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American Psychoanalytic Association (APA) would walk out of the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). The IPA then went along
with the demands.. It was really a case of blackmail. It was not until fifty
years later that the issue exploded, with the lawsuit that a group of psy–
chologists brought against the IPA in 1985, contesting that its rules of ex–
clusivity were discriminating.
But in 1938, the result was that psychoanalysis was cast as a purely
medical profession, while research in the field was carried out, signifi–
cantly, by psychologists, who became for the most part totally dissociated
from psychoanalysis. As psychology moved toward a cognitive-behavioral
mode that went into different directions, it again created, in terms of
scientific developments, antagonism between traditional psychoanalytic
institutes and new research that was mostly behavioral and sometimes
followed a kind of superficial empiricism. This came about precisely
because of the absolute split between the "understanding psychology,"
("verstehende Psychologie") that came from Europe and the
"experimental psychology" that was strongly based on the tradition of the
United States.
EK: It seems you are saying that psychoanalysis has many enemies and
that some of them the psychoanalysts created for themselves.
O K: Yes. In addition, psychoanalytic culture became somewhat conven–
tional and adaptive, in the sense of fitting itself into a cultural model of
conformity that was then challenged during the years of the countercul–
ture. Many intellectuals, who in another generation would have wel–
comed the revolutionary exploration of society generated by psychoanal–
ysis, perceived psychoanalysis to the contrary, as an Establishment psy–
chology, in contrast to those new, subjectivist, revolutionary, anarchist
aspirations that were part of the counterculture.
EK: Wouldn't you say that this resulted also from the fact that this par–
ticular counterculture did not know any history and still is not even aware
of the fact that psychoanalysis was a rather revolutionary endeavor when
it was started in Vienna at the turn of the century?
O K: Yes, I agree with that. And then finally a very important develop–
ment occurred, the growth and strength of biological psychiatry within
universities. Discoveries in the field of biological psychiatry again brought
psychiatry closer to medicine and made the non-psychiatric medical es–
tablishment look to these psychiatrists as leaders in the field. So depart–
ment chairmen with psychoanalytical perspectives were mostly replaced
by biological psychiatrists. Psychoanalysis lost its foothold in the medical
