The American Academy of Psychoanalysis was founded in 1956. We are a national organization of 650 medical psychoanalysts (fellows) and, since 1997, a smaller number of psychodynamically oriented psychiatrists, as well as international members and psychiatric and scientific associates. We practice psychoanalysis as a subspecialty of psychiatry. Over 80 percent of us are members or fellows of the American Psychiatric Association (the APA). Many — such as Ian Alger, Harvey Bluestone, Judd Marmor, Silvia Olarte, Allan Tasman, and Academy founders Miltiades Zaphiropoulos and Paul Chodoff—are leaders there as well.
In May 1999 we became an affiliate organization of the APA. We also focus our attention on the needs of dynamic psychiatrists and encourage the education of future dynamic psychiatrists. The Academy has by default become the voice of medical psychoanalysis in the United States. We enjoyed an influx of new fellows following the recent diversification of the American. Many of us, including Sheila Hafter Gray, our president-elect, and myself, the current president, are active in the American as well as in its affiliate societies and institutes.
While we have our own standards for psychoanalytic education by which we judge applicants for Academy fellowship, we do not espouse or promote a particular orientation and have never overseen institutes. We hope our Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis (current editor, Jules Bemporad; future editor, Douglas Ingram) will become an integral part of the enlarged PEP CD-ROM project. Scholars will have ready access to our pioneering contributions in such areas as two-person psychoanalysis, culturally oriented psychoanalysis, the psychology of women, dreams, and the applications of psychoanalytic ideas to psychiatry.
The Psychoanalytic Consortium, with its efforts to create national standards for psychoanalytic training, performs a vital role in healing rifts and promoting interdisciplinary cohesiveness. This was evident at the Academy's January 2000 meeting, “Paradigm Shifts: Further Considerations.” Our opening panel featured the Consortium. Our tradition of encouraging respectful exchange of diverse viewpoints facilitated our being the first group to host the Consortium organizations in presenting their opinions and their concerns from the same platform at the same time. Leon Hoffmann represented the American, Samuel Slipp the Academy, Spyros Orfanos Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, and David Phillips the National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work. Chairing this panel, I was impressed by the diversity of our ideas and the complexity of our tasks.
The first official meeting of the Academy was in Chicago on April 29, 1956. Our spring meeting, May 11–14, 2000, co-chaired by Richard Chessick and Ronald Turco, will return to its “birthplace,” meeting at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Its theme is “What Is the Clinical Practice of Psychoanalysis?”. We will celebrate forty-four years of fulfilling our goals, as set forth in the Academy's mission statement:
To provide a forum for expression of ideas, concepts, and research in psychoanalysis and in the phenomena of individual motivation and social behavior; to encourage and support research in psychoanalysis; to advance the development of psychoanalysis; and to develop communication among psychoanalysts and dynamic psychiatrists with their colleagues in other disciplines in science and in the humanities.
Henry Laughlin of Washington, D.C., initiated an early Academy Movement in 1952. The Academy was founded at a time when many psychoanalysts protested the power and authority of the American and its new Board on Professional Standards. These individuals wished to create an alternative forum for open and relaxed discussion of diverse analytic perspectives. Marmor wrote,
In looking back to the factors that led to the formation of our academy, I think first of the repressive teaching climate that I experienced during my training years between 1937 and 1941. … No deviation from orthodox theory was tolerated and any questioning of it was invariably attributed to idiosyncratic neurotic “resistance.” As candidates, we were forbidden to do any psychoanalytic reading other than our assigned readings and we were not even allowed to come to the monthly scientific meetings of the society because we might hear something that was contradictory to prescribed precepts that would endanger our indoctrination.
The Academy's founders represented the leadership of five analytic groups independent of the American, each with connections to the 1941 situation in which Karen Horney lost her training analyst status. Horney died in 1952 — seven months after attending a meeting in Atlantic City, at the time of the meetings of the American and the APA at which preliminary plans were made to launch our academy.
