When asked to contribute to the new Journal I was keen to help raise awareness of the nature of psychoanalytic controversies. I was initially tempted to write about the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge following Fred Busch's long and interesting paper. However, I decided I wanted to go in a different direction.
Arnold Richards account is interestingly personal, and it touches on the thesis that Doug Kirsner developed in his book Unfree Associations. All political debate and dispute is conducted, of course, at the level of conscious judgement, however diverse that may be within a group or Institute. It has occurred to me for some time that psychoanalysts are unfair to themselves if they deny that there are unconscious motivations even in psychoanalysts. How much of the disputes and bitter controversies have an element of unconscious motivation in them? It has been a guiding thought in my own interest in organisations of all kinds that the seemingly unresolvable conflicts may endure precisely because the dispute occurs at a level outside of consciousness in the individuals, and their solutions are proposed only at a conscious level.
In 2007 I gave a brief paper on the divide between Freud and Jung. This was on the anniversary of their first meeting in 1907. Their dispute started only two years later, in 1909 (Jones 1955), on their trip to Worcester College in the USA. It was never resolved, and the founding of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) a year later in 1910, intended in part to bring together the international groups, never managed to contain the developing conflict. Why, one could ask, did the conscious efforts of sensible professional people not succeed in overcoming the problems of forming a joint association? Mostly, the problem has been personalised as one between Freud and Jung. But might the answer be found in the unconscious incompatibility of some kind between the two groups, Vienna and Zurich? My talk in 2007 gave a preliminary
account of a clash between the two groups at a level of intergroup psychodynamics. It was based on the ideas of group relations and social defence systems as developed originally at the Tavistock Institute, and the A.K. Rice Institute, e.g., Menzies (1959). That brief postulate was developed into a paper published some time later (Hinshelwood 2018). I will give a brief resume of that developed case, and then tackle the enduring division within the British Psychoanalytical Society, enacted as the Controversial Discussions of 1943-1944 (King and Steiner 1991**).
The argument in outline is that in Vienna psychoanalysis was largely an out-patient practice, whilst in Zurich the practice was mainly within the setting of a residential institution, the Burgholzli Hospital. The level of disturbance that psychoanalysts in the different groups had to face was different, and the means for coping with it were therefore different. The hypothesis was that the differences in work each group tackled led to different anxieties, which in turn provoked different mechanisms of defence. For each group these were manifest in forms of practice which were associated with different commonly held cultural attitudes in each group.
This train of effects from anxiety to defence, to collective practices and cultural attitudes, relies first of all on the commonality Freud pointed out in his Group Psychology (Freud 1921). This is exemplified in the argument in Menzies' (1959) paper on the maladaptive practices in a high-stress nursing service, although she modified Freud's group idea to include the sets of joint defences provoked by the common anxieties in the work of nursing. So, this modified the ‘group ideal’ to the extent that it was more than an identification with specific sets of values and attitudes; it specifically includes the attitudes arising from the defences against the common anxieties (see also Jaques 1955). So, the cultural attitudes of the group serve to keep the anxieties largely at an unconscious level for all members. They serve somewhat as the manifest dream does to keep the latent dream hidden and protect sleep, and so on.
When two groups with different tasks, and therefore anxieties, come together it is likely they will have to tackle a difference in their practices and cultures, and in the derived conscious assumptions and practices. Therefore, the unconscious mismatching and its attendant friction raises
the possibility that attitudes needed for defensive purposes would be undermined, with the risk of the anxieties becoming conscious and overtly disturbing members of the groups. So, the cultural attitudes to the work held by one group can be challenged by the different attitudes of another group. Because the friction emerges from unconscious mechanisms of defence, it is not likely to be helped by conscious debate.
And in the case considered, the clash between Vienna and Zurich, it was not. The Jungian element of the IPA was more or less eliminated by 1917. The details of the anxieties and collective defences are given in the recent paper (Hinshelwood 2018).
I want however to mention a particular stress which is probably relevant to all groups of psychoanalysts. One of the most significant anxieties is that of uncertainty. Fred Busch's contribution to this Journal touches on this. And Bion remarked in his campaign to avoid memory and desire:
As a psychoanalyst I was committed to keeping an open mind, while feeling constant pressure, not least from myself, to take refuge in certainty. (Bion 1967, p. 195).
