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I'm very glad to participate in this important exchange with German colleagues and to comment and add to the ideas in the valuable, provocative, and evocative paper by Dr. Volker Friedrich. His paper is important to the history of German psychoanalysis and to the theoretical and technical issues imposed by the Holocaust.
It is historically appropriate that this Goethe House Symposium was held at the New School which gathered so many refugee intellectuals and provided a forum for psychoanalysts as a “university in exile” during the Nazi era. The title of the Symposium: “Psychoanalysis and Power” was indicative of the fateful consequences for psychoanalysis in Germany through accommodation to Nazi authority and assimilation of Nazi ideology. The influence of external and internal authoritarian or dictatorial power on psychoanalytic organizations, training, and treatment is a subject of vast importance, but the organizational involvement with Nazism elicited formidable resistance to psychoanalytic investigation.
The taboo of Nazism was to have an influence on clinical work with survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust and their progeny, and on psychoanalytic education and the development of psychoanalysis in Germany and in Austria. These exchanges may be understood as part of an analytic process of working through of unconscious conflicts and identifications, which far transcends the ability to mourn and to remember. One of the greatest problems analysts face has been with a disowned and disavowed horrifying past with which they are identified. Analytic confrontation with previously unimaginable