The decision to split the Philadelphia Society and Institute occurred in less than half an hour: Forty-five years later, its effects are still felt. Spurgeon English described to Alexis Burland his recollections of the fateful meeting on the top floor of the Medical Tower Building in late 1949. “I remember distinctly this night when Dr. Biddle and Dr. Maeder and Dr. Pearson and I sat around a card table and the momentous event took place. Dr. Biddle raised some objections again, apparently pointedly enough that Dr. Maeder said, ‘Well, apparently you don't approve of the way we analyze or what we teach.’ And Dr. Biddle said, ‘No, we don't,’ speaking for himself and Dr. Pearson. Well,’ Dr. Maeder said, ‘what shall we do about it?’ And Dr. Biddle said, ‘I think you should resign.’ And Dr. Maeder said, being a lawyer — I think that had much to do with his ready answer — he said, Well, I do not choose to resign and I do not think we need to resign. We're all members of the Society and Institute, and if you don't like the way we do things, then I think it's up to you to resign and form your own institute.’ And Dr. Biddle sort of assented and said, ‘Well, we will.’”
The Philadelphia split occurred at the end of a decade of divisiveness — both theoretical and personal — that scarred American psychoanalysis. Acrimonious divisions had occurred in New York and in Washington-Baltimore, and tensions were approaching the breaking point in Los Angeles. It was all the more poignant in Philadelphia, because the principals in the split were the same analysts who had founded the group in the late 1930s.
Homer Curtis, recounting the early history, cites George Smeltz as the first psychoanalyst in Pennsylvania. Smeltz trained in Europe, practiced in Pittsburgh, and became a member-at-large of The American in 1920. He later moved to Philadelphia, joining Horace L. Carncross, the city's first analyst. Carncross had been introduced to Freud's ideas by Daniel McCarthy, who attended Freud's seminars in Vienna in 1898-1899. Following World War I, Carncross entered analysis with Franz Alexander in Berlin, later working with Smith Ely Jelliffe in New York. He began practicing psychoanalysis in Philadelphia in the early 1920s but died in 1928.
Analysis received an impetus in 1931, when Hermann Nunberg arrived from Vienna. Nunberg was invited by Earl Bond, director of the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, to teach psychoanalysis and provide psychoanalysis to the psychiatric staff. Although after a year Nunberg decided to move to New York, his brief presence sparked a local interest in analysis.
Sidney Biddle, LeRoy Maeder, and O. Spurgeon English went to Europe for analysis and training. Upon their return they, together with Smeltz, formed the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society in October 1937. Biddle became the first president. This nucleus was joined by Gerald Pearson, G. Henry Katz, Kenneth Appel, and Lauren Smith, and the group was accepted as a constituent society of The American on May 7, 1939. Robert Waelder, George Sprague, Herbert Herskovitz, and John Eichholtz joined soon afterward.
The Institute was recognized in 1940, and two years later Morris Brody became its first graduate. A hiatus occurred during World War II, and the next to graduate, Robert Bookhammer and Paul Sloane, did not do so until 1946. After the war, many physicians leaving the service sought psychoanalytic training. Apparently, it was during this time that the seeds of the split were sown. The causes, perhaps never clear at the time, have become more obscure by rumors, discretion, and time.
Burland studied the minutes of the institute's education committee and discerned certain “premonitions” of the break. In June 1945, Biddle published “On the Necessity of Having Standards for the Training of Students and Some Suggestions Pertaining Thereto,” the first of a series of lengthy reports on the topic of “proper” and “orthodox” analysis. He wrote of “rivalries” and “factionalism” but spelled out nothing. Burland believes that for reasons of tact and confidentiality “the issues under debate are never fully explicated except in the most general of terms — such things as the maintenance of analytic neutrality, the importance of psychosexual theory, and so on.” Leo Madow calls the time the “era of the pure analyst” and cites a proposal by Henry Katz from the 1947 minutes. Katz advised developing a formal procedure to have members accept a body of psychoanalytic knowledge (i.e., infantile sexuality, repression, resistance, and transference): “Members violating this procedure will forgo membership.” The issues centered on maintaining standards of psychoanalytic technique in order to develop and preserve transference. Points of contention were the number of weekly sessions, contact with the training analyst outside the analysis, and giving advice to the analysand or to the marital partner.