There is a constant pressure to be sure one is right. A patient in a state desperate enough to come for a psychoanalysis requires his analyst to have a competence which he hopes to be an omnipotent one. Straight from these pressures in the clinical setting, psychoanalysts often carry their need to display this limitless competence when talking with colleagues. Debate with others holding diverse points of view with similar tenacity leads to a degree of intransigence. However, despite being a general anxiety, it emerges in different settings, with different kinds of patients, and perhaps in different background national cultures.
To exemplify, I shall briefly summarise the diversity in culture between Vienna and Zurich, and connect this with the difference in the work setting of each group.
Stekel described the early phase of the Vienna Group as convivial, relaxed and informal, and even as offering a safe forum for self-disclosure
(at that time, none of the members had received a full psychoanalytic treatment themselves)—thus: “complete harmony amongst the five, no dissonances… a spark seemed to jump from one mind to another, and every evening was like a revelation” (Stekel, quoted in Gay 1988, p.174).
The impact of the Burgholzli group (Zurich) changed all that. The relaxed tolerant, and even anarchic culture disappeared. Peter Gay's impression was thus:
The meetings grew testy, even acrimonious, as members sparred for position, vaunted their originality, or voiced dislike of their fellows with a brutal hostility, masquerading as analytic frankness… Max Graf sadly observed, ‘We are no longer the fellowship we once were’ (Gay, 1988, p. 176-177).
By that time the group had expanded to around 20, and was becoming a little more organised and less individualistic. Otto Rank was appointed to minute the meetings, and became a paid officer holder, though he was not a clinician. By 1910, the freedom to have one's own opinions had become much more limited, rivalry became fully expressed and, particularly, Alfred Adler and later Otto Rank hardened their views sufficiently to pull away from the group.
The Burgholzli Hospital had a high morale (Eisold 2002) and a strong discipline. There was a self-confidence to the institution that came from being known across Europe as a centre of excellence for psychiatry in the 20th Century. It had a reputation to sustain. The group espoused psychoanalysis, not without reservation, about the place of sexuality, for instance, and the factors promoting disturbance that were innate in biology. There was a strong commitment to the strict business-like regime. Rivalry and competition in this high-aspiring group was endemic, and it did not take Freud on trust. It seems that Freud's selection of Jung as his closest co-worker from Zurich caused dissent there, even though Jung was already somewhat peripheral to the institution.
The formalism of the Burgholzli hierarchical structure impacted in various ways on the Vienna Group. And it is possible that in turn the relaxed and somewhat boundarilessness of Vienna was seductive of those in Zurich, or at least for Jung.
So, the original cultures of each group were different. Nevertheless, the advantages were great, and in 1910 out of the contact came the International Psychoanalytic Association, mutually created, but based in Vienna. Significantly, the Viennese did not take the lead in organising the joint Conference, in Salzburg, where the two groups first gathered in 1908. It was the Burgholzli group that was organisationally competent enough to get an international conference going.
It is clear there were different cultures. The Burgholzli inmates were shut up there to be looked after and managed with a scientific attitude. Perhaps it is not surprising that a mental hospital should have a strict, business-like culture, because it deals with disorganised behaviours and minds, provoking great anxiety in staff and in society. The members of the group were employed by the institution in designated and hierarchical roles with assigned functions. The culture was clearly designed to promote order, and to do so within a climate of anxiety. The character of institutional structure is a means of reassurance to control the dangers of the work.
In contrast, the Vienna group was not established in anything like the same way, and did not need the defensive strictness. They dealt with quite different people who were not in need of control, or not by psychoanalysts; families cared for their disturbed members. Patients were seen by individual analysts without reference to others. And it was perhaps a lonely occupation, without the support of an organised institutional structure. This was reflected in the individualised culture of their Wednesday meetings.
The group was organised around one inspirational leader and no hierarchical or other differences were acknowledged apart from Freud's status as the oldest member and the originator of the method. One can only infer that anxieties might have arisen from this degree of isolation in the work, a professional loneliness, perhaps. The situation of this small group of practitioners of a novel and not yet accepted method demanded they stick together without affirmation from outside. Their conviviality was perhaps a defensive one, needed to combat their uncertainties and insecurities in an unsupportive professional environment with people whose problems were difficult to understand and who were actively protecting
knowledge of intolerable unconscious experience. The Wednesday meetings could be said to function as a support group for insecure people who needed to reassure each other they were of value to each other and to their patients. As Gay wrote:
“[T]he group held formal discussions aimed at ‘reforming’ procedures, and debated a proposal to abolish 'intellectual communism”—geistigger Konunismus; henceforth, each idea should be identified as its originator's private property” (Gay 1988, p. 177).
