Edith Kurzweil
THE FREUDIANS MEET IN GERMANY
Ever since the Freudians had met in Jerusalem, in 1977,
when the officials of the International Psychoanalytic Association
(IPA) had turned down a proposal to meet in Berlin, they had de–
bated whether or when to return to Germany; whether it would be
worth exposing themselves to painful memories in order to forget, or
to let time heal the wounds they knew it could not heal. More than
ordinary mortals, they were aware that just being in "Hitlerland"
would bring unconscious memories to the surface, and that these
memories would be unpleasant to assimilate. Even those psycho–
analysts who had worked with German colleagues expected the con–
tact with "German psychoanalysis" to be different from that with the
"select" individuals they knew. Still, they perceived the examination
of the Nazi past as a special challenge to their profession: knowing
"the Others," "the Outsiders," surely would facilitate new, critical
evaluations of the complex, unconscious processes of identification,
in the psychoanalytic meaning of the term, which determine later at–
titudes towards all others, as well as towards aggressors and their
victims. To what extent such identifications, because of the Nazi
past, have been denied, displaced, intellectualized, or otherwise ob–
fuscated, was to be the central theme.
These were some of the considerations by American, and par–
ticularly by emigre, analysts (in July 1985). Would their official re–
turn to Germany be interpreted as condoning the extermination of
six million Jews, or, in more personal terms, would they be betray–
ing the memory of the parents, grandparents, or other relatives killed
in concentration camps? Should they work through these conflicts
together with the German analysts, and could they do so in the ab–
sence of trust? Neither Freud nor Anna Freud any longer could ad–
vise them, and besides, they knew that their own consciences alone
had to guide them. Thus, some analysts went to Hamburg to recover
the past; others brought olive branches; and yet others manifested a
certain amount of what one analyst called "Jewish paranoia."
But American, British, or South American psychoanalysts
were unaware of the turmoils and conflicts plaguing their German
colleagues. To tell or not to tell the murky history of their institutes
right after the war, to publicize or play down the opportunism of
