Chicago Institute For Psychoanalysis - History

History

The Chicago Institute is the second oldest in the United States, preceded by New York five months earlier, and followed by Boston and Washington. It was incorporated on February 25, 1932, with Franz Alexander as the first Director. Alexander’s first associate was Karen Horney who had been another student at the Berlin Institute. Alexander and Horney appointed three more to form the first staff. They were: Thomas French as Lecturer and Clinical Associate, Helen McLean and Catherine Bacon as Clinical Associates. There were also two visiting lecturers: Karl Menninger and Lionel Blitzstein.

From the beginning, the Chicago Institute has nurtured innovative, and occasionally revolutionary, approaches to the psychoanalytic theory and practice originally formulated by Sigmund Freud in Vienna. Alexander wanted to experiment with frequency of sessions, length of treatment and how the analyst should optimally conduct himself. He published his ideas in several books, and became an outspoken advocate for such experimentation. Alexander left Chicago for California in 1955. He was succeeded by Gerhard Piers as the Director of the Institute. The group of analysts who became the dominant voices at the Institute had been greatly influenced by Lionel Blitzstein, who had analyzed them all. Though Blitzsten had been on the early faculty of the Institute, he and Alexander were at odds. With his ascendance the Institute reinstated practices that were considered more in line with the dominant American view of depth and intensity of psychoanalytic treatment. The intellectual leader of this group was Maxwell Gitelson. Joan Fleming became Dean of Education, and the curriculum emphasized a more thorough historical approach to teaching psychoanalysis.

The decade of the 60’s witnessed one of the most vibrant creative periods in the Institute’s history. Two important theoretical developments occurred. One was a collective research project that concerned parent loss. Fleming's research group observed that there seemed to be an arrest of the personality at the age of the child when the parent died, associated with an absence of mourning. From these findings, the group reasoned that intervention at the time of the loss - i.e., in childhood - would effectively prevent later psychological problems. Ten years later, in 1976, the Barr-Harris Children’s grief center opened its doors.

The second major development was the groundbreaking work of Heinz Kohut, who developed his own ideas about the central role of empathy as defining the field of psychoanalysis - a position he staked out in 1959. Kohut had observed the intense reactions that would occur when patients were engaged with others who had not functioned as a needed part of themselves and hence caused injury to that most vital part of their being. But it was this being-part-of that had deep implications for the understanding of both development and treatment. Paradoxically, the understanding of the essential role of the “other” became a psychology of the “self”. All of this offered another, additional way of looking at what the classical theory had charted in its terms. Self psychology has had (and continues too have) an enormous impact on psychoanalytic thought and practice throughout the world.

In the midst of all this groundbreaking intellectual work, the Institute also launched a number of innovative programs. In 1962 it began the Child Therapy Program, the first of its kind in the country. Graduates of the Child Therapy Program have staffed and trained legions of agencies and treatment facilities of all kinds and have been the source of quality child psychotherapy over the last 45 years. A few years later, in 1965, Kay Field began the Teacher Education Program that educated teachers and school personnel about the nature of emotional development and helped them recognize and deal with problems in that development. The program reached hundreds of school personnel. In 1973, under the direction of then-director George Pollock, the Institute began the yearly publication of the Annual of Psychoanalysis. It remains the only Institute in the country - and the world - to sponsor, edit and produce an important academic journal. The 70’s also saw the inauguration of the most complete catalogue of psychoanalytic literature assembled to that point, The Chicago Psychoanalytic Index. Begun in 1970 and continued until 1989, this was the standard reference work for most American psychoanalysts until the recent advent of centralized computer cataloguing. The psychoanalytic library out of which this work arose began with the founding of the Institute and grew to be one of the three most complete psychoanalytic collections in the world.