Ambivalence, Democracy & Disappointment

The first generation of psychoanalysts quickly saw that the insights they were acquiring in working with individuals had much wider application to society as a whole (Freud, S, 1930, Jones, E, 1924, 1964). Their optimism for the outcomes of the treatment of patients mirrored the high hopes of liberals and the political left for society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a period when there was a significant expansion in the idea of democracy as an ideal, especially in Europe and North America. However, The Great War of 1914-1918 had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, the sacrifices of so many ordinary people and the increased involvement of women in employment outside the home that had been required by the war effort, spurred on the process of democratization. Empires began to unstitch, and people looked increasingly to the expansion of the franchise and the processes of democratic governance to build a better world. At the same time the impact on Freud and some of his colleagues was the increasing pessimism reflected in his correspondence with Albert Einstein (Freud, S 1964). Freud disappointed the great physicist with his downbeat assessment of the prospects for the prevention of future wars. For a time, some other psychoanalysts shared the general optimism of the inter-war years that lessons had been learnt and that new and more peaceful ways of working were emerging with the League of Nations. But when the second global conflict in a generation exploded across the world it was in some ways even worse than its predecessor. It was more truly global; the horrors of the trenches and gas attacks were replaced by carpet-bombing, concentration camps, and the industrial scale mass murder of the Holocaust; and when the conflict in Asia ended, it did so with invention and first use of nuclear bombs.

Again, there was a sense that things had to be done to ensure that ‘never again’ would there be such a conflict, and this time there was a new d