The respectful individualism can be seen as a defensive manoeuvre by the members of the group to support each other against the insecurity of psychoanalysis at that time.
Both cultures showed possible defensive functions against the twin anxieties of the danger of the work (more at Burgholzli), and the uncertainties (more in the Vienna Group).
The IPA from 1917 onwards became an organisation which has suffered the trauma of differences. One element of the trauma is that the differences and divergences threaten to expose hidden anxieties. The result, the exclusion of the set of colleagues from Zurich, ensured that in implicit (i.e., unconscious ways) the IPA should become a somewhat exclusive association with a strictly defined identity and boundary. As Kirsner concluded, the psychoanalytic world is “[an] authoritarian and sometimes cultish approach that closed off the outside world” (Kirsner 2000**, p. 235). Freud's paper on group psychology in 1921 included a discussion of some dynamics which perhaps he had detected in his IPA. The leader, Freud himself, represented the attitude of protective exclusiveness which was the legacy of the recent deviants, Adler, Jung and Rank. Freud became a leader representing those attitudes of protection against threats from outside, the conscious criticisms of psychoanalysis, and from inside, the unconscious threats that the implicit defences could be undermined by alternative points of view:
So most psychoanalytic institutes are unfree associations of psychoanalysts where the spirit of free enquiry has been replaced by the inculcation of received truth and the anointment of those who are supposed to possess knowledge (Kirsner 2000, p. 10).
These are strong words and indicate the strength of purpose of the unconscious dynamics which keep these attitudes in place. The value of an authoritarian leader is that he provides protection by insisting on the attitudes and belief systems that have grown from the collective defences.
In the turmoil in Europe after World War I, there was a contest going on in wider society between the older monarchist authoritarian attitudes and the newer more libertarian and revolutionary attitudes of democracy and communism. It may well be that these attitudes and conflicts in society resonated with, and strengthened, those within the IPA.
It would appear that these conflicts were not apparent in psychoanalysis within the USA, geographically and politically distant from Europe. There, the jig-saw of multi-coloured opinions was tolerated in a space that allowed a pluralism, with opinions as varied as those of Trigant Burrows, Harry Stack Sullivan and Abraham Brill, and in fact reminiscent of the early days of the Wednesday meetings. Such a non-authoritarian ethos suggests a very different set of anxieties and defences, about which I can say little in detail. However, Freud did express an opinion about this pluralism, and he disapproved of US psychoanalysis and its libertarian melting-pot culture.
With the forced exodus of so many of the Viennese group, after 1938, mostly to the US, a clash of cultures of another kind occurred. This is recorded in Kirsner's (2000) meticulous series of interviews across the States, describing at least the conscious impact of the immigration, and it was clearly a very personal experience as recorded by Arnold Richards in his contribution to this Journal issue. I will not speculate on the underlying defences and attitudes that gave rise to this conflict between pluralism and authoritarianism in the USA, but move to a moment in the British development of psychoanalysis.
The British Psychoanalytic Society had its own version of this contest between conformism and divergence. It was particularly embodied in Ernest Jones who acquired his authority from his carefully engineered loyalty to Freud. Jones was, however, an enigma. He came from a non-conformist background in Wales and balanced this with his bid to be Freud's number one disciple. Freud was always cautious it seems
about Jones. There seems never to have been an open conflict between them, however, their respective protégés did quarrel—Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. It is as if they enacted something of the wider conflict over conformism. It was not just a difference in views on child analysis and theories that came out of the different practices, but is seems they represented the central conflict of the IPA since its inception—the conflict between an authoritarianism on one hand, which Anna Freud represented and tried to sustain after her father died, and on the other hand the seemingly wild freedom to follow up new evidence and new theories. The result as we now know was to develop two distinct pathways – instinct theory evolved by the Viennese at home and in the US, and, in contrast, the inner world of object-relations in Britain.
At the time that the professional practices and theories diverged in the late 1920s and 1930s, Freud was more tolerant, and although largely disapproving, he was persuaded by Jones to allow an engagement on equal terms. Federn set up a series of Exchange Lectures between Vienna and London, in the late 1930s, interrupted of course by the Anschluss in 1938.
