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This issue is a Festschrift celebrating the 70th birthday of Bernd Nitzschke, one among Freud’s oppositional heirs. Freud himself was, however, a rebel with revolutionary theories about sexuality. In 1998, I first saw Nitzschke’s name in Die Zeit citing Freud (1911) on Paul Schreber: “The delusional formations, which we take to be the pathological product, are in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction” (p. 71, Freud’s italics). I wrote to him, we met in 1998, became friends, and collaborated on a number of psychoanalytic projects. This review is my tribute to Bernd’s lifetime achievement as a psychoanalyst and prolific historian of psychoanalysis.
The wide-ranging interview with Nitzschke by André Karger covers major events in his life and evolution from being a student with a passionate interest in philosophy, committed to anti-authoritarianism, freedom, and independence of thought, a participant in Aktion-Sühnezeichen (action reparation), and staying on a kibbutz in Israel, to his being awarded a PhD in psychology and philosophy, and becoming a psychoanalyst. He became interested in Sigmund Freud and other revolutionaries – Wilhelm Reich, Otto Gross, Sabina Spielrein, and Erich Fromm – and authored numerous articles, books, and scholarly reviews about Freud and these followers.
Bertram von der Stein devotes his article to “Grenzgänger,” or borders-crossers, “people who shuttle between two or more disciplines,” and the practices, norms, and rules of different psychoanalytic organizations that developed during decades of dissents and splits between the DPG and DPV in Germany, pleading for building bridges and new relationships in the twenty-first century. He cites Nitzschke’s (2006) essay on the magical triangle of Spielrein, Jung, and Gross.
Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen’s approach to the problem of the revolutionary as rebel against the patriarchs is to examine the life of Otto Gross: psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and enfant terrible between Freud a