EDITH KURZWEIL
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began by telling us that he had learned German by reading Freud,
that Freud had been at home in a number of languages - from Latin
and Greek to Czech, Yiddish, German, French and English - and
that it was his use of these other languages and cultures that made
him who he was. As might be expected, the Viennese analyst Harald
Leupold-Loewenthal vehemently objected to elevating the formative
influence of language over that of Vienna in Freud's life.
On the last day, the Freudians evaluated their "profoundly
moving congress." They would have wanted to explore the Nazi
phenomenon further, would have liked to understand more about
"mass psychosis, murder, phobia, and questions of identification
with a leader." But, they never referred to the massive literature on
,the subject by political scientists, sociologists or psychologists, either
because they were unfamiliar with it, or because the focus on con–
scious phenomena was discarded as unsuitable or too superficial.
Nevertheless, there were implications of the need for a political agenda,
when "activists" mentioned Freud's "Letter to Einstein," and their
opponents obliquely referred to Freud's foolish politics that sup–
ported the Austrian emperor at the beginning of World War I, or to
his wish for putting science above politics. Apparently, these issues
had been dealt with by the organizers, who, under the aegis of the
IPA president, Adam Limentani, had held out against the "peace–
nicks'" pressure to schedule an "official" rally as a congress activity.
Instead, they compromised by setting it up at the university.
I went in the hope of hearing that psychoanalysts might have a
special contribution to make, that their (unequalled) ability to pene–
trate the deepest layers of human anxiety might illuminate the mech–
anisms that make us overly aggressive. Instead, Hanna Segal of
London gave the standard disarmament speech. Had her picture of
the danger of annihilation done more than repeat (and even distort)
the evils being perpetrated by the United States and Great Britain,
had she even mentioned the existence of the Soviet Union as some–
thing other than a peace-loving nation, or the danger of nuclear
weapons in such countries as Pakistan or Libya, a viable dialogue
might have been started. But under the circumstance, her conten–
tions that "we are preparing for a war against an external enemy in
order to face internal problems," in fact amounted to a call for uni–
lateral disarmament. I could only marvel at the uncritical acceptance
of her so-called facts by around three hundred independent analysts
and at their lack of political savvy. In psychoanalytic terms, her diag–
noses of paronoid mechanisms (like those in perversions), of our