By 1939, the Freud family were in London, and a trans-continental conflict now sat on the doorstep of the British Society. The irresolvable nature of the controversy that developed has lasted until today, with a sad proliferation of mythologies about the different groups. Here, I can only sketch a speculative account of possible unconscious dynamics as a suggestion for more detailed research.
I have already mentioned the general stress in the psychoanalytic work, and the propensity for uncertainty and doubt about professional worth, to be carried in a lonely individualised setting.
There were some specific elements of the British context that characterised the reaction to the uncertainties, at the time of the Controversial Discussions. The ambiguity that Jones himself introduced left his colleagues in a difficult position where encouragement of new ventures, like Klein's work with children in London from 1926, went with a need to observe a conformity. This is evident in Klein's writing for instance where she uses the conventional language and terminology of instinct
theory to express the object-relations approach she found evident in the narratives of children's play.
In the late 1920s, Jones had fought, in a formal enquiry set up by the British Medical Association, against accusations that psychoanalysis was quackery. Jones was more or less successful, but professional suspicion proliferated, despite a strong interest in intellectual circles including the Bloomsbury Group; and of course, patients in all parts of society gratefully sought a listening other. General professional acceptability seemed elusive in Britain as in Vienna.
There was however a second shared anxiety; that was the fear for survival. There were serious stresses arising at that time. First, was the fact that hardly had Freud settled in London than he died. His supreme position in the psychoanalytic world must have made this a catastrophic loss requiring a considerable amount of personal and collective mourning for the great figure.
At the same time, by 1940, there were virtually no psychoanalytic societies left in Europe, as Germany invaded and destroyed the ‘Jewish’ science (apart from a small society in Sweden and a small society in Switzerland). There must have been a sense that the British Society held the future of psychoanalysis in its hands, a sense of considerable responsibility against extinction. This was on the basis of the Freudian view at the time that psychoanalysis in the US was not very reputable. And alongside these historical events, many of the refugees had been through their own survival crises, and had lost relatives to the camps, etc.
In other words, in various directions there must have been a serious anxiety about survival. From the time of Freud's death, psychoanalysis depended on Britain's war effort and the serious commitment of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Such a set of anxieties about the survival of psychoanalysis itself must have weighed heavily on top of the persistent clinical anxiety arising from patients' despair over themselves. It is likely perhaps that a similar set of anxieties evolved in the US, where the Viennese felt a strong need to ensure the survival of the true psychoanalysis that they brought with them, and in turn to ensure the survival of Freud as their lost leader.
I have pointed to two anxieties with characteristic defences which were
expressed in different forms of practice in thinking about psychoanalysis. One was to conform to set and certain ideas and forms of psychoanalysis. The other was an adventurous, even provocative searching enquiry to idealise the new and non-conformist. These characteristics of the culture of the two groups set against each other one convergent strand, looking to preserve the essence of the lost Freud, the other driving towards an idealised exploration of novelties. Writing around the time of his own qualification as a psychoanalyst, Bion speculated on schisms in groups:
According to his personality, the individual adheres to one of two sub-groups. One sub-group opposes further advance, and in doing so appeals to loyalty to the dependent leader, or to the group bible, [and to] tradition… adherence to the group will not demand any painful sacrifices and will therefore be popular… Development is arrested and the resultant stagnation is widespread.
The reciprocal sub-group is composed of those ostensibly supporting the new idea and this sub-group sets out to achieve the same end as the first sub-group, but in a rather different manner; it becomes so exacting in its demands that it ceases to recruit itself. In this way there is none of the painful bringing together of initiated and uninitiated, primitive and sophisticated, that is the essence of the developmental conflict. Both subgroups thus achieve the same end; the conflict is brought to an end. To exaggerate for the sake of clarity, I would say that the one sub-group has large numbers of primitive unsophisticated individuals who constantly add to their number, but who do not develop; the other sub-group develops, but on such a narrow front and with such few recruits that it also avoids the painful bringing together of the new idea and the primitive state (Bion 1961 [1951], pp. 127-128).
It is not unlikely that Bion was making a point here based on his observations of the schismatic Society he was joining.
