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Three events in the history of English-speaking psychoanalysis converged in the year 1945. Anna Freud's war nurseries closed; the Controversial Discussions in the British Psychoanalytical Society concluded; and The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (PSOC), founded and edited by Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris, began publication. Papers that appeared in PSOC in its early years constitute, in part, a response to the first two developments. They also provide an ongoing engagement with the theoretical and clinical evolution of postwar psychoanalysis whose origins reach back to the 1920s and 1930s.
This essay explores the history of PSOC from its founding in 1945 to 1965. It identifies leading contributors to the journal, examines the theoretical and clinical problems that they addressed in their writings, and traces, in the wide range of their contributions, the new directions in postwar psychoanalysis found in its pages. An objection may be raised that exploring the development of postwar psychoanalysis through the lens of PSOC is overly restrictive, since the journal represented a chiefly “Freudian” point of view. Our response is twofold. First, the authors published in PSOC were not doctrinaire and did not seek to rigidly impose Freud's late theoretical revisions. They saw themselves as providing analysts with new ways of thinking about the vicissitudes and complexities of development, the influence of aggression, and the functioning of the ego. Heinz Hartmann made this point in “The Mutual Influences in the Development of Ego and Id, “presented at the Seventeenth International Psychoanalytical Association meeting in Amsterdam: