Childhood in World War II: German Psychoanalysts Remember

Abstract

The dynamic and developmental issues confronted by a generation of German psychoanalysts who were born between 1930 and 1945 are studied through a questionnaire and follow-up interviews. These individuals grew up in a society that, due to the collective guilt of its adults, either superimposed general self-idealization or self-acquittal with respect to those who were identified as perpetrators of this trauma, or would not address or process the trauma, at all. In addition, these psychoanalysts, in their responses, perceived their own training analysts, part of the older generation, to have unconsciously, or perhaps even consciously, participated in the collective guilt or self-idealization process.