My perspective on the Cleveland dispute discussed by Jacob Arlow [TAP 32/3, page 36] is fundamentally different from his. … Arlow, then and now, fails to see the crucial objective realities. Let me explain why I believe the Board on Professional Standards refused the rhetoric of Arlow and Douglas Bond.
The … vast majority of training analysts, most members, and candidates made up one group. This group included the primary teachers and supervisors. These analysts were actively and productively involved in psychoanalytic work and thought. Clearly, that group should not lose its full training status because two training analysts, several members, and some candidates had decided not to belong to it any longer. Likewise, that group should not have to cope with another training institute set up by only two training analysts. (It is true that Bond wished to appoint a handful of members as training analysts until Board members and others threw this suggestion into shame.) In a community of this size, two institutes would have had a chaotic, damaging effect on psychoanalytic training. The plan for a split and for supervision insisted on by Arlow and Bond for two and a half years made no objective sense.
Perhaps there would have been some appreciation for a split if sound training reasons had been involved. But this event was precipitated by the training analysts electing Anny Katan as chair of the Educational Committee. Bond saw this as intolerable. No analytic principle was involved.
Further, Arlow takes his speculations, however arrived at, too seriously when he writes, “Loyalties of the faculty were dominated by realistic considerations of power and prestige.” His speculations are beside the point; he does not grasp which group had the required number of training analysts, the supervisors, the teachers, the analytic involvement. I believe the Board appreciated these realities.
This potentially tragic event, both for Cleveland psychoanalysis and for the American, is instructive. All of us … can be subject to eruptions and long periods of irrationality.
Marvin Brook
Further commentary on the Cleveland dispute and Jacob Arlow's reply appear on page 37.
—Editor