ABSTRACT
The almost century-long struggle over nonmedical (“lay”) analysis within the American and the International Psychoanalytical Associations is finally effectively over. As chronicled in this book, it has been a long, turbulent, and divisive contest that badly fractured organized worldwide psychoanalysis over much of its history, and that for periods—in the 20s and 30s around the functioning of the IPAs International Training Commission and in the 80s with the lawsuit—was the major focus of psychoanalytic organizational attention and energy. How can we account for the clamor of this struggle and the divisive polarization it created amongst individuals all equally devoted to the well-being of psychoanalysis as they conceived it? What was really at stake?
