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PARTISAN REVIEW
wig Haesler talked of his countrymen's "projective defenses," which
at first were expressed by never speaking of the unspeakable past
and more recently by admonitions to speak about it. He asserted
that Auschwitz, the crime beyond any example in history, must con–
tinue to be dealt with by analyzing the persecutory phenomena,
along with all the interpretations and pseudo-interpretations. That
task, he asserted, requires
unendliche Anaryse:
both perpetrators and
victims are victims of this past.
The Argentinian Moises Kijak recounted the history leading
up to Auschwitz to refute those analysts who, according to him, have
themselves developed defensive countertransferential responses
when treating concentration camp survivors, and thus have misun–
derstood these patients' accounts. And he refuted theses about the
victims' participation in their own destruction and explanations of
survival as due to "good internal objects" rather than "fortuitous ex–
ternal circumstances."
In
this he agreed with Mortimer Ostow, who,
once again, gave a passionate, historical account of anti-Semitism as
the most important reason why Jews and Germans are bound to
have problems when trying to come together. But Ostow ended on a
hopeful note, reminding us that Germany is the first country ever to
have accepted responsibility for its anti-Semitism by passing restitu–
tion laws.
Leon Grinberg of Madrid introduced the panel on "Analytic
Understanding of Mass Psychology and Ideology" by stating that
ideology - as both a form of knowledge and of concealment - has
changed since Freud wrote about it, because of the increase in
violence, wars, terrorism, drugs, and the threat of nuclear war. A
deeper, psychoanalytic understanding, he urged, is called for. Vann
Spruill of New Orleans, after telling the audience that the break–
down of rules and folk wisdom has allowed for the spread of cults, for
massive deviance, and for shared beliefs expressed in slogans, urged
psychoanalysts to add their special expertise to the anthropologists'
and sociologists' analyses of ideology. Because crowds accept
presented data at face value, he concluded, they must be exposed to
the voice of the intellect, as Freud admonished.
Frederick Wyatt of Freiburg went on to address the fact that
ideologies are not verifiable; they are based on
Weltanschauun–
gen
-
although rooted in the superego. Speaking of young adult pa–
tients, he distinguished between those who are close to ideology by
having made use of current opinions, and those who absorb ideology
into their ego structure and thus become as "impenetrable as a glass
