The Correspondence of Edward Glover and Lawrence S. Kubie

Abstract

Lawrence S. Kubie, one of psychoanalysis's distinguished thinkers, had gone from America to be analyzed in London by Edward Glover in 1928-1930. Glover, in spite of all his achievements as a thinker and publicist, has had a bad press ever since he resigned from the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1944. These letters illustrate not just the successful personal relationship between Kubie and Glover, and how both of them were interested in research, but some of their respective struggles within the psychoanalytic movement. Kubie, who was for a time President of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, was able to help Glover remain within the International Psychoanalytic Association by securing for Glover honorary membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association. Glover, who for years had been Ernest Jones's second-in-command, encountered some of the resentment at Jones's autocratic manner of running the British Society. But Glover had taken a key role, allied with Anna Freud, in dissecting Melanie Klein's theories during the World War II Controversial Discussions. (Klein's daughter Melitta Schmideberg, an analysand and supporter of Glover's, was also in touch with Kubie.) After Glover withdrew, and before he successfully became a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society, Kubie secured an offer for Glover to become Clinical Director of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Although Glover decided to stay in London, he remained an outsider; Glover suffered not just from the circumstances of the clash occasioned by the arrival of analysts loyal to Anna Freud and her father's judgment about Klein's ‘deviation’, but his own ideological intolerances ensured his isolation. He was, however, an administrative success at the ISTD, the Portman Clinic, as well as the British Journal of Criminology, and as a teacher of someone like Kubie, who in his own way also became a maverick within American psychoanalysis.