Much like the legend of “The City”—San Franciscans' favorite epithet for their town—the earliest days of psychoanalysis in the Bay Area have a colorful and suspect reputation. The early analysts were a varied lot. Sanford Gifford, who has researched the group, believes that Alfred Kroeber, noted anthropologist and San Francisco's first analyst, deserves greater recognition. Kroeber, a serious and lifelong supporter of analysis, was deeply influenced by Franz Boas while studying anthropology at Columbia. In 1900 he became curator of the University of California's collections of Indian artifacts. He collaborated with Ishi, the last survivor of the Yahi tribe, and in 1916 published a masterful and encyclopedic book on California Indians. Because of a depression following the death of his wife and an uncertainty about his career, he entered analysis for eight or nine months with Gregory Stragnell (son-in-law of Smith Ely Jelliffe) in New York. He returned to San Francisco in 1918 to practice analysis and two years later wrote the first of two insightful commentaries on Freud's Totem and Taboo. In 1922, deciding he could not manage two careers, he returned fully to the study of anthropology.
Other analysts of the early period were a different breed, Gifford observes. The Reverend Cavendish Moxon, a former Anglican priest who had been analyzed by Rank, settled in San Francisco in the early 1930s. He maintained an analytic practice, published papers, and eventually became an ardent Marxist. Colonel Joseph Thompson, a physician who harbored great hatred toward the medical profession, had trained at the Baltimore-Washington Institute. In the 1930s he set up practice in San Francisco, where he trained two lay analysts who worked with him. He was considered by some a rugged individualist; by others, an eccentric. A renowned breeder of Siamese cats, he also collected 1600 snakes, which he donated to a local zoo. Rudolf von Urban, a physician, had the unfortunate distinction of having been asked by Freud himself, in 1914, to resign from the Vienna analytic group. In 1938 he settled in San Francisco, where he achieved further notoriety in 1940, when he was charged with practicing medicine without a license. In addition to performing psychotherapy, he advised the use of vaginal douches—solely, he claimed, for hygienic purposes.
It was into this melange that several distinguished European analysts arrived, having ended their flight from the developing Nazi terror (see TAP 23/2–3). Bernhard Berliner visited San Francisco in 1935, settling there the following year. He set up a psychoanalytic study group, of which he was soon elected president, but when it was proposed that the group meet in a medical building, Thompson, fearing the dangers of “enemy territory,” resigned along with his two followers.
Siegfried Bernfeld arrived the following year. Daniel Benveniste considers Bernfeld “without question the leading teacher of psychoanalysis in San Francisco.” Bernfeld, born in the Ukraine in 1892, grew up in Vienna, where he studied psychology, was active in socialism and Zionism, and worked for a time as secretary to Martin Buber. He joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1915, practicing analysis and writing extensively over the next decade, and in 1925 was named vice-director of the newly established Vienna Institute. In 1926 he moved to Berlin, where he achieved renown as a charismatic teacher. However, in 1934, with Nazi political power growing ever more oppressive, he and his new wife Suzanne, who had training in both medicine and philosophy, obtained visas and immigrated by way of France and England to San Francisco. Bernfeld, after his arrival in 1937, began lecturing and organized a study group. It is this period that Benveniste considers “the golden age of psychoanalysis in San Francisco.” With Bernfeld taking a leading role, the analysts met in one another's homes, discussed psychoanalysis, and mixed socially. The group contained both Americans and emigrés, physicians and nonphysicians. Many married couples were active: Siegfried and Suzanne Bernfeld, Bernhard and Hildegarde Berliner, Ernst Wolff and Leona Bayer, Egon Brunswik and Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Donald and Jean Macfarlane, and Ernest and Josephine Hilgard. Others in the group included Bernard Kaufman, Emanuel Windholz, Erik Erikson, Anna Maenchen, and Edward Chase Tolman. Its interdisciplinary status was enhanced by the anthropologist Robert Lowie and the physicist Robert Oppenheimer. However, in addition to the members of this circle, one could find listed in the local telephone directory a host of untrained people describing themselves as analysts. (Daryl DeBell still recalls his surprise, at a somewhat later time, at coming upon a listing of “psychoanalysis and high colonic irrigation.”)
The question of lay analysis was a difficult issue in both international and American psychoanalysis. Nathan Hale recounts how it affected San Francisco, where the core of the analytic community had many noted lay analysts, in a particularly painful manner. In 1938 The American passed a resolution against any future training of lay people in the therapeutic use of psychoanalysis. From then on, only physicians could become members of The American, and only societies that had physician members could become component societies.