Horney's daughter, Marianne Eckardt, was also among our founders. She served as president and continues to be a pillar of our organization. The Association for the Advancement of Psycho-analysis was founded by Horney, Clara Thompson, William Silverberg, and others who had left the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1941. They organized the American Institute for Psychoanalysis with support from Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and others. Tensions were high regarding the training of non-M.D.s, which Karen Horney opposed. This resulted in the founding of the William Alanson White Institute. Organizers of the first medical-school-affiliated psychoanalytic training institute, Silverberg, Marmor, Stephen Jewett, and Bernard Robbins of the New York Medical College, participated in the Academy's founding. The
Ann-Louise S. Silver, M.D., is president of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. At Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Maryland since 1976, she teaches at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the Military Residency Program. She is president of the U.S. chapter of the International Society for the Psychological Treatment of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses.
Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research, whose senior members included Sandor Rado, David Levy, Nathan Ackerman, and John Millet, joined the effort. With them came Robert Heath and the Tulane University analytic group. At that time, there was widespread concern that only practitioners in orthodox institutes would be permitted to call themselves psychoanalysts.
On October 7, 1955, Thompson invited a group to meet in her office at the William Alanson White Institute to consider the creation of the Academy, and they appointed Janet MacKensie Rioch formally to invite others to join. Rioch said on that occasion,
There is now present a ferment of ideas, a critical self-appraisal and a questioning of accepted premises by responsible and competent students in the field of psychoanalysis who are not reaching adequately other equally serious and competent students, for mutual discussion, appraisal and stimulation. The process of communication by forum is of value to encourage honest exchange of scientific opinion and observations; to build upon and expand those basic premises which survive critical scrutiny; to have the courage to discard that which cannot be regarded as scientifically valid in the light of our present knowledge. Research and academic discussion should not be impeded by the complex issues of licensing authority over teaching programs. It is within the best traditions of scientific inquiry that we approach the study of human behavior with modesty and with receptive but critical curiosity. This approach includes the precious right to be wrong.
At the Academy's next organizational meeting, Rioch began, “I think it is important to state that there is no thought and no intent in planning the organization of this meeting to start something that is as a rival to the American Psychoanalytic Association.” Walter Bonime wrote in the Academy's journal in 1996, “The significance of our Academy lies in its extensive and perpetual stimulus for intensive search into the evaluation of each patient, each concept and each of one's own responses in a professional context.”
Of the seventy-six charter members, all were prominent medical psychoanalysts with a fierce dedication to academic freedom. Twenty-two were women. In addition to those already mentioned, their ranks included Hilde Bruch, Stella Chess, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Leon Salzman, John Schimel, Edith Weigert, Earl Witenberg, and Lewis Wolberg. The Academy's first few presidents were Janet MacKensie Rioch, Jules Masserman, Silverberg, Millet, Frances Arkin, Roy Grinker, Rado, and Franz Alexander.
The Academy does not oversee institutes. Thus we were not named in the 1980s lawsuit by the American Psychological Association against the American Psychoanalytic Association for restraint of trade. Because we do not wield power or control people's professional destinies, we can be relaxed together. When we meet twice yearly to present our papers, or to participate in study groups or committees, we do so with minimal trepidation and much conviviality.
I delivered my first paper at a national meeting at the Academy in 1985 and applied for membership out of gratitude for this opportunity. The program chair, Myron (Buddy) Glucksman, liked my talk and invited me to join the program committee as its Washington representative. At that committee meeting, he mentioned that the Academy was planning a one-day symposium in Washington and asked for ideas. I proposed “Psychoanalysis and Psychosis.” The, group approved enthusiastically. I had come to Dallas to present a paper and left as the chair of a symposium, having made many new friends — a typical Academy welcome.
As we increase our activity at the APA, we represent the value of dynamic approaches, advocate on issues of confidentiality, and contribute to the APA Guidelines. We greatly enjoyed our teamwork with the American at the recent APA meeting in Washington, where some 700 people attended the symposium we co-sponsored. We look forward to a similarly invigorating experience at our co-sponsored symposium at the upcoming Chicago APA meeting. We welcome responses to our calls for papers from all professionals interested in psychoanalysis. For more information about us, please visit our Web site at , or e-mail our office: .
Feel free to call or visit our office at 47 East 19th Street, 6th floor, New York, New York, 10003; 212-475-7980.