From Hitler to Historical Evolution (article)

My formal training in psychoanalysis was confined to taking courses at Theodore Reik’s National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City (NPAP). When I got to the level of taking on clinical patients for control analysis I said I wanted to take on people like Adolf Hitler and the institute’s representatives asked me to leave. After that, I learned psychoanalysis from extensive reading on my own, from attending hundreds of scientific lectures at New York psychoanalytic institutes, and — most importantly — from my own personal psychoanalytic treatment. Despite my failure to continue in formal training, I was asked to be an honorary member of the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training. My own experience is that one way to be a psychohistorian — a way I wouldn’t think of condemning anyone else to — is to be 27 years in intensive psychoanalysis, read every psychoanalytic book and journal published, and sit 40 years in a library that has 14 million volumes [the New York Public Library].

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