Several factors had converged. The few societies and institutes that then existed were dominated by physicians who believed that by their training they were best qualified to be analysts. They wished to distance themselves from untrained and poorly trained “analysts” and desired to capture some of the increasing prestige of medicine. In addition, during the Great Depression physicians experienced severe financial difficulties, and state medical societies, in order to limit the supply of services, threw up obstacles to the licensure of emigré physicians. Then, in 1941, perhaps influenced by the activities of untrained, self-proclaimed analysts, the California Board of Medical Examiners ruled that psychoanalysis was a branch of medicine.
Berliner and Bernfeld were the leaders among the San Francisco analysts, similar in position to fellow emigrés Ernst Simmel and Otto Fenichel in Los Angeles. Because the number of analysts on the West Coast was small, beginning in March 1940 the San Francisco and Los Angeles analysts met jointly. The group obtained sponsorship from the Topeka Institute, and applied to become a component
society and institute of The American. Despite their attempts to obtain official status for lay members, The American would not yield on this issue, and in October 1942 San Francisco joined under The American's conditions, becoming the first society/institute west of Topeka. Charter members were Berliner, Macfarlane, Simmel, and Windholz, together with Fenichel, William Barrett, George Gero, Bernard Kamm, Jacob Kasanin, and Douglas Orr. Simmel became the first president. However, in disregard of the rules of The American, the newly founded society granted qualified lay analysts unofficial local status. This group included Bernfeld, Erikson, Maenchen, and Nevitt Sanford. Interestingly, Erikson became the Society's fifth president.
In 1941 Joseph Solomon became the Institutes first candidate. During the war years there were few applications, but at war's end in 1946, thirty-six were received, of which thirty were accepted. That same year, the first three candidates graduated: Malcolm Finley, Pearl Pouppirt, and Mel Somers. In the next decade new analysts arrived from other parts of the country. Uno Helgesson came from Boston, Emmy Sylvester from Chicago, Allan Roos from New York, and Merton Gill from New Haven. Windholz was generally regarded as the leading teacher of clinical psychoanalysis and conducted an outstanding clinical case conference. The first chair of the Education Committee, he was also very active in The American. In the 1950s he became interested in analytic research.
However, within two years of the Institute's founding, Bernfeld was in open and bitter conflict with it. He wanted a less formal organization, one more in line with his training experience in Vienna. To that purpose, in 1944 he began to offer informal analytic training in his home and resigned from the Institute training committee. Six months before his death in 1953, he resigned from the Institute altogether. Benveniste eulogizes him as “a particularly inspired teacher, an eloquent lecturer, and a passionate idealist.”
Mount Zion Hospital was intimately linked to the development of psychoanalysis in San Francisco. Its department of psychiatry was formed in 1939, and organizational meetings of the San Francisco Society were held there in March and April 1942. For the next twenty years, until setting up its own offices across the street, the Society held its meetings in the Hospital auditorium. Robert Wallerstein, who became chief of the department in 1966, calls it “the prep school for the Institute.”
Ernst Wolff, chief of pediatrics from 1927 to 1952, was an ardent and articulate advocate of psychoanalysis. He organized a psychoanalytically oriented child guidance clinic in 1933 and later was instrumental in the hiring of the first chief of psychiatry. Wolff telephoned Jacob Kasanin, then director of psychiatry at Michael Reese in Chicago, to ask if he knew of anyone who might be interested.
Kasanin said he did, and Wolf asked who. Hardly expecting a person of Kasanin's stature to have an interest in the position, he was astounded when Kasanin answered “Me.” Kasanin arrived in 1939 and put together a quality staff that included Berliner, Erikson, Windholz, Solomon, and Sophie Mirviss. When Edward Weinshel arrived at Mount Zion in 1948, he heard an “infinite supply of outrageous anecdotes” about Kasanin as “an energetic, charismatic, and brilliant psychoanalyst who was also capable of being unpredictable and acerbic.” The department was active within the local community and developed the noted Veterans Rehabilitation Clinic of Mount Zion.
Following Kasanin's death in 1946, Norman Reider was appointed chief of psychiatry. Reider had taken analytic training in Topeka and served on the Menninger staff. At Mount Zion he organized an excellent program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Weinshel considers him “a brilliant teacher and charismatic leader.” He became a training and supervising analyst and an active force in the San Francisco Institute, yet he also conducted a low fee (some say no fee) Saturday morning clinic in which he saw the aged, the poor, and the chronic.
