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Many fears have been stimulated by the prospects of the IPA's meeting in Hamburg, and also hopes that professional and personal communication between German and other psychoanalytic groups will progress toward new levels of depth and ease. I have been asked to put on paper some of my thoughts related to this topic, presumably because I am an Austrian Jewish émigré, because I have had very close personal and professional contact with German psychoanalysts for many years, and because my personal feelings, thoughts, and experiences may parallel those of others. I am keenly aware that some German friends have traveled further than I have along the path of dealing with the past. For me, and I believe for some German colleagues, the increasing depth of our contact has, however, not always been accompanied by a consistent increment in the ease of our contact. We could, of course, gradually deal with topics which became accessible only because of our greater closeness.
In preparation for the meeting, I shall focus on areas of difficulty. We may be very sophisticated in condemning the concept of collective guilt, but as psychoanalysts we know something about the complexities of the development and maintenance of individual psychological boundaries and about processes of identification and their vicissitudes. There is no neat parallel or balance between the tasks that face individuals in different groups. The work of sorting out unconscious