Editor's Introduction

The following papers are the proceedings of a symposium entitled “Psychoanalysis and Power” that was held at The New School for Social Research on December 10th and 11th 1994. The event was co-sponsored by the Goethe House New York and the New School. The occasion for the symposium was the opening of a photographic exhibition on the history of psychoanalysis in Germany, which had originally been assembled for the 1983 International Psycho-Analytical Association Congress in Hamburg—the first on German soil since the Second World War—and which had subsequently toured to Paris and London. And, in keeping with the theme of the exhibition, the topic of the symposium was also the history of psychoanalysis in Germany.

However, while the basic orientation event was historical, the content of the presentations was by no means merely archival. How could it have been, given the volatile nature of that history and the significance of its after-effects in the contemporary world? Indeed, as psychoanalysts, we need hardly point out that the past can have powerful effects in the present, especially one as traumatic and insufficiently mastered as this.

All the papers are, then, to one extent or another, related to urgent political issues in Germany today. In his keynote address, Martin Bergmann—who himself has roots in the German Cultural orbit of Central Europe as well as in Israel—discusses Freud's own dual German and Jewish Heritage and the impact of the Holocaust on psychoanalysis. In a candid and highly personal presentation, Volker Friedrich describes the struggle to lift the prohibition on confronting the Nazi years in German psychoanalysis and its effect on his colleagues and himself.

Perhaps the most controversial exchange of the proceedings concerns the legacy of Alexander Mitscherlich, one of the