The Siegfried Bernfeld conference: Uncovering the psychoanalytic political unconscious

Abstract

In his historical account of the psychoanalytic movement, Russell Jacoby (1983) laments the loss of the radical psychoanalytic tradition. It was a tradition shattered by the rise of Nazism in Europe and the trauma of emigrating to a country that was hostile toward European radical ideas. Coming to America brought a certain amnesia about the past for those Central European psychoanalysts whose vision of psychoanalysis was intertwined with radical political commitments. The horrifying realities left behind made them grateful for the haven they had found in America, but it was a haven that demanded silence about the past. As Jacoby has argued, the price of this retreat into the safer and narrower world of affluent clinical practice was to shed their political radicalism, to relinquish subversive ideas that threatened to be maladaptive in the New World. For a significant number of European psychoanalytic practitioners, however, the critical tradition of psychoanalysis is not dead. In this paper, I describe a recent conference I attended in Frankfurt, Germany that was organized by the Siegfried Bernfeld group, a group of left-wing German psychoanalysts who draw inspiration from the radical psychoanalytic tradition. The conference, attended by approximately 250 psychoanalytic clinicians from various European countries, was based on a unifying interest in the critical potential of psychoanalysis and its social emancipatory role within contemporary society. Participants were individual practitioners, as well as members of psychoanalytic societies. Some sought allies in forming new organizations independent of the established psychoanalytic societies. Others felt that there was a necessary tension between their association with these institutes and their need for separate socialization experiences based on common politica] and intellectual interests.