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In the wake of the defection of the three prominent dissidents Adler, Stekel, and Jung, the first major political crisis in psychoanalysis and a portent of many more to come, Freud (1914) published “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement.” Movement or science? Freud claimed for psychoanalysis “the right to be valued as a science” (p. 59), vigorously polemicizing against hostile critics and horrible heretics. Freud also conceded that the young science he created was a “scientific movement [with] upheavals and dissensions” (p. 49). But upheavals and dissensions were not only scientific (chiefly about theories of disorder and at that stage, less about technique)—they were political, over power and control of the organization, and fueled by jealousies and rivalries. For the very notion of a movement is inherently political: it is a program defined by platforms and planks. Coeval with the birth of psychoanalysis, started by Jews, Breuer and Freud, for example, another movement, political Zionism, was being born, started by another Viennese Jew, Theodor Herzl (with whom Freud would occasionally exchange friendly nods on the same Berggasse where he lived and worked). The first congress of the latter movement was held in Basel in 1897 while Freud was busy writing his revolutionary The Interpretation of Dreams. The very notion of a movement ipso facto implies its social, cultural, and historical context. This is Eran Rolnik's guiding principle in Freud in Zion, particularly the inextricable bond between psychoanalytic science and psychoanalytic politics.
Rolnik, an Israeli psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and historian, has given us a splendid, thoroughly researched book on the history of psychoanalysis as a sociopolitical movement against the backdrop of cultural and social trends in Jewish Palestine, from the end of World War I in 1918 to the early days of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Rolnik's chosen focus is in part supported by Freud himself. Freu