Psychoanalysis was introduced to the Chicago medical community in 1911 with a lecture by Ernest Jones, then of Toronto. His reception was mixed. Although interest grew, it was twenty years before the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society was officially established in 1931. The following year, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis came into existence under a lay board of trustees with Franz Alexander as director and Karen Horney as associate director. Both came from Berlin. During Alexander's tenure, efforts were directed toward shortening analyses, and research — particularly into psychosomatic ailments — became a prominent activity.
Therese Benedek came from Leipzig in 1936 and became a leading researcher in female psychology. A stellar array of important female teachers followed her: Charlotte Babcock, Catherine Bacon, Anne Benjamin, Margaret Gerard, Frances Hannett Gitelson, Adelaide Johnson, Irene Josselyn, Maria Kramer, Helen McLean, Emmy Sylvester, and Lucia Tower. Helen Ross, the sister of President Harry S. Truman's press secretary, became the able administrative director of the Chicago Institute for many years and distinguished herself by conducting a national survey of psychoanalytic education with Bertram Lewin in 1960. Joan Fleming, a most capable institute dean, ultimately became chair of the Board of Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association in the 1960s.
In 1956, Alexander retired and a major exodus of analysts took place: Alexander, George Mohr, and Richard Renneker left for Los Angeles, while Marc Hollender and Thomas Szasz emigrated to Syracuse, N.Y. The second director, Gerhart Piers, an erudite Austrian émigré, brought the institute into closer relation to the community. A child therapy program was established as well as an adolescent therapy program and a teacher training program. Piers became ill at the podium at an APsaA meeting in Washington, D.C., while honoring the memory of his friend Rene Spitz, and ultimately succumbed to a stroke. During his tenure, Chicago assisted the development of the Cincinnati, Denver, and St. Louis institutes.
George H. Pollock, a longtime associate of Alexander's, became the institute's third director in 1970. He ushered in a period of broader participation by faculty and candidates. In 1974, Pollock put forth an experimental plan to the American to train a small group of nonmedical analysts. This plan (which became known as the Chicago Plan) was rejected. The plan was introduced while the Chicago Institute enjoyed much success in securing medical candidates for training. Pollock's research on mourning and creativity paralleled the earlier work of Fleming and her co-workers on parent loss and its consequences. This body of studies culminated in the formation of the Barr-Harris Center for the Study and Treatment of Separation and Loss in Childhood. Pollock founded the Annual of Psychoanalysis, now nearing three decades of publication.
In addition to developing his own theories during the institute's second quarter-century, Heinz Kohut was a superb teacher of Freud who did much to advance psychoanalysis in general. He became a model for clinicians and scholars worldwide. Kohut brought new attention to Chicago with his writings on self psychology. Whether analysts agreed with his ideas or not, they read and re-read his work. His death in 1981 left a massive gap.
For sixteen months (until the autumn of 1989), reorganization took place under Henry Seidenberg's acting directorship. Power was redistributed, and faculty membership on institute committees was made rotational.
In 1989 Arnold Goldberg became director and put the institute on a sound administrative basis. The Helen McLean Library, long a nationally recognized resource, was computerized; the candidate base was broadened; a master's degree in teacher education was organized with DePaul University; a research division was re-established; and the institute continued to sponsor the development of analytic institutes in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
In 1992, Thomas Pappadis was elected director as the institute celebrated its sixtieth birthday. He added elected faculty members to what had always been a lay board of trustees and encouraged the participation of candidates on the board, as well as on standing and ad hoc committees of the institute. A speech disorder clinic and an analytically oriented adult psychotherapy training program were inaugurated. The Barr-Harris Children's Grief Center expanded into three satellite clinics in the suburbs. Barr-Harris now provides workshops and continuing education to teachers, school counselors, hospice workers, and leaders of support groups.
A move to new quarters in the historic building designed by Daniel Burnham, at 122 South Michigan, took place in 1996. The new location puts us in the heart of Chicago's cultural center, across the street from both the Art Institute and Symphony Center.
A master's degree in humanities and psychoanalysis was developed with the University of Chicago, and the Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program, which had begun in 1993, was reorganized and reinvigorated. Several of the students from these programs have gone on to pursue psychoanalytic training as candidates in the core program.
In 1997 the Edith Sabshin Memorial Visiting Lectureship was established to honor the memory of the former assistant dean of the institute (1974–1976). The lectureship is offered in conjunction with Northwestern University Medical School. Each year a noted psychoanalytic teacher meets with candidates and faculty at the institute and also presents psychiatry grand rounds at Northwestern. Past visiting lecturers have been Otto Kernberg and Glen Gabbard . This year we welcome Robert Wallerstein. Also in 1997 we celebrated our sixty-fifth anniversary with a stimulating neuroscience conference, featuring Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman and several Chicago analysts.
