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The Lawsuit: Then, Now, and in the Future
from Division Review
by Bryant WELCH
To: Arnold Zelig Schneider with gratitude, admiration, and love on the occasion of his 77th birthday
On March 1, 1985, psychologists Arnie Schneider, Helen Desmond, Tony Bernay, and I filed a class action antitrust lawsuit against the American psychoanalytic Association, (“The American”) and affiliated groups. The lawsuit contended that the defendants’ refusal to let psychologists train in their institutes or to let their teachers teach in non-American institutes constituted a restraint of trade in violation of the United States federal antitrust laws. The lawsuit also named the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) for its refusal to allow psychologist institutes IPA membership in North America.
Few now doubt the significant impact that the lawsuit has had on the psychoanalytic enterprise in America. In fact, the impact has been so profound that understandably many of the younger psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic aspirants are surprised to learn about the nature of the psychoanalytic world pre-1985 in which a career in psychoanalysis was impossible for most non-medical mental health professionals. Thus, I particularly appreciate being asked to write this reflective memoir on the lawsuit.
I would be terribly remiss not to begin with a personal statement. I have said many times that for me, personally, the lawsuit has been the gift that keeps on giving. Friendships have been the most important part of my life, and lifelong friendships with Arnie Schneider and Helen Desmond are at the very core of the bounty that the lawsuit has given me personally. I would also be remiss not to mention Nathan Stockhamer, then the clinical director at the William Alanson White Institute, who more than anyone helped legitimatize my seemingly very radical idea of using litigation to overcome the restrictive policies of the medical-psychoanalytic establishment. Nat passed away in 2019 at the age of 91. I consider the thirty-five-year- long deeply personal relationship I had with this loving and urbane man to be one of the greatest blessings of my life. I also want to acknowledge Clifford Stromberg who was the attorney in the lawsuit and who graciously put up with my meddling in it. Unfortunately, Toni Bernay passed away several years ago. I remember Tony both for her elegance and her political sophistication. Equally moving for me, in this reminiscence are the memories of the hundreds of psychologists I spoke to in speeches or personal communications during that time.
But why did we need a lawsuit? The short answer was that both clinical psychology and social work were rapidly growing and assuming primary responsibility for psychotherapy in America. Thus, the restrictive policies that kept us from being able to get advanced training in psychoanalysis were a tragic bottleneck wasting the clear talent that these young mental health professionals could bring to bear on human suffering and on the evolution of psychoanalysis itself.
For years and years there was talk that the American was going to change its restrictive policies, but hopes were repeatedly dashed. In 1982 when such optimism had been particularly high, the medical director of the American Psychiatric Association, Melvin Sabshin, addressed the governance of the American and cautioned the members to “stay close to their medical roots.” The reports from that meeting indicated that Sabshin’s comments effectively killed any chance of reform.
Sabshin’s comments were really part of a broader assault from organized medicine against psychologists and other non-medical groups to make sure that the looming cost containment movement in American healthcare beginning in the early 1980’s was felt less heavily by the medical groups themselves and more by other health care providers.
Within psychoanalysis there was, of course, a lengthy history to the issue of training non-MDs to practice psychoanalysis. Freud himself wrote a famous article in which he supported such training (Freud, S. 1959). But in America, psychoanalysis was largely the domain of organized medicine. This history has been ably described by Robert Wallerstein in his book The Question of Lay Analysis (Wallerstein, 1998).
At the time of the lawsuit Dr. Wallerstein was the President of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Since I had sued the IPA as one of the defendants in the lawsuit, it was in that adversarial context Bob, and I met. Subsequently, during the pendency of the lawsuit we had two or three personal lengthy phone calls, and I believe both felt the other was dealing with the matter in good faith. Thus, twenty-five years later when I moved to the San Francisco Bay area, Bob and I became regular lunch companions. Poignantly during the last two years of Bob’s life after he lost his much beloved wife, Judith Wallerstein, I was close witness to this gracious man’s struggle with old age in which he devoted himself to his love for psychoanalysis and was lovingly cared for by his daughter, Amy, in whose arms he literally died at the age of 93.
