Between Two Wars: Psychoanalysis in Europe, 1918-1938

Abstract

In outline form, the major centers of European psychoanalysis have been described: from the first post-war meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Budapest, 1918, when institutes for analytic training were proposed, to the Anschluss in March 1938, when Vienna was occupied by the Nazis and psychoanalysis on the Continent was extinguished for almost a decade. The emphasis has been on the organization and structure of institutes, chiefly Berlin, Vienna, and London, in that order. As an institutional history, both biographic details and theoretical issues have been kept to a minimum. The exceptions have been the controversies about lay analysis, Melanie Klein's developmental theories, and Ferenczi's innovations in technique. In these issues, some detail is necessary to understand how one institute differed from another within the analytic movement, although they were unified by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). The history of the British analytic community, which survived World War II intact, is highly condensed, and Prague, Budapest, and Paris are briefly mentioned. A history of psychoanalysis in Russia has yet to be written, from its early flowering before and during the Bolshevik revolution (1918-1920) to its swift repression under Stalin in the later 1920s. Among the conclusions to be drawn from these data is the extent to which political events influenced the development of analysis, then in its most expansive phase. Even theory was affected by history, as in the evolution of Freud's repetition-compulsion from observations on the traumatic neuroses of war. Socioeconomic conditions influenced the propagation of analytic ideas, favorably in post-war Berlin, adversely in Vienna. Each country evolved the kind of analysis that suited it best, with a variety of institutions within the same international movement. The causes of these variations in psychoanalytic institutes are a matter for speculation. Some analytic historians have linked Freud's advocacy of lay analysis to his estrangement from the medical establishment of Vienna, or to his dread that analysis might become the "house-maid" of medicine and psychiatry, as in America. Others find the roots of Freud's attitudes toward medicine in his conflicts about becoming a doctor, his yearning for philosophic speculation, which he "sternly held in check." In contrast, psychoanalysis in the United States was always committed to medical education as a prerequisite for becoming an analyst, and, in 1926, there was a sharp break from Freud's defense of lay analysis. Hale, among others, has suggested that the American "medical fixation" was a reaction to the chaotic state of our nineteenth century medical education, with diploma mills and self-taught healers scattered over a vast continent.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)