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The almost century-long struggle over nonmedical (“lay”) analysis within the American and the International Psychoanalytical Associations is finally effectively over. As chronicled in this book, it has been a long, turbulent, and divisive contest that badly fractured organized worldwide psychoanalysis over much of its history, and that for periods—in the 20s and 30s around the functioning of the IPA's International Training Commission and in the 80s with the lawsuit—was the major focus of psychoanalytic organizational attention and energy. How can we account for the clamor of this struggle and the divisive polarization it created amongst individuals all equally devoted to the well-being of psychoanalysis as they conceived it? What was really at stake?
The lawsuit was initiated and fought on Sherman antitrust grounds, that is, on the economic stand that the American Psychoanalytic Association was operating an economic monopoly that deprived nonphysicians of access to training for, and practice of, this highly prestigious and lucrative means of livelihood. A suit could hardly have been filed on any other basis. However, I never accepted the argument, no matter how loudly bruited, that this was primarily a venal, “pocket-book,” trade-union, and economic issue. Though self-serving economic entitlements and anxieties are hardly ever absent from human affairs, and though they could have been paramount for any one or any group of the involved individuals on either side of this long struggle, I have always experienced this primarily as a principled battle between people of conviction and goodwill who held very opposed visions of the nature of psychoanalysis as a discipline and a profession. In chapters 1 and 2, I traced the historical development and sociopolitical contexts of psychoanalysis in Europe and America in the early decades of the century that led to different—and on this issue of “lay analysis,” diametrically opposed—positions being held by the earnest leaders of