Psychoanalysis, Society, and Politics

It should come as no surprise to our readers that we dedicate this issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis to the ways in which the field of psychological research founded by Sigmund Freud can help us understand and deal with social and political problems, now that the war in the Ukraine has been going on for more than three months. One of us (M.C.) owes to the book by Andreas Kappeler Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine (Kappeler, 2022) the welcome and necessary knowledge of the complexity of the history and the development of the national identity of the Ukrainian people, a process which has been going on for several centuries, and which reminded him of the similar long process undergone by his own country, Italy. Although Italy had already started having a national literature in the thirteenth century, it was only in 1861 that it became a politically unified country. This happened with the Ukraine only in the summer of 1991, but given its position on the border between the European Union and Russia, as well as the lack of an adequate capacity of dialogue with and containment of Vladimir Putin’s aggressive strategy and plans, we are now confronted with the most terrible war we have had in Europe since the end of World War II. And there is no way yet in sight for how such a war can come to the end.

“Psychoanalysis and political economy” by Siegfried Zepf and Dietmar Seel (both from Saarbrücken, Germany) is the first article of this issue. We propose it to our readers also in order to remind them of how much its first author - who passed away in October 2021 aged 84 - was genuinely committed to a socially critical psychoanalysis. No wonder that his 2009 article “Consumerism and identity: Some psychoanalytical considerations” has received 2760 views and occupies second position on this journal’s list of Most Read Articles (see Zepf, 2009). One of us (M.C.) originally met Siegfried Zepf in 1990 through the German “Bernfeld-Gruppe,” a group of colleagues committed