ABSTRACT
On 2 June 1933, the distinguished psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Leon Pierce Clark (1870-1933), one of the founders of American psychoanalysis, left his comfortable consulting room on East 65th Street, on the Upper East Side of New York. He made the journey across the East River to the ramshackle Randall Island School for Mental Defectives in order to address (for the third year running) a meeting of the American Association for the Feeble-Minded. On this occasion, Clark presented his paper (1933a), ‘The Need for a Better Understanding of the Emotional Life of the Feebleminded’. He used it to introduce the work of Freudian depth psychology, and told the society about his work with these ideas over the preceding decade. He gave the meeting examples from his case studies, showing the practical application of Freud’s theories in an institutional setting. Clark finished the paper confidently: ‘It is our endeavour to recommend these methods so that they may be carried out on a much larger scale in institutions for this class, and to be more patient to the fact that the potentialities for development in the “ament” [an early term for people with an intellectual disability] are not so hopeless as we have heretofore been led to expect’ (Clark, 1933a p. 354).
