Two historic meetings took place in New York City this winter. The first, on January 13, 1998, was Arthur Zitrin's presentation of his paper “The Freud-Frink-Brill Relationship: A Puzzling Episode in the History of Psychoanalysis.” The meeting was the first scientific meeting jointly sponsored by the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine (founded by Sander Rado, who left the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1943).
In his presentation, Zitrin discussed certain events in the history of psychoanalysis during 1920–25. Horace Weslak Frink, an early practitioner of psychoanalysis, was elected president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society because of the support of Freud, who preferred him to Brill. Shortly after assuming office, Frink suffered a psychotic episode and had to resign the presidency. He was later divorced by a former patient of Freud, whom he had married with Freud's encouragement.
Zitrin's paper was discussed by Harold Blum, a member of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. This society was founded by a group of analysts who left the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1950.
The second historic New York meeting of the winter was the PEP CD-ROM symposium, “The Seduction Hypothesis, 100 Years Later: Trauma, Fantasy, and Reality Today,” which was held at Mt. Sinai Hospital on February 28 and March 1 of this year. The symposium was “sold out” (more than 600 attended). Sponsors of this meeting included the American Psychoanalytic Association and the William Alanson White Society. The founders of the William Alanson White Society split from the New York Society in the 1940s; by the early 1950s, they had severed their connection with the American Psychoanalytic Association as well.
Observers of the psychoanalytic scene have commented on a trend toward scientific collaboration in step with the movement for professional collaboration which is central to the spirit of the Psychoanalytic Consortium. Are we witnessing a shift from a long history of coming apart to a new climate of coming together?
Arnold Richards, M.D., is the editor of JAPA. He is a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, the New York Freudian Society, and the Psychoanalytic Association of New York.