Daryl DeBell attended medical school in San Francisco and began his internship there in 1942. He spent four months on a psychiatry rotation at Stanford Medical School and Hospital, where he met Kasanin, who differed from his psychiatric colleagues in urging interns to talk to the patients. Kasanin also hosted periodic evening meetings at his home, where after thoughtful discussion of a paper, dessert and coffee were served. DeBell was drafted into the armed services and, upon his return to the States in 1945, applied to the Institute and was admitted. The application procedure consisted then of an interview with Windholz and a written autobiography.
The Institute was led at the time by Barrett, Berliner, Bernfeld, and Windholz. The latter two, along with Erikson and Maenchen, were considered the outstanding teachers. Other faculty included Sanford, Kasanin, Macfarlane, Paul Homer, Carl Tillman, and Suzanne Bernfeld. DeBell recalls the pleasure of the get-togethers at Windholz's home following Society presentations. DeBell also notes the “sweet and reassuring nature” of Jenny Chiado, the executive secretary.
In 1945, while attending the extension division of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, Haskell Norman encountered a young analyst, Maxwell Gitelson, who advised him not to train in Chicago because of the ongoing controversy there with Franz Alexander. Norman was assigned to San Francisco's Letterman General Hospital in 1947, where he met Windholz, who invited him to the riveting lectures that he, Bernfeld, and Erikson were giving at the Langley Porter Clinic. After obtaining a residency at Langley Porter, Norman applied to the Institute in 1948 and was one of six chosen from among sixty applicants. At this time the selection procedure was formalized: three individual interviews and one group interview.
Norman recalls some teachers as outstanding, but felt overall that consistency was lacking. In retrospect, he realizes that there were only eight training analysts at the time, and that they must have been overwhelmed with responsibilities. Because of the limited number of teachers, classes were begun every other year. However, as graduates joined the faculty, teaching improved. Norman fondly remembers Victor Calef, who even as a senior candidate was an excellent teacher. In 1957 Norman joined the faculty and was appointed to head the newly formed extension division. Some faculty worried that those attending would misrepresent themselves as analysts, but this never happened and the division prospered.
Analysis never made strong inroads at the two San Francisco medical schools, either the University of California or Stanford. George Stephen Johnson, chair of psychiatry at the latter, was overtly hostile, while Karl Bowman, chair at UC, was far from positive. Hildegarde Berliner recalls that in the late thirties three residents at Stanford had to do their psychoanalytic training in secret. Even later, time off for analysis or training was not granted.
However, analysis did make inroads across the Bay at UC-Berkeley, especially at the Institute for Child Welfare. Kroeber was helpful in introducing Erikson to the Yuroh Indians in Northern California. Erikson's subsequent research into Yuroh child-rearing practices provided
material for an important chapter in his first book, Childhood and Society, which established his reputation. Kroeber also supervised the doctoral thesis of noted psychoanalytic anthropologist George Devereux. The Berkeley group published an important volume, The Authoritarian Personality, coauthored by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. But the department of psychology was decimated in the early 1950s when, at the height of McCarthyism, the State of California demanded a loyalty oath from its employees. The majority of the psychology department, led by Erikson and Sanford, refused and resigned in protest.
In 1961 Weinshel became chair of psychiatry at Mount Zion and, with money readily available for innovative programs, the department entered a period of exceptional growth. At one point an active, interdisciplinary psychoanalytic staff taught up to seventy trainees. This same staff helped develop the San Francisco Community Mental Health Centers. Throughout the decades, Hale reports, the San Francisco Society had continued to carry the banner of lay analysis. In particular, the interdisciplinary group at Mount Zion continued to push for full analytic training for qualified nonphysicians. Eventually the “San Francisco Proposal” led to the Gaskill Committee's recommendation that such training be provided by institutes of The American.
Although considered a “conservative” institute in the domain of psychoanalytic theory, San Francisco has been at the forefront of such “liberal” issues as the training of lay analysts and the movement of analysis into the broader community–a legacy from San Francisco's psychoanalytic pioneers of half a century ago.
This article is based on the Oral History Workshop, “Psychoanalysis in San Francisco: 1940 to 1965,” held May 20, 1993 at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Robert Wallerstein chaired the workshop, and Daniel Benveniste, Daryl E. DeBell, Sanford Gifford, Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Haskell F. Norman, Jr., and Edward M. Weinshel were participants. Additional history of psychoanalysis in San Francisco can be found in a special section in TAP 26/1.