First of all, the careful balance that Jones trod between extreme loyalty and his own brand of non-conformism could not be sustained in the British Society. Indeed, he took the opportunity of his 65th birthday (on 1st January 1944) in the midst of the Controversial Discussion to retire from psychoanalysis, and from the post of President of the British
Society—perhaps not so reassuring for a Society beset by survival anxieties. His patriarchal nurturing of Melanie Klein's originality had come seriously unstuck as the Controversial Discussions were set up as a series of four formal papers by Kleinians for the purpose of questioning by the orthodox Viennese Freudians. It was almost as if they were to be cross-examined in a court of law for their ‘novel’ ideas, and some, like Anna Freud and Edward Glover thought that Klein should not be regarded as a psychoanalyst at all. The same attitude of exclusiveness operated; and so, it seemed the two sets of attitudes could still not be reconciled.
Conformism and deviance remained as quite separate approaches without compromise. The argument here is that the rigidity of the positions on either side are driven by the unexposed anxieties defended against in the two different manners. The authoritarian conformism erected around Freud (no longer with the Vienna group, but preserved by them), and the speculative search for novelty that would satisfy the need for professional respectability. It is not that either attitude is ‘wrong’, just that they are both used unconsciously in defensive ways, and cannot therefore be drawn together.
These two sets of attitudes are embedded in the approaches to practice—in the clinical work, and in the practice of discussion with each other. There is a serious possibility that the attitudes developed have an unintended result of aggravating the unconscious anxieties. For instance, a quarrelling Society, for all the sophistication that was actually shown, cannot have been very helpful to the anxieties about uncertainty, the worth of psychoanalysis, and its survival.
For all the risk of harming the established shared defences, the British Society did eventually work towards formal conscious discussions.
The cultures of conformism versus research, authority versus individualism, both aim at avoiding the anxieties, although in different ways. And both were set up to be challenged by each other. One could, I think, with some justification, say the challenges were made consciously, but defended with an unconscious rigidity (see the verbatim records of the
Scientific Meetings in King and Steiner 1991). The original debate, beginning in 1927 and lasting more than a decade, had been conducted across the continent and it was not resolved. Distance had allowed a ‘living together,’ but now proximity made all the difference. On the one hand, a group who had developed a sense of certainty and security on the basis of being close to the great figure of Freud was shattered by losing home, family, and Freud himself. The other group, basing its security on a kind of non-conformist research programme, which could carry the uncertainty of enquiry through its search for eventual professional acclaim, was compelled to face a solid (and anxious) conformist group.
If, at some level, there was an attitude that positioned the British Society as the last remaining hope for the survival of psychoanalysis itself, then it would have been a significant component of the resolve to prevent the Society at all costs from splitting up, as has so often happened in the psychoanalytic world, elsewhere and at other times. Of course, it is often given as evidence of the British capacity for compromise; however, only some of the players in the drama of controversy were British. We might consider this some evidence of a determination not merely to compromise, but to survive, both a conscious and unconscious determination.
On the other hand, both groups faced the shattering anxiety that their hopes for psychoanalysis and its ideas would completely disappear in a wartime defeat, coinciding with the death of their leading thinker and founder. This anxiety was dealt with in two ways. Firstly, by a denial, and the actual war going on outside the British Institute was almost never mentioned in the Controversial Discussions (see King and Steiner 1991**). And secondly by a heroic resolve to stick together in an embattled colleagueship. This reactive resolve against the anxieties (some of it realistic thinking, of course) took the form of the endless discussions that now form the large book by King and Steiner (1991).
Inevitably, the cultures would clash. And what the Controversial Discussions expressed was…. well, controversy. The point emphasised here is that this controversy was not merely in terms of different ideas and approaches to psychoanalysis, but it had unconscious elements organised at a group level to deal with those anxieties we have identified as inherent in the work and context of psychoanalysts. Two separated groups, each of whom challenged the other's defences, unconsciously
threatened to expose the anxieties.
Balancing the conformity with the ‘research’ attitudes meant two issues at the level of unconscious anxiety. First, is the ethos of the psychoanalytic world as a whole which was threatening towards deviation and which had been encountered in the years up to 1920 or so. But the second is that clinical practice also demanded an unconscious allegiance to the certainty of conventional theory, whilst requiring a more open questioning approach for the production of new knowledge.