Morris Brody, also interviewed by Burland, noted that because of the demand for analytic training there were too many students for too few teachers. Analysts practiced from eight in the morning to eleven at night. Rules would be bent, and Brody criticized the lack of “gumption” among senior analysts to limit the number of students an analyst could treat. Brody decried “the 301-hour analysis” — that is, some analyses presumably ended the moment the 300-hour minimal training standard of The American was met. Supervision often stopped at the required fifty hours. Brody regretted that the specific issues, such as too many analysands or rumors of socialization, were never openly addressed.
Brody considered another factor to be that English was a very social person who had a national reputation. This led to feelings of jealousy. “Backbiting and rumors filtered to candidates, who would tell tales to their analysts, heightening tensions,” Brody recalled.
English reflected on the fateful meeting at the Medical Tower. “All this came as a surprise, and everything took place so fast. I'd almost say that within twenty minutes to half an hour it was all over, and that was too fast to decide such an important issue. But we were young, proud, and full of vinegar. So there was a gauntlet thrown down. Maeder picked it up, replied, and Biddle said, ‘Okay, we will form our own institute,’ you see. And with the implication that, of course, Well make it better than yours.' And so we were at war in a way.” The faculty was divided. Biddle, Katz, Pearson, and Smeltz left to form the Association, which became an affiliate society in January 1950 and was fully recognized by The American three months later. Brody, English, Maeder, and Leon Saul remained with the Society. Waelder stayed in both groups until he became president of the Association in 1953.
The candidates were taken by surprise. At the time the split occurred, Madow was in his second year and president of the candidates association, then forty-one students strong. He does not recall that the candidates were called together and the split discussed. They just learned of it. But alignment was obvious: Candidates went with their training analysts.
Madow mentions a discussion with William Wermuth, who was elected president of the Association candidates, about how to split the seventy-four dollars in the treasury. Although the Society had more candidates, he conceded to Wermuth's demand that the funds be divided
equally. He felt that the group who left “had the word,” and that those remaining now had to prove they were better.
Herman Belmont had completed his training by 1950. Because Biddle was his analyst, Belmont joined the Association. However, he continued friendships with former classmates. Belmont only learned of the reasons for the split from a series of articles in the Bulletin of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis. He considers that the differences between the groups were matters more of style than of substance. For example, he recalls sailing with Eugene Baum, his good friend from the Society. Belmont was “the purist” and would await a breeze if becalmed, while after a couple of hours Baum would say, “Turn on the damn motor.” William O'Brien, about to begin training at the time of the split, still recalls the excitement about analysis in Philadelphia in the early 1950s. All five medical school psychiatry departments in the area were either largely psychoanalytic or partial to analysis in their orientation. Psychiatric residents planned personal analysis and considered taking analytic training. Patients welcomed the recommendation for analysis. There were thirty or forty candidates in O'Brien's first-year class at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. Like most candidates, O'Brien knew little of what was happening within the institute.
In 1953 David Sachs asked for a recommendation for an analyst at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychiatry. He was unaware that a split had occurred, but noticed “an oppressive silence about certain kinds of recommendations.” Thinking back to his candidacy in the Association, he compares the situation to that of children of divorce. The split was a prohibited topic of conversation. Because there was little actual knowledge of the issues, fellow candidates developed theories to account for the separation. There was little formal communication between the two groups, and prejudices developed. Rumor and trivialities became proof of the rightness of candidates' views. Sachs experienced the intensity of these feelings when he casually mentioned to a friend that he had arrived at his analytic session with Waelder so chilled from a one-hour motorcycle ride to his session that Waelder had given him a cup of soup. He found himself in the middle of a huge controversy over whether Waelder was now “totally unorthodox.”
The newly developing child analytic programs were also victims of the split. In 1950 Margaret Mahler began a child analytic program with the Society. Selma Kramer recalls that Mahler's teaching adhered for the most part to Anna Freud's ideas. It was only later in training that Mahler taught about her own research on the stages of early development. Meanwhile, at the Association, Pearson attracted child analytic teachers Berta Bornstein, Jenny Waelder-Hall, Mary O'Neill Hawkins, Lydia Dawes, and Elizabeth Geleerd. The two groups were said to have developed differing orientations: The Society was reputed to have a greater preoedipal focus, while the Association centered more on the oedipal. Kramer notes that there were informal contacts, as candidates from the Association would query Institute candidates about separation-individuation theory.
