PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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born in the first quarter of the twentieth. Moreover, psychoanalysis
as an institutional organization had established itself through a
series of isolations. Some of these isolations were necessary; others
may have been more questionable. I have already mentioned the
location of psychoanalysis within the medical profession. In addi–
tion, as psychoanalytic institutes and societies for the training of new
analysts continued to grow, there was a tendency for the work in
such bodies to be isolated still further from what was going on both
scientifically and culturally in the worlds outside. Hence there
occurred a further professional isolation of psychoanalysis within
the medical profession, as well as beyond it. The long and difficult
training of new analysts tended
to
focus on specific clinical and
therapeutic practices, on the development of certain concrete and
immediate skills, while questions of wider-ranging research and
intellectual interest were by and large deferred or relegated to the
periphery, where they were given peripheral attention. Moreover, the
institution of Freudian analysis tended to evolve as something of a
closed society. Its early history supported such a tendency. Its
simultaneous location in and separation from the discipline of
medicine stimulated the further development of formidable and at
moments forbidding hierarchical modes of organization, dispensa–
tions of authority and allocations of reward and professional recog–
nition. Although such problems are common to almost any profes–
sional organization, the tendency towards orthodoxy among
psychoanalysts and their organizations was noted overtly, most
bitterly perhaps by those who had broken with such groups and set
up their own. However hyperbolic certain of these critical claims
may have been, there is little question that there was some point to
them, and that psychoanalysis was handling the problems of intel–
lectual renewal, growth and new discovery with less than perfect tact
or foresight. A certain confinement of view combined with the social
and cultural ambitions of a customarily respectable and uncritical
order to produce a general situation that did not bode well for the
future.
Finally, psychoanalysis was isolated in yet another way. In
establishing itself as it did, it largely cut itself off from the intellec–
tual life of most American universities. This was not a bad thing
before World War II, but it was damaging indeed when it continued
after 1945. During the years that followed, the center of gravity of
American intellectual life shifted, inexorably, we now can see,
towards the university. Psychoanalysis had put forward or founded
