EDITH KURZWEIL
45
Freudians have reactivated the critical "Bernstein circles" which had been
started in the 1950s in several cities and where analysts pursue such ques–
tions as the status of lay ana lysis and medicalization and relations to reim–
bursing agents. This is not to say that Freudians elsewhere are noncritical,
only that their criticism either remains more private or takes the form of so–
cial protests for equality, peace, or humanity.
In general, much of what app lies to American Freudians can be said to
hold true for their London colleagues, but writ small. Only American
psychoanalysis was in a position to develop unimpeded by war or totalitarian
interference; the Londoners were handicapped by the blitz; the French had a
hiatus of six years; and the Germans' gap of twelve years was multiplied by
the trauma of Hitler's legacy. These events changed the Freudians' lives.
That so many of them emigrated to Anglo-Saxon territory and were
influenced by prevalent social, institutional, and cultural conditions favored the
spread of psychoanalytic ideas in America. In the process, the various influ–
ences on psychoanalysis, and the demands on it, led
to
myriad new readings
and interpretations - all of them defended and attacked. Thus it is no longer
is possible to speak of theoretical coherence.
After 1945, psychoanalytic research primarily originated in the Anglo–
Saxon countries. But mOl-e recently , German critical-cum-psychoanalytic
theory and French feminist-cum-deconstructionist psychoanalysis have been
exported to the English-speaking countries. Freudian, Lacanian, and Kleinian
formulations were expanded upon in South America and, in turn, came back
to Paris, London, and New York in altered versions. Although some of the
ensuing differences also had to do with gaps in translations and with mis–
translations, such timing itself tended to be in response
to
specific temporal
interests and biases. Still, the psychoanalytic institutes that eventually formed
in many cities took on their own personalities, influenced by the theories
preferred by their dominant members as well as by the type of marriage
worked out with psychiatrists and psychologists. Most of all, however,
Freudians everywhere depended upon the press they got from satisfied pa–
tients. And nowhere did they abdicate voluntarily to emotionally easier and
shorter therapies.
Steven Marcus (1984) talked of the overdetermined sequence of de–
velopment within psychoanalysis, leading fi-om Abram Kardiner's cross-cul–
tural observations of superego formation (as indicator of cultural stability)
through Erik Erikson's focus on ego identity (,,'located'
in
the COTe
of
the
individual
and
of communal
cultUTe
due
to
historical accident") to Kohut's
view of fragmentary and discontinuous selves. This describes the American
scenario, although some would argue that theories of the self were already in