Bob and I shared a love of psychoanalytic gossip and had many wonderful laughs at the foibles of the human mind especially as it functions in the chaos of organizational disagreement. We also loved comparing notes on the lawsuit as it played out in each of our eyes.
So, for those of you who are interested in a description of the history of the issue of lay analysis and the early stages of the lawsuit I can only say that as I read Bob’s depiction of the events that he and I lived through, even as adversaries, my admiration for this man’s attempt at an objective recording of historical events is enormous. There were certainly a few interpretations of events that I felt were incorrect, most notably settlement discussions, but I am sure I could never have approached Bob’s evenhandedness in so describing an adversarial process in which he had played such an important role. It was against this historical context described by Wallerstein in 1982 that I, along with many of my psychology contemporaries, wanted to obtain psychoanalytic training. But we were blocked by the restrictive policies of the American.
Here, I was uncannily suited by background to lead the lawsuit effort and have been grateful to the lawsuit because it seemed to give some purpose to my early life uncertainties. Some unique facts about my background are particularly germane to the lawsuit. Briefly, I grew up with two very, very loving and very, very traumatized parents. My home was always within one or two heartbeats from exploding and, periodically, it did erupt. In the early years my mother was clearly devoted to me, and I feel extremely fortunate for the tenderness between us. My father was a remarkably farsighted city manager. He was initiating environmental programs in the communities where we lived as far back as 1949. He was deservedly respected for the incredible integrity and devotion with which he went about his responsibilities towards his community. His marriage to my mother was probably one of the most tumultuous relationships I have ever experienced. My father withdrew into work and tennis and my mother into alcoholism that just destroyed any semblance of family that did exist.
There were two effects on me that are especially relevant to the lawsuit. First, I had a remarkably close access to the workings of government from as far back as I can remember. The City Hall that most people are taught is something they could not fight, was a frequent sanctuary to me to get away from my parents’ fighting. I literally studied and escaped to City Hall, taking refuge in my father’s office. I always felt that the chief of police in our community was the equivalent of a benign uncle or grandfather. Years later I would feel very comfortable in courtrooms, legislative bodies, and even the White House. I simply felt I had a right to be there, and I felt I understood lawyers, elected officials, and the government.
But the second effect of my earlier years was the horrific suffering I witnessed in both of my loving parents. It, of course, left me personally with feelings of deep insecurity that drove me towards compensatory achievements like getting into the best schools, but it also left me pining for repair both externally and internally. At first, I looked to social justice as a solution, planning a career in law and politics. I studied government at Harvard, worked on Capitol Hill for my Congressman, and was President of the Harvard Debate Council. Amidst these activities I did find time to be depressed and increasingly dissociated.
Doubling down on my early strategies, I decided the best treatment for all of this, was of course, to enter Harvard Law School. My political and debate activity combined with my inner suffering had taken its toll on my grades in college and left me doubting my intellectual ability. I decided that in my first year of law school I would test myself in that arena, and I did well. This had the obvious effect of clarifying that my underlying fears and uncertainty were not amenable to intellectual solution. The problem was elsewhere. I could not work or “achieve” my way to feeling better.
It was by then 1970, the actual peak of “the Sixties”. I took a year off from law school, taught debate at Emerson College in Boston and for the first time went into psychotherapy. I had sought out therapy as an undergraduate at the Harvard Health Services with the primary complaint that I “could not feel anything.” I was discouraged from returning (at least as I remember it.) The other thing I did, that seems very significant to me now, is that I began to read in the new wave of Eastern/ spiritual growth authors, like Alan Watts. I went to a meditation retreat with Philip Kapleau, the first ordained American Zen priest trained in Japan and author of Three Pillars of Zen (Anchor, updated, 1989). The image I had of Kapleau from those few days stayed with me through the decades as the most mature and disciplined of the older male role models I was seeking at the time. At this stage of my life, I believe my assessment of Kapleau was correct, and I credit myself for preserving a deep sense of what he had achieved in his own mental/spiritual development. Today, Tibetan Buddhism feels like every bit, if not more, of a beneficial therapeutic factor in my life even than psychoanalysis. I was also heavily influenced as were many of many peers by RD Laiing’s work especially in The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience. The idea that “reality” was a politically negotiated thing profoundly shocked me much as did Roy Schafer’s article “The Psychoanalytic View of Reality.”
