German themes in psychoanalysis. Part two

In this issue, I am once more taking up the discourse on German psychoanalysis that I began in Issue 4/2013, whose aim is to familiarize readers with the complex and creative evolution of psychoanalysis in Germany after World War II – and with its specific contributions to the international analytic community. To help realize this project, I asked Werner Bohleber to write a paper on the foundation (in 1947) and evolution of the journal Psyche, which contributed so much toward helping our German colleagues elaborate the Nazizeit (1933–1945), and toward promoting the work of mourning that the second paper of Issue 4/2013 represents: “The fate of German-Jewish psychoanalyst-refugees in the Netherlands: An overview,” by our Dutch colleague Harry Stroeken. For the third paper of the issue, I chose Ulrike May’s revisitation of Freud’s “Beyond the pleasure principle,” aiming to document the close dialogue with Freud that the group of German colleagues who produce the journal Luzifer-Amor contribute to the international community. Hans-Jürgen Wirth was the author of the fourth paper of Issue 4/2013, which centered around the abuse of nuclear energy, seen from the social-analytical viewpoint developed in Germany by Horst-Eberhard Richter. Last but not least, the issue contained the interview with Horst Kächele that Ingrid Erhardt and I had undertaken in the spring of 2013, in which he talked not only about his research work, but also about his whole personal and professional development.

In my previous Editorial (Conci, 2013), I referred to the reconstruction of the history of psychoanalysis in Germany that was articulated by the sociologist Edith Kurzweil in 1989, and now I can alert readers to the revisitation of this topic formulated by the historian Anthony Kauders in 2014. Particularly relevant to my presentation of the papers in this issue is Kauders’ division of his subject into a series of chapters associating a certain year with a certain topic, starting with “1913: