AbstractsHistory

In an age of managed care and new biological therapies for mental illness, psychoanalysis is generally seen as a 'profession on the ropes' whose hour is up. What went wrong? While external factors have played their part in the fall of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts have generally disregarded their own crucial role in creating this decline. This thesis examines this role as played out through their own institutions, the freestanding psychoanalytic institutes. Freud was an explorer but he also codified his ideas. His work has been taken as an inspiration to explore without presuppositions but also as Holy Writ. Psychoanalysis deals with emotions and excites passions. Like religion, psychoanalysis asks big questions, and, like religion, is easily influenced and seduced by dogmatic answers to these difficult questions. Psychoanalytic institutes have been notable as closed shops. Their solid walls have kept them sealed off and mysterious to the outside world, including the mental health professions and the academy. Authoritarian cliques, power struggles and intrigues have predominated inside the institutes. Institute life has been secret, the subject of rumour rather than knowledge. Insiders often know little about of other institutes (unless they are involved in site visits to particular institutes). Sometimes, insiders have a limited view of their own institutions because they see them through the vantage points of their own experience and that of some close colleagues. I have interviewed central participants of the dramas of the histories of some key psychoanalytic institutes in the US. For the first time, this thesis recounts the intricate inside history of these organizations. The thesis reveals the detailed inner political histories of arguably the four most important and varied psychoanalytic institutes affiliated with the APsaA. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute was the first and for decades the prestigious institute which set the model for many others. It became pre-eminent on a world scale with the immigration of leading European analysts fleeing the Nazis. The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute are quite varied in their organization and histories. The cultures are often quite different yet many of the problems will be found to be similar at base. I first examine the detailed political history of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute which provides a quintessential example of analytic anointment in practice, together with its pitfalls. I then examine a split that occurred in the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, which demonstrates some of the tensions and ambiguities that seem inherent in psychoanalytic organizations, especially where society and institute are part of the same institution. I move on to investigate a very different history in the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, which is quite differently organized: in Chicago, the institute with a lay Board of Trustees is quite separate from…