Suffice it to say, by this time, I was not turning into good corporate law material. Clinical psychology was an obvious landing spot. I finished law school, taking as many courses as I could in psychology since I had no undergraduate major in it. As soon as I made that transition in the course work, the most striking change to me was that my relationships became much, much richer as I found people with more sensitivity and psychological mindedness. That change has been a cornerstone of my deep love for psychologists and mental health professionals throughout my adult life. There were three people who in different ways were profoundly helpful to me. On the Harvard Law faculty, Alan Stone and Larry Tribe, at a time I thought I was certainly insane for making the career change I did, were very supportive and Sherry Turkle, who as a graduate student TA in psychology at Harvard at the time, was extremely kind to me transitioning to the new world of psychology colleagues I was entering.
I went to the Ph.D. clinical psychology program at UNC Chapel Hill and simply poured myself into psychotherapy. I took on every training opportunity I could for clinical work and did the minimum I had to for the research part of my program. I was especially drawn to the object relations literature and read everything I could in the still new object relations field. Buddhism was ebbed out of my awareness by psychoanalysis.
But there I was blocked. And that became the rub that was to lead to the lawsuit.
The limitations on psychologists practicing in the late 1970’s went beyond the restrictions on psychoanalytic training. I opened a private practice for psychology in Chapel Hill, but we could not access insurance coverage like our competitors, the psychiatrists. Using my somewhat precocious experience in politics and grassroots organizing, I launched a rather ragamuffin group of psychologists and took our case to the North Carolina General Assembly to get what was then known as a “freedom of choice” bill, meaning that insureds were allowed to use their mental health insurance benefits with a psychologist if they so chose. I remember one of the psychologists at the time saying to me with both shock and gratitude that she had never been on a winning side before. Psychologists’ income tripled overnight, and they were grateful. I was elected president of the state psychological association at the age of 31 and turned it into an effective lobbying force in the state, which it still is today.
These efforts came to the attention of the APA, and I was nominated for a spot on the ballot for the APA Board of Professional Affairs, the body most responsible for professional issues in the APA. I campaigned vigorously for the position against two more senior members of the APA and won. The upset nature of the election captured the attention of the APA political figures enabling me to move rapidly into the inner sanctum of the APA governance.
There were two things I wanted to accomplish. The first was the lawsuit to open up psychoanalytic training for psychologists. The second was to create an effective advocacy office for psychology practitioners who I felt had been very poorly represented by the APA’s advocacy efforts that were largely in the service of academic and scientific issues. The second led to the APA Practice Directorate and a series of successful ventures for psychology, most dramatically recognition for psychology in Medicare.
I should probably say just a bit about my own psychoanalysis here. Overall, I did something like two thousand hours of psychoanalysis with four different analysts, all of whom, to this day, I like very much. The analyses were extremely helpful in the work I undertook. Both of the objectives I had in going to the APA to work were grandiose. I don’t think I was ever afraid of failing, although I certainly knew we could. But the sheer weight of the grandiosity was something else. One day on the couch, I associated to a barn-like structure still under construction and held up by a few beams. When I continued on, my analyst at the time, Charles Keith of Duke, stopped me and said he noticed I seemed to have run away from the association to the barn-like structure. When I returned to it, what emerged was the wish to use my political skills to build a national advocacy structure for psychology, something that with some luck and my political skills, I was certainly in a position to do. To the best of my knowledge the structure that did come from that uncovering by Dr. Keith, the Practice Directorate of the APA, led to the explosion of victories for psychology in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and the unprecedented expansion of psychotherapy and psychological care that resulted. It was a profound personal liberation that I do believe made me a much more effective advocate. I was especially proud of the work I did for gay rights during this period, something I could not have done had analysis not freed me to trust my own judgement that Socarides’ (1989), work, for example, did not explain the gay men I was working with in therapy at the time. It seemed to me psychoanalytic theory was being used to rationalize a social prejudice.
