In July 1929, Joseph T. Wearn was appointed head of the Department of Medicine at Lakeside Hospital, which became University Hospitals of Cleveland. He had a long-standing interest in the relationship between the mind and body, and in 1937 he created the Division of Psychiatry. Edward O. Harper and Neil McDermott, both psychiatrists, were appointed instructors.
Recognizing the huge emotional cost of World War II, the Greater Cleveland Chapter of the American Red Cross joined with University Hospitals of Cleveland and Western Reserve University to establish a psychiatric clinic for servicemen and -women and their families. The Red Cross funded the clinic for two years. Wearn used this seed money to expand his Division of Psychiatry and to provide expert treatment. He turned to the Office of the Army Surgeon General, where he found the new division head, Douglas D. Bond. Bond's clinical skills and enthusiasm for analysis were widely recognized and praised.
Upon his arrival in Cleveland, Bond, whose analytic training in Boston had been interrupted by the war, resumed his training in Detroit. The Division of Psychiatry consisted of Bond as chief, John Flumerfelt as assistant chief, Edward O. Harper, Neil McDermott, Daniel Badal, Brian Bird, Alfred Bochner, and David Crocker. Badal had received his psychiatric training in Boston; Bird had a strong interest in psychoanalysis from the beginning. Crocker had interned in Cleveland, served as a medical officer in the war, and returned to train in psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
Other early analysands included Samuel Lerner and Walter Musta, both of whom worked at the State Receiving Hospital (now the Cleveland Psychiatric Institute), and Louis Halle, who worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital. Willard Boaz and Marvin Brook had received analytic training at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis in England and returned to Cleveland.
Bond called upon Anna Freud, whom he had met in England, to help him develop his program. She helped him recruit Anny and Mauritz Katan, who left the Netherlands and arrived in Cleveland in August 1946. Analytic training in Detroit was sponsored by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. When the Katans came to Cleveland, they joined Edith and Richard Sterba (who had settled in Detroit in 1939) and Leo H. Bartemeier to form what was unofficially referred to as the “Detroit-Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute,” although its official name was the Detroit Psychoanalytic Institute. However, this institute was disaccredited in 1953 due to the excessive control of the Sterbas and its failure to incorporate graduates into its administrative and teaching functions.
The Cleveland group then obtained sponsorship from the Institute of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, and in 1954 it received provisional approval from the American Psychoanalytic Association to become a training center. The center's letterhead, however, reads “The Psychoanalytic Training Center, School of Medicine, Western Reserve University.”
Bond continued to recruit top-flight individuals. It was an adventurous and exciting time, beautifully articulated in a letter from Elizabeth Daunton to John Dingle, in which she recalled how honored she was to be invited in 1955 to leave her work in London at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic and join the Department of Psychiatry in Cleveland as a child analyst. One of the newly recruited future analysts, William Adams, said that for a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst “Cleveland was like Camelot.”
The first group of candidates consisted of Adams, James Berwald, Robert Furman, Halle, Albert Orfirer, and George Streeter. They were taught by Bird, Bond, Flumerfelt, Mauritz Katan, Musta, and Theodore Suratt of Cleveland and Samuel Guttman, Eli Marcovitz, Paul Sloane, and Robert Waelder of Philadelphia. There was an atmosphere of open exchange between teachers and students. During this time candidates went for weekend seminars to Philadelphia and the Philadelphia analysts came to teach weekend seminars in Cleveland.
In 1959, Bond became Dean of the School of Medicine. That year, he wrote to Sara Bonnett, Chairman of the Board on Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association, requesting that BOPS consider the Cleveland Training Center as an institute. He may have written as dean in order to indicate that the School of Medicine was willing to “sponsor” the new institute. He felt it would be more forward-looking to have the institute sponsored by the School of Medicine than by the psychoanalytic society. This opinion was shared collectively by the analysts in Cleveland — and nationally.
In May 1960, the Training Center in Cleveland provisionally became the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute, loosely sponsored by the School of Medicine and the Department of Psychiatry. In 1963 it was granted full accreditation by The American. Full accreditation freed the Cleveland Institute of its sponsorship from the Institute of the Philadelphia Association. This was a significant moment for two reasons, as stated in the BOPS minutes of May 1, 1963:
Dr. Ashley pointed out that the approval of The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute marks a step in the development of the [American Psychoanalytic] Association, since this is the first time that a group has been approved after having been under the auspices of the Committee on New Training Facilities. The Chair added that this was also the first time that a training facility which had been under the jurisdiction of the Committee on New Training Facilities now passes to the jurisdiction of the Committee on Institutes. This creates a precedent of which the outcome will be most interesting.
