The Transformation of Psychoanalysis in America

Abstract

Part I reviews the role of the Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration of the American Psychoanalytic Association, chaired by Lawrence Kubie and Bettina Warburg, members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, in facilitating the immigration to the United States of scores of European analysts and candidates between 1938 and 1943. The challenges facing the committee are outlined in reports written by Kubie and Warburg. In particular, the intractable problem of how to integrate European lay analysts into the American Psychoanalytic Association was an ever present problem. Part II describes the impact emigré analysts had on the intellectual life of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and considers how the psychoanalytic work of the emigrés was influenced by their move to America. The reminiscences of two emigré analysts, Peter Neubauer and Kurt R. Eissler, on their experience of coming to the United States close the paper.

In all questions, my interest is not in the individual people but in the analytic movement as a whole. It will be hard enough here in Europe in the times to come to keep it going. After all, we are just a handful of people who really have that in mind &

“…Yet one should also not forget the fact that the Committee, like Jones in London, had to depend on governmental decisions taken in Washington DC, where Roosevelt in March 1938 for instance was still trying to reach a simultaneous agreement between various countries to “ower their restrictions against the immigration of refugees, so that no one country will have to carry the entire burden”. I think Kubie was referring in his report to the famous intergovernmental conference on refugees held in Evian, (France) in July 1938, 325 at which very little was achieved.For a more detailed analysis of all those problems see the very important and well documented paper of N. Thomson (2010).…”