6. The Four Committees of the American and the Precipitation of the Lawsuit

The Committee on Prerequisites for Training (CPT) deliberated carefully over a six-year span, from 1975 to 1981. It was appointed by Edward Weinshel, then Chairman of the Board on Professional Standards, and consisted of nine members,1 with Homer Curtis as chair and Paula Bernstein (one of its nonmedical members) as the very conscientious secretary who created minutes of its discussions in assiduous detail. The nine committee members were selected to represent the spectrum of views within the American on the issue of the place of lay analysis within the discipline; four of the nine were nonmedical, all products of the research training program under CORST auspices.

At the first, December 1975, meeting, the committee set its overall agenda, to explore the valid prerequisites for learning to become an analyst, in order, ostensibly, to improve psychoanalytic education for everyone. The question was set as, What does training to be an analyst require? The tone was framed by Charles Kligerman, a medical analyst from Chicago and an earlier promoter of the aborted Chicago Plan to train in an independent doctoral-level discipline of psychoanalysis, as the query, How can we justify not taking nonphysicians into training? The assertion was advanced that we (psychoanalysts) have for a long time felt that there has been an intellectual drying up in psychoanalytic advance and that this could significantly reflect the narrow medical-psychiatric track from which our candidates have been drawn. This was declared to have eventuated in a state of scientific stultification, educational dogmatism, and increasing