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It is the signal achievement of this collection of essays in a special issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis edited by Zvi Lothane to place the history of psychoanalysis in the era of fascism into its full European context. Heretofore, psychoanalysts and historians have mostly focused on the fate of psychoanalysis in Germany after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. But psychoanalysis had long been an international phenomenon - indeed, cosmopolitanism had always been one of its hallmarks as a scientific and humanistic enterprise. And of course the Nazis did not confine their depredations to Germany, since the German army proved horribly capable of extending Hitler's power over most of the Continent between 1939 and 1942. By the latter year, the Nazis, even more horribly, had generated the Final Solution to the Jewish “problem,”the event that more than any other would mark the Nazi movement and this European moment. Psychoanalysts in Europe were not implicated directly in Nazi atrocities. Many, most of them Jewish, had to flee - or die - while the rest to varying degrees occupied a space in which, in the words of Lothane's introduction to the volume, “there were neither one-dimensional villains nor saints, nor a clear boundary between the bad guys and the good guys, between black cynics and lily-white idealists, but rather, the more mundane manifestations of short-sighted opportunism” (p. 96). There were heroes, too, though this rightly is not the main concern of the essays in this collection.
The subject matter and, to a lesser extent, the treatment offered in this special issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis also reflect the approach of recent historical scholarship. There is necessarily an emphasis here on the transnational as well as on the traditional interest in affairs of and within nations. The newest literature on emigration and exile is of course highly relevant here, given the psychoanalytic Diaspora occasioned by the political and