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their postwar psychotherapies, to wallow in the guilt of their prede–
cessors or to deny it, to ask for forgiveness or shoulder blame, those
were some of the issues they had addressed (or avoided) during their
own precongress meetings . Actually, when the German psychoana–
lysts met in Wiesbaden last fall, the majority allegedly had been more
concerned with professional vindication than with "purging" them–
selves of the Nazi past they had "internalized ." Their declarative
rather than insightful polemics got such analysts as Margarete Mit–
scherlich so annoyed that she decided not to go to Hamburg . For
those who insisted on honest, open confrontation of
all
issues allegedly
were outvoted : the majority wanted to use the congress to get inter–
national recognition, and some of them even objected to open press
coverage . (Most of their foreign colleagues not only were unaware of
these struggles, but did not even realize that the German organiza–
tion had become the second largest component of the IPA in part be–
cause "psychodynamic and psychosomatic illness" became reimburs–
able ailments by the government-backed insurances.)
Inevitably, the organizers tried to compromise without com–
promising themselves : they had to appease their friends , to act as
buffers, and to assure a respectable attendance. The older Germans
who came were concerned for the most part with avoiding clashes
resulting from the tensions among themselves and those tensions the
occasion was bound to provoke . Some of their candidates, however,
did not go along, because they perceived them as too authoritarian:
they talked of analytic issues touching on Nazi ideology; they sus–
pected Nazism in their "analyst fathers," and a few spoke of the Nazi
past within their families in order to overcome it.
Most of the participants had not known that the original theme
was to have been "Mourning, Forgiveness and Reconciliation." But,
as
J
anine Chasseguet-Smirgel, the chair of the program committee,
explained to the press, "No one whose family was exterminated could
be reconciled; none of the Nazis tried ever admitted to more than
obeying orders : they neither asked to be forgiven nor admitted guilt."
By the same token, she continued, they did not want the meeting to
take on the form of a trial: one could not go on blaming the children
and grandchildren, many of whom were born after the war. Still,
because children will identify with their fathers until they work
through their early identifications, psychoanalysis, potentially,
might "cure" them. That was why they finally agreed upon "the fate
of identifications" as the congress theme - identifications with Freud
and their "father analysts," with the German culture and language,
