ABSTRACT
American psychoanalysis began to split apart, literally, on April 29, 1941, when Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and three colleagues stalked out of a meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Psychoanalytic institutes are notoriously unstable and intolerant of divergent points of view, and organizational splits or schisms are common. Any organization needs to be able to construct and exercise for itself the authority required for its work. The professional authority of medicine had only recently been firmly established in this country; it was based on dramatic reforms that physicians themselves had brought about. An external factor profoundly influencing the creation of psychoanalytic authority stemmed from both the influx of refugee analysts from Europe and the death of Freud. Psychoanalysis did indeed virtually take over psychiatry, as the core discipline, the discipline within the discipline, and received virtually unqualified public acceptance. Psychoanalysis has lost its preeminent standing in psychiatry, barely holding its own as one treatment modality among many.
