The organizational history of psychoanalysis in the Washington D.C.-Baltimore metropolitan area is as convoluted and complex as the intellectual weave that created it. Psychoanalysis started early in Washington, embraced by key U.S. psychiatrists, and it mutated and expanded over the better part of a century. Currents of thought and practice, often in conflict, came to include ego psychology, Freudian revisionism, Sullivanian interpersonal theory, and the use of psychoanalytic theory to understand and treat psychoses. Among the important figures in its history must be counted psychiatric pioneers Adolf Meyer and William Alanson White, the maverick Harry Stack Sullivan and his colleagues Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Clara Thompson, and the determined Viennese defender of orthodoxy, Jenny Waelder-Hall.

The precursor to the Washington Psychoanalytic Society was founded in 1914, with William Alanson White as its chair. Like several...