Psychoanalysis as Psychohistory or Why Psychotherapists Cannot Afford to Ignore Culture

Let me begin with a personal anecdote. Some years ago, my family and I visited a friend and her daughter in Brussels in Belgium. The woman we visited is a commissioner in the European Economic Community and is approximately 10 years older than I am, born, I would think, around 1940. She comes from a Jewish family and survived the Holocaust, with her parents and siblings, by hiding in Brussels. During our visit, we made a walking tour of the city and, turning a corner, came upon a small construction site in the sidewalk. There was a hole in the pavement, about a yard deep, with a wooden walkway over it and a railing. But when our Belgian friend saw this construction site, she cried out in a panicked voice, “Watch out! Be careful! It's dangerous!” In reality the construction site was not dangerous, not even for our children. But her reaction, her panic-stricken reaction, was so familiar to me. My father could have—would have—reacted in the same way. He too survived the Holocaust, fleeing Austria as a young man in 1939. And I must confess that I too have this panicky reaction at times. The world is bright and colorful, the sun is shining. But then out of the corner of the eye one glimpses a little spot of gray, and suddenly one is seized with a terrible anxiety that this little spot will suddenly cover the whole colorful scene in black. From our contemporary perspective, the source of this so exaggerated reaction is not difficult to identify. It was produced by the historical reality of the Holocaust. It happened once, exactly like that. The world was bright and colorful, the sun was shining. But suddenly one found oneself in the middle of a lethal situation. What today seems such an unrealistic and inappropriate panic was, back then, a realistic and appropriate reaction to a situation of extreme danger. The relatives of my father, his aunts and uncles who did not have his panic-stricken reaction and remained in Austria, were all exterminated. I have related