The identity of psychoanalysis: the question of lay analysis

This article, besides being a general historical account of the nature and meaning of the almost century-long controversy over "the question of lay analysis," also had a specific context and purpose. The author was invited to give the plenary keynote address to the winter meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis in Santa Barbara, California, on December 9, 1994. After the passage of the Gaskill Committee proposals by the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1986, the alteration of the Regional Association agreement between the American and the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1987, and the settlement of the class-action lawsuit by clinical psychologists against the American and the International in 1988, this controversy over lay analysis had finally been resolved within the International and all its component organizations, including the American. The American Academy of Psychoanalysis, however, is one organization (with some overlap of membership with the American Psychoanalytic Association) that continues to maintain a bar against any members except medically qualified psychoanalysts. The author agreed to give the plenary address with the stipulation, which was accepted, that he could use the occasion to review this long history of the struggle over lay analysis, and to ask the Academy to reconsider its long-standing policies that now make it a lonely holdout against the evolution and resolution that has taken place in the overwhelming balance of organized institutional psychoanalysis worldwide.