For fifty-seven years, having graduated more than 550 psychiatrists and psychologists — and currently boasting 325 active alumni, a building that is an historical landmark, and a substantial endowment — the White Institute has stood as the premier representative of the “loyal opposition” to the psychoanalytic establishment in the United States. A multitude of forces contributed to the institutes success, but certain aspects of its structure have especially facilitated its ability to respond to change while maintaining a singular analytic identity.
In the early 1940s Clara Thompson supported Karen Horney's departure from the New York Psychoanalytic Society. The decisive split (as documented by Eisold in 1998 and discussed by Richards in 1999) involved Horneys having been removed from the society's teaching faculty. Not long after, personal difficulties between Horney and Erich Fromm led Fromm to join Thompson and others in founding the William Alanson White Institute while Horney started a new school bearing her own name.
Thompson called upon Harry Stack Sullivan, her longtime colleague, to provide a conceptual center for the new venture. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Janet and David Rioch were recruited from Washington to form the core faculty. Thus a group of independent minded practitioners joined in an experiment in psychoanalytic education. They formed an unusual alliance, based more on respect for freedom of thought than on unanimity of perspective. What they did agree on was a humanistic concern to alleviate suffering, a fervent commitment to psychoanalysis as a response to human pain, an active political desire to redefine social structures to support individualism and personal freedom, and an abiding interest in the manifold interactions between individuals and their interpersonal environment. This shared vision is crucial in understanding the institute's past and future.
The new training center affiliated with the Washington-Baltimore Institute, and the first graduates were credentialed through that group (and thereby became APsaA members). Before long, however, the American invoked the “geographic rule,” dissolving the long-distance sponsorship. The White Institute then applied to the APsaA for independent membership. The application was withdrawn when the head of the site visit team, Merton Gill, advised that the inclusion of Ph.D.s would never be sanctioned.
The heresy of our founders did not involve unraveling the interwoven threads of analytic training. Candidates at White receive a thorough grounding in the teachings of Freud and his followers. They undergo intensive personal analysis and supervision — requirements that parallel and in some ways exceed those of the American. In terms of the divisive and less-than-scientific “numbers game,” White accepts a minimum of three sessions per week for personal analysis and control cases, while requiring four rather than three supervised patients.
Given this commitment to excellence, White supports the movement toward credentialing to ensure that practitioners will be fully qualified. In the same vein, we recognize the importance of a rigorous, non-anecdotal empirical study of the parameters of analytic training as well as treatment, and we advocate jointly sponsored scientific investigation of these matters.
Of the founding group, Fromm (a psychologist-analyst trained in Berlin) was the most committed to political activism and the least comfortable with organizational structure. His influence flowed from personal magnetism as well as the force of his ideas, which expanded in the best oral tradition. Interestingly, Fromm's impact on our analytic community remained strong although his work was not included in the institute's curriculum until quite recently.
The other founders, notably Sullivan and Fromm-Reichmann, employed analytic ideas in treating hospitalized patients. These efforts broke with prevailing theory about psychopathology and involved technical modifications that were labeled heretical. Such experiments led interpersonalists to discover the implications of countertransference as early as the 1950s. They also expanded analytic methods to a broad range of patients, anticipating later “discoveries” concerning borderline and narcissistic phenomena. Work with such nontraditional patients illustrated how intense analytic scrutiny could sometimes have negative impact; taking a more active analytic stance demonstrated how a meaningful analytic process could be achieved and resolved with fewer than four or five weekly sessions. In this regard it might be noted that Thompson had traveled to Budapest to be analyzed by Ferenczi and was deeply impressed by his personal and professional risk-taking as well as his openness to new methods.
A spectrum of analytic stars emerged from this early period, including Ernst Schachtel, Silvano Arieti, Salvador Minuchin, Rollo May, Erwin Singer, Ed Tauber, Jack Schimel, Ralph Crowley, Ruth Moulton, David Schecter, Harry Bone, Milt Zaphiropoulos, and Geneva Goodrich. Later theorists of note who graduated from the institute include Ed Levenson, Jerome Singer, Ben Wolstein, Emmanuel Ghent, Arthur Feiner, and Lawrence Epstein. In 1972, Rose Spiegel and Max Deutscher started the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis (currently available on the PEP CD-ROM) as a forum for interpersonal and other alternative psychoanalytic views.
