Editorial

In the history of psychoanalysis, crucial issues which started life in the context of debate often subsequently gave rise to violent schisms and expulsions from the International Psychoanalytical Association. Sadly, such schisms and expulsions also tended to foster narrow introspection within analytic institutions, and unchallenged traditions were established about what should or should not be read: Freudians, for example, read little Jung and Jungians read little Freud.

It has always been one of the principal aims of Free Associations to inform readers about the variety of and difference between psychoanalytic perspectives, and to encourage debate across traditional divides. In this issue, we first report on psychoanalysis in Germany. We feature the work of Helmut Dahmer, the editor of Psyche, the main German psychoanalytic journal since World War Two. In an interview with Martin Stanton, Dahmer discusses the ‘de-realization’ of the Nazi period post—1945 and psychoanalytic approaches to this; he also extends this analysis to responses to the unification of East and West Germany.

We also publish a previously untranslated article by Dahmer on the importance of social research in German psychoanalytic work, and a report by Evelyn Heintges on the recent dissolution of Psyche, which has shocked the German psychoanalytic community. To complement this, we include a paper by Anthony Elliott which discusses several of the key psycho-social concepts worked out by two of the leading lights of the Frankfurt School — Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno — and critically assesses their implications for the analysis of subjectivity, the unconscious and social relations.

Although the split between Freud and Jung may traditionally be viewed as terminal, such traditions certainly do not apply to all contemporary Freudians and Jungians. In Britain, discussion and