Study Group's new program chair, is at present negotiating a five-year series of programs with the Historical Society.
Two other major initiatives came out of the discussion with Margolis. First, the Study Group created a class of candidate membership, including anyone accepted for analytic training, and is amending its bylaws to create yet another membership class, this one for students in the psychotherapy training program. The resulting increase in group enthusiasm and good hard questions has been dramatic and operates to the benefit of all concerned. The second move was to rethink the idea of a psychoanalytic clinic and referral service and then to put them both into operation. Dieperink, Pat Torrey, and Tom Folsom, with conceptual and financial help from PFM, made this happen in under six months.
The Study Group hopes to be recognized as a society within the next year. With new audiovisual technologies being used to minimize the need for local candidates to commute to Chicago, as well as to facilitate the development of three additional training analysts, the Study Group's goal is to set up its own institute by the year 2000.