Pappadis died of cancer in July 1998. In his honor, the Thomas James Pappadis, M.D., Prize for the best paper on a given psychoanalytic theme from a University of Chicago undergraduate or graduate student in the humanities has been established by the institute and the university. A prize of $1,000 will be awarded, and the winning paper will be published in the Annual of Psychoanalysis. This years topic is “Freud
Jerome A. Winer, M.D., is director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he is a training and supervising analyst. He is a professor of psychiatry at the College of Medicine of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also editor of the Annual of Psychoanalysis. Jerome Kavka, M.D., also a training and supervising analyst at the Chicago Institute, is archivist of the Institute and of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society.
and the Modern World.“ On March 17, 2000, the institute welcomed Ralph Roughton as the first visiting teacher in an annual program to commemorate the contributions of Pappadis to psychoanalytic education.
Our current director, Jerome Winer, continues to steer our vital institute toward increased involvement in the community and reinforce the foundation of Freudian analysis upon which the institute's strength has always rested. A professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois, he has established links with various university communities and charitable foundations. Winer serves as chair of the IPA's Ethics Committee. Last year his committee was successful in establishing the first approved code of ethical principles in that organization's history. He is also the first chair of the new BOPS Committee on the Impaired Faculty Analyst. He has published on a variety of topics on the interface between psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and on applications of psychoanalysis to literature and on psychoanalytic training.
The Chicago Institute currently sponsors four certificate-granting clinical training programs: Adult Psychoanalysis, Child Psychoanalysis, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, and Adult Psychotherapy, each offering clinical services at modest fees. The Barr-Harris Children's Grief Center sees well over a hundred children and families every year. Our local Institute Fellows program, open to advanced trainees and recent graduates in psychiatry, psychology, and social work, is now in its fourth year and growing steadily. The one-year fellows receive classroom instruction, individual mentoring, invitations to meetings, and subscriptions to local and national psychoanalytic publications. The current group numbers fourteen fellows, two of them from out of state. Several potential fellows have already expressed interest in applying for the 2000–01 program.
The Continuing Education Program offers several courses each year. In the Fall 1999 quarter, five faculty analysts taught a course on “Models of the Psychotherapeutic Process” from four psychodynamic perspectives. This spring we will offer “Working With Transference.” Our Outreach Program is offering a series of courses on parents and children in the adult education program of a local school. The series will be taught by members of the institute faculty.
The institute's Conference on Youth and Violence (May 12–13, 2000) is making tremendous inroads in bringing the institute together with schools and universities, law enforcement, social service agencies, the business community, religious leaders, health care providers, the court system, and state and local government. The conference will take place simultaneously with Friday and Saturday sessions of the Annual Meeting of the American.
The Youth and Violence program will feature a public forum, open free of charge to APsaA meeting attendees and to the general public. The committee has been hard at work planning a conference that promises to be highly informative and intellectually stimulating. The conference will feature many nationally recognized experts including Elijah Anderson, Steven Marans, Joy Osofsky, and Charles Strozier, who will discuss such topics as the media and violence, police response to violence, violence in schools, ways to prevent violence, the impact of early life experience on later violence, the jailed adolescent, and protecting children online.
Members of the Chicago Institute's faculty, staff, and candidates will be part of an exceptional group of national and local researchers and community leaders presenting twenty-nine discussion groups over the two-day conference. Winer is proud to have secured more than $75,000 in funding for this conference, with the able assistance of Robert Galatzer-Levy, the conference chair, and Patricia Rueckheim, the institute's director of clinical and educational services.
The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust is the lead sponsor of the conference. Other supporting organizations are the American Psychoanalytic Association, the American Psychoanalytic Foundation, DePaul University College of Law, University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Psychiatry, the Harris Foundation, Seymour Persky, and the Siegel Foundation. The plenary sessions and public forum will be held in the beautiful Preston Bradley Hall at the Chicago Cultural Center, an architectural showplace in downtown Chicago.
The Library of Congress's Freud exhibit “Conflict and Culture” is scheduled to come to the Field Museum in Chicago in October 2001. A number of exciting events and projects are being planned to coincide with the exhibit. James Anderson of the Chicago Institutes faculty and Eva Lichtenberg of the institute's board of trustees co-chair the committee that is planning a conference, lectures for the general public, and a program for high school students. The Annual of Psychoanalysis is preparing a special edition, “Freud and the Modem World,” which will include contributions by analysts and other scholars from around the country as well as members of the Chicago psychoanalytic and academic communities.
This year, the Chicago Institute will sponsor the twenty-third annual Self Psychology Conference, to be held at the Chicago Marriott November 9–12, 2000. The conference will explore the therapeutic process and consider the impact of self psychology in understanding the human condition.
From the modifications recommended by Alexander to the innovative theoretical and clinical conceptions of Goldberg, Kohut, Michael Basch, John Gedo, and Merton Gill, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis has remained a unified but diversified center of learning. We look forward to the future with confidence that our presence and influence will transcend the boundaries of the city that welcomes the American's eighty-ninth Annual Meeting.