ABSTRACT
The arrogant psychoanalyst is a pervasive stereotype in our culture. “Why are psychoanalysts so damn arrogant?” This question has haunted me in countless ways ‒ at conferences, dinner parties, and in casual conversations ‒ even by strangers upon discovering what I do for a living. In an absurd, memorable, moment ten years ago, a woman dressed in a banana costume, dancing and singing on Park Avenue in New York, began chanting: “Freud is an arrogant fraud” when she discovered I was in psychoanalytic training. It feels as though the general census within and outside of the psychoanalytic community is that we are an arrogant bunch. While it can be reassuring to brush these comments off as envious and aggressive projections, there is of course a long tradition of arrogance in psychoanalysis that is a painful reality. The “origin story” of psychoanalytic societies began with arrogance ‒ Freud’s ruthless methods of alienating colleagues who had contrasting perspectives; most notably his notorious “secret committee,” which demanded absolute professional and personal submission with secret rituals and loyalty rings, is the most striking example (Grosskurth, 1991). The tradition of arrogance continued in America with the ascent of psychoanalysis as the dominant model of understanding human psychology beginning in the 1930s, reaching its zenith in the 1950s-1960s. In the highly influential and widely published Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Brenner (1955) confidently wrote: “At present, interest in psychoanalysis is expanding. . . . it seems likely that the current interest in psychoanalysis on the part of psychiatrists and associated workers in the field of mental health will continue to grow” (p. 243). This obviously did not come to pass.