The actual lawsuit really began when I met Stockhamer at an APA Convention in 1983. We met for a lunch that lasted for five hours. The discussion continued and only gathered steam after that meeting. I outlined my plan for the lawsuit and, I am quite sure, Nat was carefully assessing me. It was Nat more than anyone who convinced the small group of psychologists mostly in New York, who had been able to get psychoanalytic training and who had just formed Division 39 in the APA, that I was a stable person with a good idea. (For decades after I would taunt and tease him how badly I had fooled him on the former.)
There were several things that needed to be done if the lawsuit was to become a reality. I had to check my reasoning about my legal theory to make sure it was correct. We had to find an attorney to actually take the case. We had to find plaintiffs who were representative of the class of psychologists we were saying were the victims of the anti-trust violations. (Thus, the phrase “class action.”) To establish a class action suit, we had to secure broad support in the field for the effort. Had there been any significant opposition from within psychology we would have a very hard time having the class certified and the lawsuit would have lost all its power to make the medical analysts change their actual policies. Then, of course, there was the matter of money for attorney fees, court costs, and travel.
Here my earlier background with the law was especially helpful. I did know anti-trust law a bit, but I also knew that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing in launching a venture of this nature. Fortunately, I knew some very bright people who really quite familiar with the legal areas. I could simply call a few dozen of the friends I had made along what felt to me to be a strange professional odyssey, off of whom to bounce my thinking. It was extraordinarily helpful. Most were Harvard or Yale Law School graduates and a large percentage of them had made the law review at these prestigious law schools. Joel Perwin had been my college debate partner and later served as the staff director for the Senate Judiciary committee. He introduced me to Clifford Stromberg who was a remarkably quick study in understanding the legal argument I was proposing. Stockhamer and I met with Cliff in DC one wintery day, and we knew we had found our legal representation.
With a respected law firm behind us, we now had to build support within the psychology community. Stockhamer was the clinical director of the William Alanson White Institute and was widely respected in New York. He convinced the still new Division of Psychoanalysis to put the issue on the Board Agenda and for several such meetings we discussed the matter. There was a highly diverse group of people on the Board all of whom, understandably, wanted their own concerns addressed. In retrospect I admire these people greatly. The law was foreign to their way of thinking, and I was a thirty-five-year-old from North Carolina.
At the same time, the people most affected by the proposal, young psychologists awaiting training were scattered in urban areas around the country. Thus, I spent several months traveling to speak with groups of varying size about the lawsuit, explaining why it could work and what the steps were.
I think it is fair to say the lawsuit captured people’s imagination and these forays were a wonderful tonic for me. The connections I made were to some of the kindest and brightest young professionals anywhere. And we shared a very similar passion and hopefulness for psychoanalysis. While I did the speaking, Stockhamer was almost always there, meeting me at the airports, going to the presentations, and offering staunch support. I especially remember presentations in Boston at the “EtherDome” (the building in which the efficacy of ether as a general anesthetic was first demonstrated) and the Harvard Faculty Club, in San Diego at the Hotel Coronado, in Chicago on one day when the windchill factor hit 78 degrees below zero, and at countless state associations, division meetings, and other psychological forums. Robert Pear of the New York Times wrote an article about the lawsuit, and it hit the mass media.
As the word of the proposed lawsuit spread, people responded to our need for psychologists to come forward and serve as “class representatives.” They would serve as representative of the experience psychologists were having under the restrictive policies of APsA. I had known Toni Bernay from the APA governance and she and I were both obvious choices as class representatives. But Arnie Schneider and Helen Desmond were not psychology politicos. Instead, they were the very best that psychology had to offer in terms of psychoanalytic skill and caregiving qualities. One of the more comical aspects of the lawsuit from my perspective was that within a very few years of its settlement, Helen was elected president of her institute. For Arnie, it was different. Arnie was at Menninger’s and after the lawsuit was filed several members of the psychology leadership at Menninger’s shunned him, a development that to this day is hard for me to accept. Despite this, Arnie went on to train at the Freudian Society in DC and had a very successful practice in the Tampa area. He has been one of my most trusted friends now for over forty years. Helen has now retired from a distinguished psychoanalytic career and has devoted herself to a long-neglected talent as a painter in Los Angeles.