Things were looking up. According to Mrs. Jay Krent, her husband, Bird, Bond, Edward Schiff, and others on the faculty were all close friends.
One reason Bond was able to request institute status from The American was because Brian Bird had been designated a training analyst, bringing the number of training analysts to the requisite complement of five. (The other four were Bond, Flumerfelt, and the Katans.) However, in July 1958, Bird resigned from the position of secretary of the training center. In May 1961, he stopped attending Education Committee meetings.
In January 1962, Anny Katan wrote Heinz Hartmann and Edward Kronold asking if they knew an analyst who might consider joining the institute as a training analyst:
Gary Waltz, M.D., writes, “It is now almost 40 years since Mauritz Katan wrote his brief history of psychoanalysis in Cleveland; almost 30 years since the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute was courageously incorporated; and 20 years since J. Krent wrote his own brief history and presented it at an APsaA oral history workshop in Quebec. As a recent graduate of the institute I often heard reference to its separation (‘the split‘) from the Department of Psychiatry at University Hospitals of Cleveland. In my desire to learn about this and other aspects of the institute, I have prepared this history.”
As you know, our Cleveland Institute is a very small one. There are five training analysts, of whom only four are members of the Educational Committee. It is the choice of the fifth not to work with us in the committee, and I don't think I need to go into details of his decision. Certainly, as the situation is now, we very badly need another training analyst.
Slightly more than a year later, the Education Committee asked Bird to communicate the committee's opinion about one of his analysands' progress to the analysand. Bird's reply contrasts the real role of the Education Committee to provide “an active, usable, knowledgeable, influential and responsible relationship to the candidate” with that of the analyst as someone who should simply do analysis. One month later, Bird wrote Flumerfelt:
As the Institute grows, there may be other training analysts besides me who will not be members of the EC but who should have an Institute organization to be a member of. … I have taken the view that you are all working like hell to develop a program that, although I may not agree with what develops, will be better than no development. Also, it is a fact that I am much more critical of something of which I am a part than something of which I am not. For instance, if I were to be a member of the committee, I would surely be fighting with all of you.
Bird's refusal to participate in the committee put the institute in the position of attempting to attract another analyst to Cleveland: Samuel A. Guttman. In a March 8, 1961, Guttman wrote to Bird indicating his willingness to relocate to Cleveland and become chairman of the Education Committee and/or director of the institute:
Doug [Bond] told me the Psychiatry Department is actually part of the Department of Medicine. What is the “position” of Psychoanalysis? Is it a “division” of the Department of Psychiatry? If this is so, what are the pros and cons? I know that rules, regulations, etc., are only needed to settle (!!) differences when they exist and cannot be solved by reason. (I know that there is actually no need for this because of the unique situation in Cleveland). The relationship between the Department of Psychiatry and the Psychoanalytic Institute is not clear to me. Perhaps some words from you will clarify this.
The prospect of bringing Guttman and his desire for organizational clarity to Cleveland may have threatened Bond's desire to control the institute. It is possible that it was Guttman's 1961 letter that threatened Bond and perhaps spurred him to find some way to have the Medical School and/or Department of Psychiatry become dominantly influential over the institute and not merely “sponsor” it.
At least two events foreshadowed the overt dispute with Bond. In a 1968 letter, Furman wrote attorney Malvin Bank: “Flumerfelt stopped being Chairman of the Institute on March 31, 1964, as a result of the first Bond-Katan skirmish in the spring of 1964.” This “first Bond-Katan skirmish” likely related to Bond expecting the Katans to retire at age 65.
Furman's “Bond-Katan skirmish” is approximately, if not exactly, related to a statement made by A. Katan to Jacob Arlow regarding Bond's action on July 6, 1967:
The action Dr. Bond has taken is a definite one. He had discarded any analytic or democratic rules, and I can't see how this could be undone. Dr. Bond has brooded about this action for at least four years so that one can't consider his behavior as being unpremeditated. Therefore, we should look for other solutions. Personally, I believe that only an institute that is completely independent can offer a stable solution.