From the very beginning, the personal characteristics of the founders translated into inventive professional activities and innovative organizational structures. For example, White was among the first institutes to establish a low-cost clinic for both psychoanalytic treatment and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. Students were (and still are) supervised in psychotherapy at the end of their analytic training, in order to accommodate the differing needs of specific patients. This clinic is currently a model for psychoanalytic centers throughout the country, embodying the application of analytic techniques to diverse populations and offering opportunities for candidates to finance training and for graduates to expand their skills. From its inception the institute created opportunities to study analytic ideas for members of related professions including teachers, health workers, dentists, and clergy. The founder of
Marylou Lionells, Ph.D., is completing her second term as director of the White Institute, where she is a training analyst and teaches in the required curriculum. She is also on the faculty of the Independent Analytic Centers in Seattle, Oklahoma City, and Minneapolis.
psychiatric nursing, Henrietta Peplau, was an early participant in one of these programs. White pioneered in presenting psychoanalytic ideas to the public, creating awareness of the potentials of analytic treatment as both a liberating and a healing experience.
Started by a group of splendid iconoclasts, the institute was from its inception propelled into uncharted waters, which were navigated in very effective ways. It accepted its first candidates in 1943 and has enjoyed fifty-three consecutive graduations; applications remain substantial. White has a solid tradition and a sturdy economic base. As is true for most psychoanalytic centers, many of its graduates remain deeply involved with the institute and volunteer to maintain its programs. Of the 325 members of the graduate society, about 170 participate as faculty.
The institute's long history has produced professionals working in a broad range of college and university programs, mental health centers, and other institutions throughout the United States and around the globe. At one time virtually every major academic and hospital program in New York was directed or staffed by White graduates. Graduates were instrumental in founding the Academy of Psychoanalysis, the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, and the Psychoanalytic Consortium. White graduates were also involved in starting other analytic centers including the post-doctoral programs of Adelphi and New York Universities, the Westchester Center, the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy, the Manhattan Institute, the Colorado Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, and the Northwest Center for Psychoanalysis. This wide dispersion of alumni is one source of the profound yet largely unacknowledged influence of interpersonal theory, bearing out Leston Havens' often-quoted remark that Sullivan is the major underground influence in American psychoanalysis.
I have emphasized the intellectual tradition at White because this underpinning in interpersonal theory provided an essential body of knowledge concerning the two-person model, which has emerged as the foundation for post-modern psychoanalytic theory. The interpersonal focus on the individual within the socio-cultural matrix fostered study of the analytic dyad, the real relationship, the pervasiveness of countertransference, the narrative quality of reconstruction, the difficulty of defining truth or reality, the multiplicity of self, the reconceptualization of the unconscious, and so on. Indeed, among the White Institute's graduates are some of the seminal theorists fueling the current revolution in psychoanalytic thought. Jay Greenberg, Steven Mitchell, Edgar Levenson, Darlene Ehrenberg, Donnel Stern, and Phillip Bromberg, to name a few, have achieved international acclaim for their contributions.
Perhaps paradoxically, our concern about the vagaries of the human condition fostered an appreciation of heterodoxy while at the same time strengthening convictions about the centrality of experiential input. Although often defined as the home of interpersonal psychoanalysis, White takes pride in its broad curriculum, its acceptance of a diversity of viewpoints, and its tolerance for a range of techniques and practices. This intellectual tradition prepared us for the current revolution in theory and practice, allowing us to flexibly expand while retaining core values.
How does an analytic organization accommodate differences without becoming divided? The institute's founders were well aware that political concerns often dominated, and sometimes decimated, psychoanalytic societies. Thompson wished to devise a structure that might attenuate the pressures of personal interests. White was created as an independent non-profit center, governed by a board of trustees selected from an informed lay community. To maintain a firm connection between the institute and its alumni, the faculty is selected from the graduate society, but administration remains the province of the institute as a separate professional entity. This unique system has successfully protected the internal integrity of the training process.
The organization was especially tested in the 1960s. From the institutes beginning, M.D.s and Ph.D.s were co-equals in the training program, although they received different certificates. The recommendation that they be awarded identical credentials carried the potential for explosive divisiveness. Eventually the trustees affirmed the principles upon which the institute was founded and, although a handful of members resigned, the training program remained intact. Currently, White is also open to doctoral-level social workers.