We now had the legal analysis, the attorneys, the plaintiffs, and strong support in the clinical psychology community for the lawsuit. There was just a small matter of money to be resolved. When Wallerstein and I met decades after the lawsuit, he told me that the American had heard that I had been given a million dollars by the APA to fund the lawsuit. This was one of those apocryphal stories that emerge from the fog of war. APA contributed nothing to the lawsuit.
Of course, I was aware of the financial issue from the beginning. I knew it could be “expensive,” even thinking the price tag might go as high as fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars. Undaunted, I reasoned we could surely find fifty to seventy-five people who cared enough about the issue to donate a thousand dollars to it and the cost would not be a problem. Also, it should be noted that the Division 39 Board voted to tax its membership $15 apiece for a couple of years to raise several thousand dollars towards lawsuit expenses.
I was a little off in my estimate. By the time the lawsuit settled in 1988, we had spent over six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Stromberg never billed us and seemed as committed to the matter as we were. Fortunately, rumors swirled that we were very well-heeled, and money was never a problem. The lawyers believed in the case, and we simply fought on.
We filed the lawsuit on March 1, 1985, in the Southern District of New York. We drew a very good judge, Jack Weinstein, who was well respected in legal and anti-trust circles. The defendants filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit arguing that this was a matter of academic freedom and not financial motivation. Fortunately, by this time, we had an enormous amount of information culled from the APsA’s own documents in which they talked about the “unwanted economic competition” that would result were they to let other qualified mental health professionals be trained in the field of psychoanalysis.
Judge Weinstein, in his opinion, rejecting the defendants’ argument that this was about academic freedom, said that the plaintiffs had already shown “more than a hint of economic motive” on the part of the defendants. With those words we knew our lawsuit would become a matter of grave concern to the defendants. If they were motivated by economic considerations as their own documents said, they were in violation of the antitrust laws.
Throughout this time each side was taking depositions of key witnesses on the other side. I waited outside the room for Arnie Schneider to finish his deposition and will always remember Arnie coming out shaking his head as if he had water in his ears from swimming. He was quite stunned for a few days but, fortunately, bounced back rather quickly. Of greater significance for the progression of the lawsuit, was that some of the officials of the American Psychoanalytic openly admitted that economic motivations played a role in the deliberations about whether to open training. Homer Curtis, then the chair of the American’s Board of Professional Issues was especially honest about this in his deposition. Our case grew stronger.
There is no question but that the process of a deposition is unpleasant, to say the least. Personally, I was deposed for seven days on three different occasions. Depositions are not places where deponents can win their case. They can lose it, however. During the first three days the American was represented by a prominent New York attorney, Lew Kaplan, who later went on to become a federal judge in New York. He was in the news most recently for presiding over Donald Trump’s civil rape case. Kaplan was quite aggressive, challenging, and generally unpleasant to deal with. I do remember later telling Stockhamer that my association to the deposition experience was like being told I had to go into a room with a giant wet gorilla. My job was to hold on to the gorilla without being thrown off for three days, and, if I could do so, I would win.
I did not come out of the encounter with Kaplan feeling terribly victorious or effective. But neither did I lose. Eventually the American changed attorneys and hired Joel Klein whom I had known slightly at Harvard Law School where he was highly respected. Joel went on to become the chancellor of the New York City school system and played other high-profile roles in the legal community after the lawsuit.
Probably the most dramatic event during my seven days of deposition occurred in the last day, when I was being questioned by the attorney for the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Mark Bunim. During his questioning, Bunim suggested that because the plaintiffs were contending, we were qualified to be psychoanalytic candidates that we would be obliged to certify our mental health by entitling the defendants to access our personal psychoanalytic records. The room fell silent at the suggestion. However, I was well aware that in addition to the legal dimensions of the lawsuit there was also a public relations dimension. I was quite opportunistically cognizant that Bunim’s transparent attempt to threaten this exposure would backfire with many members of the American and would only heighten support for the plaintiffs. The words were no sooner out of Bunim’s mouth than I turned to the stenographer to make sure that she had the assertions on the written transcript of the deposition. She assured me she had.
