In the summer of 2001, at the IPA meetings in Nice, I received some disquieting news from the IPA’s current president, Dr. Daniel Widlocher. He announced his concern that psychoanalysis is no longer compelling enough to enlist young, worthy people into its service for the requisite number of years it takes to become an analyst. The widened pool of a few years ago, which included psychologists, social workers, etc. – a pool that never would have been imagined possible 50 years ago – has now shrunk.

Other luminaries also remarked on the abysmal facts, including Dr. Kernberg, outgoing president of the IPA. This news, it turned out, was pervasive enough to affect the discussion group I attended, as well. It was a German-speaking group; but one member was polite and gracious enough to provide a very comprehensible translation, and the participants kindly shared their remarks in both English and German whenever they could. This, perhaps, added some elanto the meeting. The topic – the fact of the paucity of candidates applying to our institutes – occupied the group until the close of the meeting, at which time people left in not so elated a mood.

What I found interesting were the participants’ anecdotes about the overbearing, sometimes crushing, atmosphere that was stifling their membership. And yet there was nothing, they claimed that they could do about it. I was not surprised by the revelation of such authoritarianism. What psychoanalytic society has not suffered such tyranny? Even so, I found it incredible that the people creating and maintaining such an oppressive atmosphere are all analysts. They have all been through analysis, gone through the rigorous training – all to no apparent enlightenment.

I received another piece of regrettable news when I attended the May 2002 business meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Philadelphia. There, Dr. Fox, the president, announced that we in America have few residents-in-training – that is, few physicians are applying to our institutes. Young doctors, it appears, see little future in psychoanalysis. Dr. Fox has assigned another doctor, Dr. Glen Good, to this problem and the continuing discussion associated with it.

It is well known that American psychoanalysis faced a similar crisis a number of years ago, when the lawsuit between the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychological Association came to an end. Eventually, the analytic association had to admit qualified psychologists to training – a body of professionals that, 50 years before, would never have been considered acceptable - as a reservoir for a failing candidate population and, of course, as a new source of income. This decision was an incredible change from an earlier time when business meetings at societies and institutes seemed to always include the dilemma about whether psychologists could or could not be trained - discussions that continued for a number of years, always resulting in the decision that psychologists should not be trained under almost any circumstance.

So the truth is out. We are told that at this point, even those pools of secondarily trained people are dwindling. There is an end in sight for psychoanalysis as a field. And after….what? When will the institutes and societies disappear? The universe and its smaller cosmos, the world, is a graveyard for baseless dreams and unfounded hopes; for great ventures that have failed.

Not surprisingly, the keepers of our particular house of wisdom are worried. They say that we must look to ourselves. The American Psychoanalytic Association has hired a marketing firm to gather all of these complaints about our field, our institutes and the people who run them. Our leaders’ solution then? To do what all the really big corporations in America and the rest of the world do: Hire a marketing firm, gather information, assess that information and come up with a solution. This has been done. And the marketing firm’s report was a recital of symptoms of a dying discipline. Reports from the world without, as it turns out, do not flatter us. We are a hierarchy. We are rigid. We deny creativity. We stifle new ideas. We are isolated and arrogant. We are class-conscious and have an old-boy’s network.

Of course, none of this should be news to anyone. A similar report was written by an ‘insurgent’ group of members of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute – of which Dr. Fox is a member – who, in a revolutionary fervor in the early 1960’s overthrew the oligarchy and proclaimed a “people’s republic”. This report similarly detailed the stifling arrogance of the Institute’s leading analysts, who would not permit new ideas to flourish. Did we not learn the moral of this story? As we know, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This report is still available in the Institute’s Los Angeles library but, apparently, we have learned little from the LAPSI experience, both in the APA and the IPA.

