Opposition To Freud
However, embroiled in a struggle for psychoanalytic respectability, the plurality of Freud's followers were not at one with him on this issue, and opposition was especially contentious in the States. The issue remained heated until World War II - a split with the American Association only being prevented in the 1920s when a compromise allowed lay analysts to work with children alone in New York.
However in 1938, the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) formally began limiting membership of the association to physicians who had first trained as psychiatrists and subsequently undergone a training analysis at a (then European) psychoanalytic institute. The move has been described as initiating an official cleavage with the rest of the IPA which would not be settled until 1987.
During that period, many in the States believed, in Janet Malcolm's words, that "American psychoanalysis is a great cut above psychoanalysis elsewhere in the world...the laxness and sloppiness of English, European, and South American analysis. There are other people, naturally, who... whether too much wasn't lost by this strategy - whether too many good people who are unwilling to go through medical training aren't being lost to analysis". The policy was somewhat softened by the readiness of the APsaA to grant waivers over the decades to a number of individuals: these included, for example, Erik Erikson and David Rapaport. There was also the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis which Reik had founded in 1946 specifically to train non-doctors.
However only when lawsuits were brought in the 1980s alleging "restraint of trade"' was the official American position finally altered, and the question of lay analysis resolved - on a footing of which Freud himself might actually have approved.
Read more about this topic: Lay Analysis
Famous quotes containing the words opposition to, opposition and/or freud:
“Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it, is [in?] his love of justice.... Repeal the Missouri compromise—repeal all compromises—repeal the declaration of independence—repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“It is useless to check the vain dunce who has caught the mania of scribbling, whether prose or poetry, canzonets or criticisms,—let such a one go on till the disease exhausts itself. Opposition like water, thrown on burning oil, but increases the evil, because a person of weak judgment will seldom listen to reason, but become obstinate under reproof.”
—Sarah Josepha Buell Hale 1788–1879, U.S. novelist, poet and women’s magazine editor. American Ladies Magazine, pp. 36-40 (December 1828)
“The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman’s belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)