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.
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.
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,[7] 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.
[8] 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.
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.