Editorial: Still Water Runs Deep

This issue of International Forum of Psychoanalysis was developed under the editorship of Valerie Tate Angel in collaboration with Helen Adler and Janet Droga

Most of the articles published in this issue of International Forum of Psychoanalysis were presented at the Prague Symposium at the end of August 1995. The focus of the symposium was a dialogue between psychoanalysts from the U.S.A. and the Czech Republic to discuss contemporary perspectives in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. This symposium was hosted by the Department of Psychology of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Charles University in Prague. The unique circumstance regarding this symposium was that for forty-one years, from 1948 until 1989, the practice of psychoanalysis was illegal in the country then known as Czechoslovakia (1). One may wonder how psychoanalysis survived in a totalitarian society, where private practice was forbidden. There is an old Zen saying that one can be still and moving at the same time. On the surface the Czech psychoanalytic community was still, but deep beneath the surface, the exploration of the unconscious was attended to and discussed. To the outside community calm water was on top while underground the stream kept running. Still water runs deep. From the interchange with my Czech colleagues, I realized that during the repressed years under “communism” psychoanalysis was taking place amongst knowledgeable people.

Robert Berk's paper on “The Contemporary Significance of Freud's Early Psychoanalytic Technique” suggests that the tradition of psychoanalysis is embedded in freedom of thought (2). It is significant that in 1995 the Charles University in Prague hosted a symposium in which different perspectives in theory and technique were presented. The fear of discussing psychoanalysis outside of the consulting room has at last been lifted for analysts in the Czech Republic.

The articles in this issue represent the mainstream of the different currents in the field of psychoanaly