Robert Prall, who trained in the adult and child program of the Institute/Society, became director of child psychiatry training at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute and worked with candidates and graduates of both programs. Prall considers the split “an artificial thing” and thinks that both institutes have produced a tremendous number of fine adult and child analysts. Belmont always regretted leaving his many friends who remained in the Society. Although he maintained contact, he finds it a “pity that we couldn't really do a great deal together in our child analytic work.”
Reconciliation was slow. The participants in the split remained in power in both the Society and the Association, and new candidates in both groups tended to take their elders' disagreements as their own. There were no joint meetings. However, as Belmont suggests, many candidate friendships survived the split. Members of the two groups often worked together harmoniously in the same medical facilities. Involvement with The American also served to promote relationships. And as time passed, those directly involved in the split retired to the background.
Sachs reflects on what counteracted his distortions of the Society. Many of his friends were in the Society, and he discovered that he had much in common with them. His rethinking was enhanced at meetings of The American, where he met analysts from throughout the country and grew to appreciate the diversity of analytic thought. However, when he first introduced the idea of joint meetings to the leadership of the Association, he felt that he was considered quite a radical by the participants in the split.
Henry Kleiner was a Fellow at Penn in the early 1950s and the only analyst there from the Association. He experienced no conflict with staff belonging to the Society and praises the friendly atmosphere. He still is taken aback by an incident when he asked a colleague for a lift home. The colleague replied that he couldn't oblige him, that he was driving his analyst home and might have a session in the car. However, in retrospect Kleiner realizes that in both camps were analysts with feet of clay.
In 1955, after analytic training at the New York Institute and a sojourn in Boston, Paul Ecker arrived to teach at University Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the Association, not for ideological reasons, but because he knew Waelder. He, too, developed cordial relations with members of the Society with whom he worked.
Belmont could not recognize faults attributed to the Society in the members he knew. As he rose in seniority in the Association, he raised the question about getting back together. He believes that Baum also brought up these questions in the Society. Belmont credits, among others, Homer Curtis of the Association and Baum of the Society, with establishing the liaison meetings, which in turn led to a closer working relationship. William O'Brien became an important supporter of this collaboration as a representative of the Society after Baum's death.
Conflict abatement progressed in the 1970s, and by the end of the decade more focused efforts were underway. A conciliatory attitude on both sides has led to recent joint scientific sessions, courses cotaught by members of both groups, and a joint dinner-dance. Despite current difficulties finding patients and recruiting candidates, the two groups continue to seek the advantages of cooperation. Ecker believes that however worthwhile the reunification of the two groups, the sticking point is not ideology or personality but the personal investment in two separate organizations.
Years after the split, English said, “I wouldn't hesitate today to be quite willing to say, ‘Look, write out your rules, let me look at them, and I think we will be able to see eye-to-eye on it and won't need to split.‘” Bernard Cowitz, who began analytic training in 1954, realizes that the particular training program was not that important, and laments, “The human tragedy, I think … was that we were deprived of a lot of friendships. There were remarkable people in the older groups, and after a while some of us got to know only half of them, and not the other half.” Prall adds, “I really see very little difference between my friends and trainees in the two groups…. I've heard presentations and rubbed elbows with Herm Belmont and others from the Association, and I find there's practically no difference in our understanding of child analytic technique and procedures, as well as adult technique.” O'Brien wonders if “a purpose may have been served at that time with the split, in that the differences were tested in a way that may not have come about without such a divorce. We have found such differences which were important, and which were inconsequential in the light of today's knowledge and our experience over the last thirty or forty years.” Curtis adds, “The more we have the kind of collaboration that gradually and imperfectly has been built up, I think the more the work and the name of
psychoanalysis will be well-represented in Philadelphia.” Kramer concludes: “I think both· groups have members we are very proud of. I think both groups have members we wish didn't exist, but, you know, that happens too. We're human. I'm so glad we have become closer over the years.”
This article is based on the Oral History Workshop “Psychoanalysis in Philadelphia: 1937 to the Present,” held May 19, 1994, at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Participating were J. Alexis Burland, Homer C. Curtis, Paul G. Ecker, Leo Madow, William R. O'Brien, and David M. Sachs Selma Kramer was chair. Further history of psychoanalysis in Philadelphia can be found in TAP 28/2.
Corrections
Sylvia L. Ginsparg, a member of the IPAwho was elected to membership in The American, had her name misspelled in the last issueofTAP In the Honors section, typos appeared in the names of Harold P. Blum and Martin Wangh. We apologize for these errors.