ABSTRACT
The frontiers of research and creativity in psychiatric theory and practice—once the proud domain of psychoanalysis—have now shifted to other areas, and psychoanalysis is in serious danger of becoming a tight little island of devoted technicians plying a fading trade in the gathering twilight of its senescence.” The independent psychoanalytic institutes of the thirties were the only places where a young psychiatrist could get the kind of psychodynamic training and experience that would enable him to understand the hidden motivations and conflicts that lay behind his patients’ symptoms and behavioral patterns. The isolated psychoanalytic institutes, independent of university interdisciplinary connections, which grew out of the enforced isolation of the early psychoanalytic movement, have tended, for the most part, to become perpetuators of a tradition rather than centers for the exploration of new frontiers in our field.