Fred Pine was sitting in the waiting room and was scheduled to do the next deposition. When he heard about the Bunim statements he was appalled as were many members of the American. When the American wrote to their members to explain the matter, then-president Richard Simons said we had accused Joel Klein of making the comments. He quoted something Klein did say about the matter but that was different from Bunim’s statement and was not nearly so offensive. This only further complicated the situation and when it was clarified that we had correctly identified Bunim as the culprit, trust in the American by its members was further eroded.
At this point the lawsuit was reaching a critical issue. With Judge Weinstein’s earlier ruling that we had shown economic motive on the part of the American it was clear that the four plaintiffs would probably have our day in court. The remaining question was whether the court would “certify the class,” that is, say that we really were representing the large class of mental health professionals who had been similarly aggrieved by the policies of the defendants. This would make the defendants liable for the vast economic damages that the entire class had suffered. If that happened the chances of the American changing its policies, which is what we were after, were much greater. Stromberg wrote a strong brief explaining why we were representative of this larger class, and we awaited Joel Klein’s reply.
I was stunned when I got it. Klein argued that the American did not discriminate against other mental health professionals and in fact had been training them all along. He cited numbers drawn from just the previous year in which the American had been admitting non physician mental health professionals on a widescale basis. Almost forty percent of them were psychologists and social workers. This was, of course, two years after we had filed the lawsuit and was completely at odds with the historical reality of the American’s refusal to train psychologists. For about thirty minutes I was incensed at the audacity I attributed to the brief and its historical revisionism.
I sat at my desk in my office at the APA building and, as I cooled off, I suddenly realized that this was a golden opportunity I had not been anticipating. All along the American had asserted it would never surrender its right to set its own training standards. This was in effect a face-saving way out in which the American could maintain their principles. I called Stromberg and said that if the American claimed they were already training us to the tune of almost forty percent of their candidates, that all they had to do was commit not to back off from that policy and we could have the framework for a settlement. They had been denying that they ever restricted their teachers, so they would simply have to sign a binding agreement to that effect. Based on my discussions with Wallerstein, I knew the members of the International Psychoanalytic Association would gladly drop their exclusion of psychologist institutes in America. Thus, the three prongs of the restraints we were objecting to would be resolved. Psychologists and social workers could either train in the American Institutes, or we would have enough people so trained as potential teachers that they could set up their own institutes. In psychology, there was a mix of opinions on which way would be preferable, and I myself was uncertain about it.
We spoke with Joel Klein, and I think it fair to say both sides felt it was an opening to a possible resolution. There was of course the financial issue. We had asked for damages and legal fees. However, the reality was we were never concerned with the damages and in fact had promised several psychologists with close ties to the American that we were not seeking to cripple the American financially. We quickly agreed in principle that the American would pay our legal fees which totaled about $650,000 at the time, and we would forego damages. I was, of course, also aware that this would greatly appeal to the American’s insurance carrier who could then be expected to add pressure to the American to settle the matter. The international quickly agreed to the structure of the proposal and agreed that they would admit psychology institutes to the IPA.
The only glitch was the American’s abhorrence of the idea that they should agree to any “quota” in their settlement. And, of course, their assertion that they were training nearly forty percent non-physician candidates was essential to the substance of the settlement. So, we went back and forth to come up with language that could resolve their concern but also alleviate our concern that they would simply back off from their representations in the brief. We arrived at some language that I think did satisfy both concerns which was that the American would not “back off” from their-then professed training of nonMD mental health professionals. Here too, it seemed to me at the time that if we could get a significant number of people trained so that we could set up qualified institutes of our own with credibly trained psychoanalysts, it really didn’t matter what the American did after a few years. Of course, as it turned out the American is now heavily integrated with psychologists, social workers, and marriage and family counselors.
An unexpected problem for me came up in relation to the International Psychoanalytic Association. Wallerstein ‘s term of office was up, and he was replaced by Joseph Sandler of the Hampstead Clinic. I had read several articles by Sandler and was impressed by the eloquence and sensitivity they seemed to reflect. When I met him in person to discuss implementing the lawsuit settlement, I did not find him that way. Stockhamer, Jay Kwawer of the William Alanson White and I spent a day or two trying to iron out these difficulties with Sandler and officers from the IPA in some of the more acrimonious meetings of the entire lawsuit era.
