ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis developed almost exclusively as an extension of medical practice by doctors trained in psychiatry and neurology. In 1914, G. Lane Taneyhill at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore offered the first optional course in psychoanalysis, and psychiatrists interested in psychoanalysis asked the visiting Paul Federn for the first training analysis in the US. The medical institutions of the US, in which psychoanalysis found its niche, also served to inhibit its development. In New York, Abraham Brill, following theoretical guidelines adopted in Vienna, accepted only one out of eleven referrals as being suitable for psychoanalysis in the first twelve years of his practice. William Alanson White had the institutional support and relative freedom to create the base that was to lead to the development of interpersonal psychoanalysis – the distinctive US contribution to the development of psychoanalysis. White understood the fundamental radical implications of psychoanalysis for psychiatry.
