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Psychoanalysis and politics are related in many ways. One group of their relations can be subsumed under the broad rubric of “Psychoanalysis of Politics.” This includes the applications of psychoanalytic understanding to the matters of state, large group psychology, patterns of leadership and government, rights of individuals, intra- and interstate relations, conflicts between ethnic and national groups, racism, war, and genocide. Prominent contributions in this realm include Freud's (1921, 1930) insights about social institutions and war, Erikson's (1969) study of Gandhi's nonviolent struggle, Mack's (1976) penetrating biography of the Lawrence of Arabia, Volkan's (1976, 1988, 1997) investigations of the Greek-Cypriot conflict and of psychoanalytically-informed conflict resolution strategies, Kestenberg and Brenner's (1996) study of child survivors of the Holocaust, and Helmreich and Marcus’ (1998) reflections upon the relationship between Jews and African-Americans in the United States.
Then there is the “Politics of Psychoanalysis” in both its organizational and theoretical spheres. On the organizational side, such politics ranges from the rivalrous intrigues of the early circle of Freud's followers (Gay, 1988; Grosskurth, 1991) to the convoluted history of nonmedical professionals in psychoanalysis (Akhtar, 1995; Miesels and Shapiro, 1990; Wallerstein, 1999), and from the 1980's antitrust litigation against the American Psychoanalytic Association to the recent emergence of schisms over the IPA-UN Committee's participation in the UN Conference on Xenophobia and Prejudice in Durban, South Africa. One look at Douglas Kirsner's book, Unfree Associations (2000) on splits in psychoanalytic institutes will convince the reader that the path of the psychoanalytic profession has always been politically influenced. Psychoanalytic theory itself has not been immune from such pressures. Fromm's (1950) early expansions of psychoanalytic thought in socioeconomic directions, Kove