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analysts were shaken by the subject itself: trained to use their em–
pathic selves as a "scientific instrument," they increasingly spoke of
denial by victims and aggressors, and by themselves. The subject of
the Holocaust had come alive .
It continued to gain momentum that afternoon, when the de–
bate turned to the history of psychoanalysis during the Hitler period,
which , during the last two years, has been the focus of a bitter (Ger–
man) controversy . Here , Karen Brecht, one of the analysts who had
put together an exhibit on German psychoanalytic history, redeemed
her compatriots by stating publicly that she had found unpleasant
and upsetting evidence of collaboration with the Nazis, and that only
by digging up the entire truth could they overcome the past. She al–
most named names, arguing that the relationship between Jewish
and non-Jewish members needed to be clarified, that institutional
opportunism had to be exposed. For German analysts, it appeared,
the pretext of saving psychoanalysis had obscured the fact that it had
been sacrificed. (In the process, I may add, the analysts' analyses had
had to remain incomplete.) This was demonstrated when the ninety
year-old Jeanne Lampl-de-Groot took the floor and told the audi–
ence about the much-quoted meeting between Freud, Karl Mueller–
Braunschweig and Felix Boehm which she witnessed (she described
the former as a nice weakling and the latter as an untrustworthy ma–
nipulator), after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938. In a moving state–
ment, she recalled how Boehm had claimed that
Gleichschaltung
would
save psychoanalysis. Contradicting the Germans' official history, she
stated that Freud had said: "I cannot and will not prohibit or force
anything on you"; and that he immediately had left the room.
There were other sessions on the past of psychoanalysis : on the
analysts' identification with Freud himself, with the theory, and with
specific aspects of his research. They spoke of Freud's Jewish back–
ground, his Germanness, his sense of humor, of the multiplicity of
selective identifications by his followers, and of guarding against
idealizations. Peter Neubauer described Freud's Vienna
andfin-de–
siecle
culture, where Beer-Hoffmann, Schnitzler, and von Hoffmann–
sthal wrote on psychic suffering, where discussions of the "material–
ists" versus the "mentalists" were common, and where narcissism
was a favored theme. Although this history is known to the older
Freudians, most of their candidates (like the rest of the younger gen–
eration) do not know much about it. Only the French, as Didier
Anzieu soon demonstrated, are conversant with the past - a past that
currently revolves around Paris. Essentially, in a
tour de force,
Anzieu
