At our last annual meeting in May, the Executive Council approved the donation of the archives of our Association to the archives of the Institute for the History of Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in Manhattan. The donation was approved with the understanding that the Association would supply some annual financial support, to help defray the costs of having the material professionally archived.
The transfer of our archives to Cornell was proposed by the APsaA History and Archives Committee and made possible by George Makari, director of the Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Cornell, when new quarters became available at the New York Presbyterian Hospital. The new space provides the highest level of security, complete climate control, and the most sophisticated fire-protection system available, using inert gas instead of water to extinguish a fire. There is also a comfortable reading room with a full-time librarian, to make the archives accessible to our members and others researching the history of psychoanalysis.
Our holdings will reside in the Oskar Diethelm Library, one of the world's great collections on the history of psychiatry. Its 45,000 volumes range from the fifteenth century to the present and contain many historic items. It holds the personal papers of such eminent analysts as D. W. Winnicott, Joseph Wortis (Freud's analysand), and John Frosch (first editor of JAPA) and the archives of the Group for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Academy of Psychoanalysis.
In making this transfer, the History and Archives Committee has completed a process initiated in the early 1980s by Eric T. Carlson, then director of the institute; Arcangelo D'Amore, chairman of the History and Archives Committee; and Helen Fischer, executive director of the APsaA's Central Office. During the demolition of Payne Whitney Clinic and the reconstruction of New York Hospital in the 1990s, the archives then in the Diethelm Library were temporarily housed at the New York Academy of Medicine. The History and Archives Committee temporarily suspended the transfer to Cornell of the tapes and transcripts of our biannual oral history workshops since 1974. We plan to resume this process and continue the preparation and editing of more transcripts.
In 1987–88 the APsaA archives also contained some thirty-three boxes of archival materials dating from 1932. These included early versions of the Association's constitution; minutes of the Executive Council, the Board on Professional Standards, and the Emergency Committee to aid refugee analysts; and the presidential papers of A. A. Brill (1931–32), Karl Menninger, Bertram D. Lewin, and others. There are also historical photographs of early members.
Another large collection of important archival materials, which had been inconveniently stored for many years in the Central Office, will be transferred to Cornell. These occupy more than 200 boxes and include many interesting subcommittee minutes, like those of the late Viola Bernard's Committee on Social Issues. There are extensive records of Harry Weinstock's pioneer questionnaire on psychoanalytic practice and clinical outcomes, circulated to all members and candidates during the 1950s and 1960s.
On behalf of the Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Makari made these welcoming comments:
We are honored and excited to receive this generous donation of papers from the American Psychoanalytic Association. These important documents will be crucial to future histories of American psychoanalysis and will join a prior donation of papers from the American housed in the Oskar Diethelm Library. Once cataloguing is completed, we look forward to welcoming scholarly researchers and facilitating the writing and rewriting of the history of psychoanalysis in America.
[Editor's note: As this issue of TAP went to press, the archives were in off-site storage, where they will remain until a donor is found to help defray the costs to the Cornell History of Psychiatry Library for professional archiving of the material. Anyone interested in funding this project, or anyone who knows of a potential donor, is asked to contact Ellen Fertig at the Central Office. The History and Archives Committee is seeking support from the American Psychoanalytic Foundation.
Sanford Gifford, M.D., George Makari, M.D., and Nellie L. Thompson, Ph.D., are members of the American's History and Archives Committee.