ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some historical background to the modern psychodynamic training institute while identifying certain historical factors which have deeply influenced the plight of the profession. From the first psychotherapeutic institution in Britain to the founding of the most institute, one characteristic stands out in the history of psychotherapy—its meteoric growth during the twentieth century. The genesis of this expansion psychotherapist could locate as early as 1910 when the first group of analysts who were in part responding to the mounting success of psychoanalysis in America, began to actively establish psychoanalytic institutions outside of Vienna. After this first British institute was established there was little institutional expansion within psychotherapy until post-war Britain. As popular acceptance of psychotherapy increased after the First World War, by the end of the Second World War psychiatry’s characteristic hostility towards psychoanalysis was loosening in certain quarters.