But with the main issue of training now resolved, I was becoming preoccupied with psychology’s Medicare campaign in the late 80s, the CAPP V Rank hospital practice lawsuit in California, and the impending push for National Health insurance that was taking shape at that time. As a result, Helen Desmond and Arnie Schneider took over the interactions with the International. While today I think those problems are largely resolved they did not get resolved without a great deal of inconvenience and organizational stress for the psychology institutes in their application process to the IPA.
What effect has the lawsuit had?
It is hard to believe it has now been thirty-five years since the settlement of the lawsuit. What did it all mean? Whatever our foibles, there is no question it was also a genuinely idealistic initiative. In 2003 the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association devoted an issue to the lawsuit. In the lead article, Richard Simons who had been the president of the American at the time of the lawsuit, opened with the following: “On March 1,1985 an event occurred that would change the American forever.” I do not think anyone could disagree with this statement. At the most obvious level, the psychoanalytic enterprise in America in all aspects is now heavily driven by psychologists, social workers, and marriage and family therapists. But I also believe this change, in turn, has come with other far more important changes.
For its adherents, psychoanalysis is Western culture’s deepest attempt to explore and understand the human mind. Most of us would quickly agree that the subject matter is complex and daunting. However, if we add to that recognition the fact that every mind we study is different from every other mind and, even more, that every mind we study is in a constant state of flux (including the one we ourselves use to study the patient’s unique and ever-changing mind,) the only thing we can really say with any certainty is that we truly know very, very little about what we are up against. With this recognition, to suggest that any one form of training in the human experience, even one as impressive as medical training, should be given sole access to participation in that enterprise is silly.
And with such presumptuousness, can come an unfortunate arrogance. I would certainly not claim that the lawsuit has eradicated the seductive capacity of psychoanalysis to bestow a mantle of narcissistic superiority and omnipotence to those trained in it, be they physicians, psychologists, social workers, or marriage and family therapists. I also worry, as a result, that many, if not most of us, have been analyzed by someone who was trained in a culture of specialness and superiority.
Hopefully, as the field grows more diverse, however, both in terms of backgrounds and ideas, the complexity becomes so great as to challenge the spurious certainty of even the most narcissistic among us. As we open our awareness to issues of gender fluidity, gender equality, our bizarre attempts to differentiate ourselves based on our skin color, the psychological implications of social injustice, and so many more things that now are slowly gaining access to psychoanalytic inquiry, we must admit to our most profound ignorance. And with the recognition of that profound ignorance comes a humility and a more genuine ability to form a truly equal partnership with our patients. In so doing, hopefully, we will be able to transcend our rather unfortunate history of not tolerating differences of opinion within the field of psychoanalysis.
Substantively, in addition to the evolution of our understanding of social justice, I believe the integration of Eastern and Western thought is one of the most hopeful frontiers facing psychoanalysis. Freud’s use of free association, connecting one thought with another and exploring the unconscious processes that drive these connections has been extremely helpful to me personally, and I believe for most of us reading this paper. However, the Eastern contemplative tradition with its emphasis on the space between those thoughts provides a badly needed supplement to that process. It is in those spaces between the cognitive processes of free association where one connects with a vastness in which love, tranquility and an unending and inborn awe become manifest. With the accessibility of those realizations, searching for meaning outside our own experience becomes tragic and neurotic striving. We commit Adam’s original sin of leaving the Garden of Eden.
Again, I thank Bill Fried and the editors for granting me this forum and for the opportunity to reminisce about a wonderful period of my life.
References
Freud, S. (1959).The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,20():1-292
Kapleau, R. P. (2013). The three pillars of Zen. Anchor.
Schafer, R. (1970). The psychoanalytic vision of reality The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 51(3), 279–297.
Simons, R. C. (2003). The lawsuit revisited. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 51, 247-271
Socarides, C. W. (1989). Homosexuality: Psychoanalytic Therapy.[1978]. Northvale (NJ): Jason Aronson.
Wallerstein, R. S. (1989). Lay analysis: Life inside the controversy. Analytic Press