There had been conflict between Bond and the Education Committee for years. However, it was not until May 1967 that an overt conflict developed. An ad hoc committee submitted a report titled “An Initial Attempt Towards an Evaluation of the Institute.” The committee wished to address the committee's authority to conduct its own affairs, particularly relating to its composition and selection of officers and the retirement of its members. On July 6, at the regular meeting of the Education Committee at which the annual election of officers was to take place, Bond opened the meeting by acknowledging a letter he wrote in 1964 “that hurt the feelings of both Katans.” This presumably related to his desire to retire them. Later in the meeting, Bond read a statement that said, in part:
As in any good academic institution, great latitude is allowed for the freedom of ideas — for the selection of pupils and methods of instruction — but the sponsor [read University] has the responsibility to see to it that organization is proper, and it never relinquishes certain administrative control. I am the administrative officer who is charged with this responsibility. As that administrative officer, I have made a decision: namely, that I will be Chairman of this Educational Committee for the next year and that the Katans will be retired from it with my gratitude for the positive contributions they have made.
After reading his statement, Bond walked out. On July 8, as Professor of Psychiatry, he wrote to both Katans and indicated that their retirement from the institute was effective one week earlier. Reappointment could be made yearly with a vote from the department, a policy Bond never mentioned.
On July 10 Anny Katan (chairman), Krent (secretary), Adams, Bird (who had become active again), Furman, Mauritz Katan, and Musta asserted themselves as the Education Committee and responded with letters to Jacob Arlow, chairman of BOPS, and Fredrick C. Robbins, Dean of the School of Medicine, informing them of Bond's actions and asking for advice. In response, Bond wrote to Krent, Furman, and Bird that unless they supported “the executive action of the University” they should submit their resignations from the department.
A consulting committee from The American was established, consisting of Samuel Ritvo, Sylvan Keiser, and Gerhard Piers. Bond made two proposals as part of a moratorium: No new training analysts would be appointed, and no new training analyses would be started. These terms were accepted, but by October 19, 1967, Anny Katan wrote to Ritvo:
Dr. Bond has utilized the time of the moratorium to seek out and then attempt to influence prospective candidates, candidates still in training, Society members and officers and even influential private citizens, as you are aware. In these interviews, Dr. Bond has repeatedly made derogatory and inflammatory comments about members of the EC.
She also stated that Bond's behavior could be construed “as bringing a unilateral end to the moratorium and its potential negotiations.”
In a letter to Krent on December 4, Ritvo stated:
The Dean [of the Western Reserve School of Medicine] has made it clear that so long as the Institute is in the Department [of Psychiatry], appointments [such as to a committee like the EC] would need to go through the Chairman [of Psychiatry] and the Dean. In a friendly atmosphere with mutual respect on all sides appointments are a formality. … Your group would need to consider whether the ability to initiate appointments free of the influence of the Chairman in the deliberation of the Educational Committee would sufficiently alter the situation to make an Institute in the Department appear feasible to you.
Ritvo recognized how important it was that the institute govern itself and exist in an atmosphere of academic freedom. He was careful, as chairman of the ad hoc committee, not to usurp local, democratic autonomy by telling
the Cleveland group what to do. The Cleveland group decided to separate from University sponsorship, and on December 29, 1967, it became incorporated. Adams, Bird, Furman, Krent, and Musta were the original incorporators, and both the Katans supported this action. In essence, this pitted them against Bond and Flumerfelt.
The society responded positively to the incorporation, and many members wrote letters supporting the action. In a special business meeting of the society on January 17, 1968, Bird, now chairman of the Education Committee, stated:
In groups of this kind, no one person can be permitted to control the decisions of the group, let alone controlling their very lives. Such acts, no matter who makes them, must be stopped and must not recur. It is not always easy to stop such acts. It takes some courage, and I often wonder where we found it. But, above all, it takes group action, concerted and determined group action.
In a January 19 letter to Arlow, Bird noted that this business meeting “was probably the best attended business meeting in Cleveland's history.” The candidates were informed, and their education continued.
