In order to learn the lessons that experience teaches, every organized group has an obligation to study and to try to understand its history. Otherwise important lessons and guidelines for the future may be missed. There is the temptation for the victors in any struggle to romanticize and mythologize their history by omitting significant facts from the record. In large measure, this is true of the article by Gary Waltz [TAP 32/1], “Growing Pains in the Cleveland Institute,” a review of events characterized by serious omission of relevant information. It thus presents an inadequate, distorted picture of the issues concerning the “Cleveland dispute.” Fortunately, some of the elements that contributed to the problem are not likely to be repeated again within the American Psychoanalytic Association.
As Waltz points out, originally the Detroit and Cleveland Institutes were part of one body. In each instance, the center for the new training facility consisted of a married couple — a pair of outstanding European analysts — and one, sometimes two, other “local” training analysts. In Detroit, the institute centered around the Sterbas; in Cleveland, around the Katans.
These were arrangements fraught with potential difficulties. Things went very badly in the Detroit Institute. After investigation by the committee from the Board on Professional Standards of The American, the recommendation was made to disaccredit the training of the Detroit Institute. Viewed in retrospect, this decision was a great mistake. It imposed grievous hardship on the candidates whose training was interrupted in midstream and who, under great difficulties, had to look about the country for other institutes where they could complete their training. The cost to the candidates in time, effort, and money was egregious. Because of the unhealthy atmosphere regarding professional standards that prevailed at the institute, a burden was imposed upon the candidates that was not of their making.
In the case of the Cleveland Institute, certain difficulties were built into the situation from the beginning. These were overlooked because of certain advantages that accrued to members of the institute's faculty. I learned about some of these elements shortly after I was elected Chairman of the Board on Professional Standards in 1967 but before I actually took office and presided over the first meeting of the Board.
It was clear that the situation in Cleveland was a crisis waiting to explode. There were two competing centers of power. On one side, there were the Katans, respected pioneers in the history of psychoanalysis, who had analyzed many, if not most, of the leading figures at the institute. On the other side, there was Douglas Bond, the dynamic and well-connected chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Case Western Reserve College of Medicine. Through his influence and power, most of the leading figures of the institute had received attractive appointments, including salaries and professional office space, in the Department of Psychiatry. In fact, most of the analysts' offices were in close proximity to each other, down the same corridor, so that it was not unusual for an analysand to leave his analyst's office after an analytic session and to join him in another room a few minutes later at a meeting of the Educational Committee of the Institute. The loyalties of the faculty were dominated by realistic considerations of power and prestige and, of course, by transference allegiances.
By this time in the history of psychoanalysis, such close social, professional, and personal involvement between analyst and analysand was known to be highly undesirable for a training program. This was obviously one of the lessons learned from the Detroit situation. Clearly the practices and the atmosphere at the Cleveland Institute were antithetical to the accepted principles and standards of psychoanalytic education. It is important to note that — unlike the case in other institutes where there have been factional disputes — issues of scientific theory and professional orientation were not part of the dispute. Antagonism between the two camps, one clustering around Bond, the other around the Katans, had been brewing for a long time.
Shortly before the first meeting of BOPS over which I was to preside as chair, I was visited by both parties in the Cleveland dispute. Each complained bitterly about the behavior of the opposite side, whom they accused of professional malfeasance and even criminal behavior. (These accusations were later publicly voiced at a meeting of the Board.) In the interest of maintaining the integrity of the training situation, I made only one request of both parties: not to compromise the training analyses of the candidates by involving them in discussion of the ongoing conflict within the institute.
Not three weeks passed before I learned that each side had called in each candidate individually and had laid out before each one its own version of the conflict. The accusations were mainly personal in nature.
Martin Stein of New York had been my immediate predecessor as chair of BOPS, and Brian Bird of Cleveland was Sy Lustman's predecessor as secretary. Both Stein and Bird were well aware of the developing crisis in the Case Western Reserve/Cleveland Institute, but neither informed me of the problems when I assumed the chairmanship. (Bird ran against me for the position but lost.)
In Waltz's account, it would appear that Lustman and I were acting as individual partisans in a power dispute between the factions of the Cleveland Institute. There is, in fact, only a passing reference to me as the Chairman of the Board. The officers and members of the Coordinating Committee took the position that the best way to proceed was to declare that a split had occurred in the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute.
When the Board was about to begin considering the issues in Cleveland, it was confronted with a totally unexpected turn of events. A member of the Katan-Bird group rose to call attention to the fact that according to the by-laws of the Association, any decision of the Board required a two-thirds vote. Since for years the Board had been doing business according to majority rule, this information came as a complete surprise. We searched the by-laws and, to be sure, the two-thirds vote requirement was on the books. It had never been rescinded. The result was parliamentary paralysis. Since neither side of the dispute
Jacob A. Arlow, M.D., served as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and as chair of the Board of Professional Standards. He was also a member of the Committee on New Training Facilities and chair of the Committee on Psychoanalytic Education.
could muster a two-thirds margin, any motion for action inevitably would be defeated. Nothing could be passed. This situation persisted for the next two and a half years, essentially stalemating the work of the Board and guaranteeing no progress in the resolution of the educational issues in Cleveland.
It was in this way that the issue of a “split” became central in the controversy, and this is the main point that Waltz's account misses entirely. After all, the major faction of the Institute, the Katan-Bird group, was free to disengage itself from Bond et al. In fact, that is exactly what they did. Their right to do so was never challenged, as Sam Ritvo's communication indicated. (Ritvo was chair of a special committee appointed by the Coordinating Committee of the Board to help mediate the dispute in Cleveland.) They retained that right, split or no split.
So what was the issue? Why did the officers of the Association and the Board press for viewing the turn of events as a split? There was one important practical consequence of a split. According to the rules of the Board, when a split occurred, each faction was considered a new training facility and would therefore fall under the supervision of the Committee on New Training Facilities (CNTF). That committee would be responsible for supervising, assisting, and overseeing the professional educational practices of the Institute. This was truly the central issue. Clearly, the Bond group was not viable, but the Katan-Bird group refused to have anyone help, oversee, or look into its educational practices.
To those of us interested in preserving and advancing psychoanalytic education, using the expertise of the members of CNTF seemed the best solution to the problems confronting the new Cleveland Institute. In this respect, I and other officers were guided by the experience gained in connection with the organization of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Several years earlier, after the Detroit Psychoanalytic Institute was disaccredited, the Board had asked the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to sponsor and supervise a training institute in the Detroit area. The New York Institute accepted this responsibility and appointed a committee to carry out the task: Phyllis Greenacre, Ruth Loveland, and myself as chair. While sponsoring a new institute and supervising and guiding an established institute are not identical, the Michigan Institute experience impressed us with how helpful the support and advice of an outside agency could be in such cases. The Katan-Bird group, however, wanted none of this. With the two-thirds rule in effect, the work of the Board was stalemated. In the end, the other officers and I agreed that there was no further purpose to an unproductive, endless stand-off, and we let the Cleveland Institute go its own way, without help or advice from the Board.