The interdisciplinary background of candidates has had a vital impact on the institute, fostering a rich dialogue between medical and psychological viewpoints on the human condition, challenging to students and faculty alike. Such diversity enlarges perspectives, questions assumptions and traditions, and enlivens training. White is one of the few venues that has long ensured these issues a consistent focus.
For the greater part of our long history, the board of trustees has been a quiet presence. Trustees defer to professionals concerning educational matters, only springing into action when the possibility of crisis, political or financial, internal or external, has appeared. The board has bridged factions, opened channels for dialogue, and maintained our core mission and identity. It has also raised money! Some nodal points of intervention included purchasing a building, expanding services into non-traditional areas, facilitating involvement of younger graduates in the training process, and insuring orderly transitions. The board also sponsored new analytically informed programs, making White the first psychoanalytic center to initiate a program in Organizational Consultation. In 1999 we graduated the inaugural class of professionals treating children and adolescents.
To keep pace with the electronic revolution, we have experimented with interactive TV and initiated a series of mini-courses over the Psychoanalytic Connection, a computer-based communication network (started by one of our graduates). We have also devised intensive seminars on interpersonal ideas offered to visiting foreign nationals. Several years ago, more than 900 mental health professionals attended a conference celebrating the institute's fiftieth anniversary. True to our heritage, the meetings featured dialogues between graduates and distinguished representatives from other analytic centers, illustrating the role of interpersonal psychoanalysis as formidable challenger and serious alternative in the analytic world. In 1997 we sponsored a ground-breaking conference that posed searching questions of common concern to psychoanalysts and scholars from across the intellectual spectrum. In the fall of 1999, we sponsored meetings that demonstrated how sophisticated psychoanalytic concepts may be applied to problems of addiction and substance abuse. These meetings drew an audience of more than 600 professionals.
The underlying thread here, carried forward from the days of our founding and infusing the current spirit at the institute, is an abiding interest in social issues, humanitarian concerns, and political activism. Throughout its history, analysts at White found innovative opportunities to demonstrate the effectiveness of psychoanalytic ideas. In the 1960s when teenagers were leaving school to tune in and turn on, the institute sponsored the “College Drop-Out Project,” an inquiry into the dynamics of adolescence in a changing society. Interest in working with non-traditional groups resulted in the “Union Therapy Project,” co-sponsored with a branch of the United Auto Workers. Special clinics have been established for creative and performing artists, for those in mid-life crisis, for the elderly, and for Hispanics and other minorities.
Recently the institute established a Center for the Study of Psychological Trauma. Under this conceptual umbrella, graduates and candidates offer psychoanalytic treatment to people who are affected by the scourge of HIV, victims of sexual abuse, political refugees and other immigrants, and people who are struggling with infertility or recovery from substance abuse. Such study is a natural extension of the institute's interpersonal perspective, in which experience is recognized as inevitably interacting with intrapsychic forces in the formation of both personality and psychopathology. Specialized clinics, offering a unique
opportunity for psychoanalytically informed treatment performed by trained psychoanalysts at reduced or subsidized fees, involve a significant number of our graduates.
We offer training opportunities to our alumni in these various areas of contemporary patient care, supporting a sort of analytic specialization. Through such programs we attract new patients, train graduates to teach and supervise new generations of professionals from the wider community, and attract attention (and eventually supportive funding) to the institute. In the process, we increase awareness of the potentials of analytic treatment and, as an added benefit, create a new population of patients — and of course analytic candidates from the ranks of those attracted to these ancillary programs.
I like to imagine that a survival mechanism is handed on in the White Institute through our organizational genes. Our founders, after all, were rebels. They prepared themselves and the institute for a bumpy ride. They found groundbreaking invigorating and adversity stimulating. The impossible was not to be missed. The institute certainly faces problems that beset all analytic centers, and economic pressures inevitably challenge the organization as well as its graduates. However, the White Institute survives, and thrives, by continuing to do what it has always done: respond to the concerns of students as well as the wider society, while fostering a richly stimulating professional community, emphasizing rigorous training, and maintaining stringent standards of excellence.