ABSTRACT
The agreement fashioned in New York in December 1986 between the officers of the IPA and of the American did not, of course, immediately erase all the escalated tensions within the American or between the American and the IPA over the question of lay analysis. An example was the distressed letter to Simons, as President of the American, and Orgel, as Chairman of the Board, from Morris Peltz, Chair of the Education Committee of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute on December 27. On behalf of the Education Committee of one of the American’s institutes that was in full sympathy with the IPA’s position on the issues in contention, Peltz wrote:
The San Francisco Institute felt that the best course for psychoanalysis in America scientifically and professionally would consist of a fully adequate opening the doors of the existing approved Institutes in the American to properly qualified nonmedical mental health professionals. [In my prior letter of December 10] I expressed our collective concern that the guidelines being proposed for its operation by the Davis Committee would inevitably reflect a spirit of tokenism and second-class citizenship that would be contrary to the very thing we were trying to foster, to offer the best training possible to the best applicants, whatever their mental health disciplinary background, and for the best good of the discipline of psychoanalysis.