The American dissolved the Ritvo committee and formed a second committee chaired by Leo Rangell to investigate the training program. Shortly after incorporation took place, conflicts developed about cash accounts, to whom candidates should pay fees, and who should be in possession of the business and candidate files. Bond discovered that the candidate files had been removed from the department and asked for them back. Bird responded, “The records of the candidates of The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute, as they have been at all times, are in the custody of the Secretary of the Institute.” Further questions were referred to the Malvin Bank, the institute's attorney, who gave crucial help in protecting the institute.
An article in the Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association articulated the issue well: “Had a split in fact occurred, or was the newly incorporated Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute a natural consequence of internal growth?” The Cleveland group maintained the latter position and held that Cleveland was too small to support two institutes. The newly incorporated Institute named two Fellows, Furman and Krent, to BOPS. This, however, was questioned by Lustman and Arlow because the Rangell Committee was still at work. Krent sent a firm and powerful letter to Lustman on February 20 indicating that to question the institute's right to assign Fellows to BOPS stirred up “discord and doubt” and “keeps the pot boiling.” In a follow-up letter to Lustman on March 21, 1968, he wrote:
We therefore wish to emphasize once more that we have never requested the Board on Professional Standards to respond to the election by The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute of Fellows to the Board and the notification contained in my letter to you dated February 1, 1968. No response by the Board was solicited, required or necessary.
On May 9, BOPS passed a motion that the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute, as incorporated, was an accredited institute. An earlier resolution indicating “that a split had in fact occurred in The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute of the School of Medicine, Western Reserve University” was defeated 22 to 18. These issues were worked out before the vote. Martin Stein, Guttman, Brook, Brenda Green, and Bank assisted the incorporated Cleveland group by correcting procedural errors, working on position papers, and circulating them by sliding them under the hotel room doors in the middle of the night.
If no split had occurred, then there was only one institute in Cleveland, and because the incorporated institute was recognized as an accredited institute, it was therefore the only institute in Cleveland, accredited or otherwise. This view, however, was challenged by Bond, who was aided by Arlow, Lustman, and the legal counsel to The American.
By this time, Bird and Krent had been forced to relocate their offices from the Department of Psychiatry. Following the BOPS vote, Bond retaliated by terminating Bird's appointments in the Medical School and University Hospitals because Bird had confined his teaching activities to the institute, which was now outside the University. Krent came to Bird's aid by writing to Robert Morse, President of the University: “Dr. Bond is making certain decisions with respect to faculty appointments on the basis of his displeasure with those who have opposed his actions relative to The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute.” Bond rescinded his action against Bird.
By July 17, Lustman was questioning the issue regarding the split. On July 29, Arlow indicated to Krent that the establishment of the newly incorporated Institute “in no way affected the status of The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute of the School of Medicine of Western Reserve University.” This opinion appeared to be based upon legal counsel by Allan B. Ecker and a misinterpretation of the minutes of the May 1968 BOPS meeting. On July 18, Bond sent a memo to members of the Department of Psychiatry stating that the University-sponsored Institute was continuing. On August 9, Krent wrote to Arlow indicating that he had come to the wrong conclusion. Also in August, Bond informed BOPS that he had designated four new training analysts within The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute, School of Medicine, Western Reserve University.
On November 18, 1968, Bank provided the institute with a legal opinion contradicting Arlow and Ecker. In preparation for the fall meeting of BOPS, Bird prepared a 19-page letter, circulated to all BOPS Fellows, that summarized the issues and opinions of many analysts who had studied “the Cleveland situation.” Stein was extremely helpful in establishing a supportive consensus for the newly incorporated institute, and he was made an honorary member of the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute in 1995. At the December 1968 meeting of The American, BOPS decided there was no split and affirmed the accredited status of the institute. Motions to seat delegates for the School of Medicine group were defeated as was a motion to grant this group status as a provisional institute.
Bond again retaliated by terminating Adams's appointment in the Medical School; it was his desire to drop Bird, Furman, Krent, and Musta as well. By now Bond had attempted to fire 11 members of the Department of Psychiatry. In the spring of 1969, Robbins, Dean of the Medical School, designated John Dingle chairman of an ad hoc committee to investigate the problems in the department. This report resulted in reinstating all members of the department. A month later, Bond submitted his resignation as chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, effective September 1, 1969, “in order to devote more time to teaching and to research on neural and behavioral sciences.” The “Cleveland situation” was thus brought more or less to an end.
An article about the current state of psychoanalysis in Cleveland appears on page 23.