Editorial: Psychoanalysis, Society and Politics

Psychoanalysis has from the beginning had a complex relationship to the surrounding society and to the political movements. On one hand psychoanalysis has aspired to be recognized as a respected science in the bourgeois society. On the other hand there has been a strong tendency to see psychoanalysis as an eternally oppositional and emancipating movement, radically questioning the Establishment. In one of the papers in this issue Michele Ranchetti writes: “It is an often forgotten characteristic of psychoanalysis, that its starting point was the search for something concealed and forbidden (…) Bourgeois decency is far removed from the origins of the psychoanalytical movement and cannot grasp its history.” In a long perspective psychoanalysis seems to be moving in the direction of seeking respectability rather than opening radical perspectives, which may be one of the reasons for the crisis of psychoanalysis that we can see today. Both Michele Ranchetti and Horst Eberhard Richter point to this development in their papers. Richter notes Anna Freud's regret in 1969 regarding a tendency of the institutes to select politically uncritical candidates for training.

One background to how different analysts have arrived at their respective ways of relating to society is the setting in which they have conducted their psychoanalytic tasks. Most of the members of the Vienna Wednesday group were not associated to any university or big medical institutions, but were general practitioners or directors of small sanatoria. In a previous issue of this journal Johannes Reichmayr (1) describes and discusses on the basis of Mühlleitner's Biographisches Lexicon der Psychoanalyse (2) the implications this has had for how psychoanalysis has evolved. Reichmayr writes “…future research (…) could prove that the classical form of psychoanalytic private practice had more resemblance to a mini-sanatorium than was hitherto assumed”. Reichmayr also observes that “some of the early members of this gr