The New Center for Psychoanalysis is a psychoanalytic research, training, and educational organization that is affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association. It was formed in 2005 from the merger of two older psychoanalytic organizations, the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (LAPSI) and the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and Society (SCPIS), which had been founded as a single organization in the 1940s and then split around 1950.
History of Psychoanalytic Institutes in Los Angeles Psychoanalytic study groups are documented in the Los Angeles area from the late 1920s, with influence from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute The Los Angeles society was initially associated with the California Psychoanalytic Society in San Francisco, which later became the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and Institute after the Los Angeles group became independent. The first formal psychoanalytic institute in Southern California was founded in 1946 as the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, with key figures including Ernst Simmel, Otto Fenichel, May Romm (an analysand of Sandor Rado), Frances Deri, and Hanna Heilborn. Early members included psychoanalysts who had left Europe to escape Nazi persecution and the turmoil of the Second World War. Like psychoanalytic institutes and societies in some other American cities, the Los Angeles Institute and its successor organizations split several times over the second half of the 20th century. One major source of schismogenesis was the conflict between the dominant ego psychology/neo-Freudian position and increasing interest in the ideas of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, and later of Self Psychology and other developments. Another major factor was disagreement over the role of non-physician psychoanalysts. In Europe, where psychoanalysis began, Freud himself was trained as a physician and his ideas were very influential among many psychiatrists and other physicians. However, some early figures in Freud's movement included non-physicians, such as his daughter Anna Freud, and he defended the notion of non-physician psychoanalysts in his essay on lay analysis. A number of later prominent European psychoanalytic thinkers such as Erik Eriksen and Harry Guntrip were also non-physicians. In the United States, the American Psychoanalytic Association was a nearly all-physician organization for many years, and opposed the expansion of psychoanalysis to non-physicians. This played out in a number of conflicts among American psychoanalytic institutes and societies, as psychologists and some other academics and clinicians also wanted psychoanalytic training and to practice psychoanalysis. (This ultimately resulted in a lawsuit in the 1980s, and American psychoanalytic institutes have all admitted non-physician candidates since at least 1992). In 1950, the Los Angeles Institute split over the issue of non-physician analysts. The Institute for Psychoanalytic Medicine of Southern California broke away in that year, later changing its name to the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and Society (SCPIS, sometimes affectionately pronounced "skippy"). SCPIS focused on physician members, while the group that retained the name of Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (LAPSI) began to allow training of psychologists. It also pioneered research psychoanalysts, individuals with advanced degrees in social sciences, humanities, law, or some other fields who wished to complement their academic and professional work with psychoanalytic training. The SCIPIS group included May Romm, Martin Grotjean, Judd Marmor, among others. During the 1970s through early 1990s, several other psychoanalytic institutes were founded in the greater Los Angeles in response to differences of opinion over the direction in which psychoanalysis should go. The Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS), an organization of psychologists and educators, was founded in 1970. From the beginning, it offered training to a wider variety of health professionals than just physicians and PhD-level psychologists. Kleinian analysts had existed within both SCIPI and LAPSI but as minority viewpoints in both organizations. The Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC) was established in the 1980s with a specific focus on the works of Melanie Klein and her associates; it joined the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1989. Another source of controversy, similar in some ways to the earlier impact of Kleinian-Bionin theories, was the emergence of Self Psychology from the writings of Heinz Kohut and his interlocutors in the 1960s and 1970s. Analysts devoted to self psychology and intersubjective approaches formed the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in 1990. Robert Stolorow, one of its founders, was a major figure in intersubjective psychoanalysis on the West Coast. In the early 2000s, leadership of both SCIPI and LAPSI began discussing a potential merger. Membership was declining across most psychoanalytic institutes in the United States (for a variety of reasons including changes in insurance coverage for long-term psychotherapy and changing institutional pressures, fewer psychiatrists and psychologists underwent full analytic training), and some of the earlier controversies such as admission of non-physician psychotherapists, had become irrelevant. SCPIS and LAPSI formally merged in 2005, with headquarters at the prior LAPSI building on Sawtelle Boulevard.
Associated figures Persons who have been associated with the New Center for Psychoanalysis or its predecessor organizations include the following:
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