Like all of you, I have been anxiously awaiting the answers from our leaders and their reactions to the marketing firm’s report. And now, the outcome is this: the committee at the American has determined that we all must be as amiable and pleasant to people in the outside world as we are to our patients. Indeed, we will receive packets detailing how we are to conduct ourselves in public – in a way that will attract more candidates and give people a better disposition towards analysts and psychoanalysis in general. If people feel we are arrogant and insulated, let us behave differently and create a new impression. That is all.

I had thought that the keepers of our flame, being analysts, would look inward. When someone sits before us and complains bitterly about the state of his or her life, we look inward. Analysts always look inward. We have before us a group of people masquerading as analysts; but all the time, they are truly psychiatrists -–those who want to solve problems with drugs and behavior modifications without looking any deeper. Right now our leaders are behaving more like psychiatrists or even politicians than they are analysts, who hold the truth sacred above all else.

But then, what is the truth about psychoanalysis? Does it contain a great truth, despite the misguided actions of a few of its practitioners? If so, what is the truth?

I believe the one great truth is simply this: that every person on earth has the ability to know the truth of his or her unconscious.

Generally speaking, in science, people do not say, “We are a cultural diversity, so we must have different sciences for this diversity.” People in science do not have a babble of languages, for in science 2 + 2 is always 4, whether you are a white man, brown man, Catholic or Muslim. 2 + 2 is always 4 and no one disputes it. Just as no one disputes the trust of E=mc squared.

Yet of psychoanalysis it is said that we must have a diversity of theories – and indeed we do. We have a tower of Babel, and each tower is full of adherents saying that they are the ones, the only ones, who know what the elephant really looks like…or is it the donkey?

After 100 years of psychoanalysis, we have yet to discover the truth that is accepted within the scientific community at large; the way the truth of DNA is accepted and understood. We are simply bands of people agreeing to theories that go a little way toward understanding the human experience; whether our theory of choice be self-psychology, attachment theory, classical theory, Lacanian theory or Kleinian theory. No one theory has captured the heart and mind of the analytic community the way that E=mc squared has captured the hearts and minds of mankind. And we have 10,000 warheads to prove it.

We are pointed in the right direction when Freud told us that his most valuable contribution was his work in dreams. He was right, for dreams contain the secret plan of each human being’s life. But dream pursuit has gone out of fashion. Few people know how to do it and few argue that it is important to do it.

This is the way that jewels of knowledge disappear from the minds of man; when the keepers of the flame no longer heed the wisdom of the father. If analysts had kept at the mother lode that is the dream, the truth would have been revealed. And this revelation might well have been regarded as our own E-mc squared.

We return to the keepers of our future and we worry along with them; but what answers do they have?

I know that they lack one important answer; one that tells us there must be something wrong right at the root of our practice. There must be something wrong with our paradigms, because our theories are not working. It matters little that, here and there, we can find patients who say their lives have been changed by analysis. Pastors and rabbis can offer similar testimony.

My thesis about the problem confronting psychoanalysis is that we have nothing of value to offer young people, and they know it – and are correct to stay away. The truth is that few physicians come to the field. Few people are coming at all, and no superficial solution will change that fact.

***

The universe is a graveyard of foolish men’s baseless dreams: Men who have never learned the lesson of the law of cause and effect; men who would put human beings above eternal natural law. Everywhere there are ruins of splendor, the old age of decay. Shelley put it perfectly when he described Ozymandias, monarch of all he surveys, looking out over the “lone and level sands” now “boundless and bare.”

The universe is also an endlessly fecund garden of creation and innovation, where a new bold dawn and a rising star are always approaching. Now, in psychoanalysis, it is time for old customs and ideas, old and wrong beliefs, to pass and for us to find our way back to the temple of truth that lies within each one of us. We must change psychoanalysis in a way that is fundamental; we must look to our theories that do not work and to the jewels of knowledge that we’ve let slip past. The motto in murder mysteries is always “look for the motive.” In psychoanalysis it has to be “look for the unconscious”. Look for the dream and the truth it has to tell.