ABSTRACT
The 1938 American ban on any training of nonmedical analysts was never as absolute as it was generally understood to be. Frederic Levine (1989), in citing the three statements published in the Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1938, quoted from the third one, “Resolution Against the Future Training of Laymen for the Therapeutic Use of Psychoanalysis”: “henceforth they will not admit into training for the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis anyone who is not a physician”; but he followed this immediately, quoting from the same brief document, that nonetheless, “each institute remains free to train laymen for the use of psychoanalysis not for therapeutic purposes, but for research and investigation in such non-medical fields as anthropology, sociology, criminology, psychology, education, etc.” (Levine, 1989, p. 7). This was quite in keeping with the way that Martin Bergmann (1988), in an historical account of this controversy, described the American’s attitude during these early years toward those distinguished lay analyst refugees from Europe, trained before 1938, who were admitted to the American’s ranks, like Ernst Kris or Hanns Sachs; that their analytic work in America should be strictly limited to conducting the training analyses of candidates and to teaching Institute courses. (This was, of course, the kind of offer also made at the time to Theodor Reik, which was spurned.)