Two different groups with different means of coping with those anxieties had suddenly been confronted by each other at close quarters. Their differences challenged their certainties about psychoanalysis. And as is well known there was no resolution. Obviously, the impossible examination of the group dynamics was not undertaken, and could not begin to release the groups by facing some of the anxieties. For instance, there was, for understandable reasons, not much open or published expression of the enormous loss when Freud died in September 1939, a few days after the declaration of war by Britain against Germany. But interestingly, the British Society subsequently engaged in two extraordinarily creative responses; one was Jones' three-volume biography (Jones 1956**), and the other was Strachey's (1977**) extremely scholarly editing of the Standard Edition. These must surely be seen as intellectual memorials to the greatness of Freud arising from the emotional work of mourning.
In 1944, when the scientific discussions of the controversies had finished, attention turned to training, and a new training committee was formed—but without Anna Freud (King and Steiner 1991). It was as if the British Society, at this unconscious group level, had no way of accommodating the authoritarian exclusiveness. Nevertheless, discussions were then held between Anna Freud and Sylvia Payne (the new President after Jones' resignation) to see how Anna Freud could be included in the training. In fact, only limited integration was possible, though Anna Freud did join the committee. The solution was reached to run two parallel trainings—one organised by the Viennese, and one by the rest of the Society, as they had done before the arrival of the Freuds. This separation of groups with the alternative separate attitudes—exclusive conformism or non-conformist pluralism—prolonged the two cultures and the separate defensiveness.
The hypothesis to be researched further would be the alternative ways of unconsciously managing the clinical anxiety of doubt, uncertainty and survival, arising from a variety of theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, attitudes of exclusiveness put doubt aside through denial; and on the other, an espousal of innovation as something of a triumphalist attitude towards finding the new and ‘certain’ position.
It may be of relevance that just at this time, in 1946, Klein published her paper on the paranoid-schizoid position, a position that centred around the anxiety about survival of the self. She was concerned only with the defences in the individual, but there may have been some urgency felt unconsciously that pushed her to write and publish, and for others to read and take seriously Klein's formulation of persecutory anxiety and the defences against it. In other words, the paper came when fears about the survival of psychoanalysis were at their height. It must also have seemed that the British Society was especially responsible for the survival of psychoanalysis. Klein herself suffered a considerable loss of support after the Controversial Discussions. As she said much later, looking back:
I became very sceptical as time went on about the survival of my work, but in recent years, with a group of outstanding colleagues, who have the capacity to protect this work and who can and will continue it after my death, I am again hopeful (Klein 1959, p. 80).
Her own predicament, in losing most of her support in the British Society by the end of the Controversial Discussions, is likely to have intensified her sense of insecurity and fear for the survival of her clinical and research work.
Looking in another direction, I have mentioned the achievements of Jones and Strachey in producing the Biography of Freud and the Standard Edition of his works. And there was a corresponding clinical creativity. The pursuit of new theories and their confirmation continued as a striking feature of British psychoanalysis. It has been an extraordinary upsurge of creativity. Did the death of Freud, and the feared death of psychoanalysis, prompt this kind of achievement in others? Indeed, it originated around 1939 and went right through to the end of the 1960s
and perhaps beyond. The names of Balint, Bowlby, Fairbairn, Winnicott and several Kleinians come to mind. What prompted such a widespread urge to a lively creativity in one relatively small Psychoanalytical Society in this period? We might consider it worth exploring the hypothesis that it arose out of attitudes to survival and death provoked by mourning Freud and the threat to psychoanalysis across Europe.
It was not entirely a destructive defensiveness at all, as many of those ideas are still used today in clinical practice, debated and taken further conceptually. So, to be clear, this struggle for intellectual rigour and evidence appeared to combine both a realistic scientific endeavour with a defensive need to prove one's worth. Perhaps its triumphalism has led to the plethora of postulates never coherently integrated, sometimes called a psychoanalytic Tower of Babel (Tuckett 1994).
Kirsner's (2000) account of the battles across the US, between conformism and the individualism of US psychoanalysis (and society) will not be explored here. That is to say, by implication, I ask the question whether the continuing determination to achieve a dominance for ego-psychology, in fact achieved until the 1980s in the US, had a root in the continuing threat of exposure of unconscious anxieties. After all, ego-psychology arose when Freud was still alive in 1930s Vienna (and in fact, from his book in 1921, Group Dynamics and the Analysis of the Ego). Did it represent an equivalent conformist defence against the fear for survival, comparable to the explosion of creative novelty as the defensiveness of the British Society?
The aim of this paper has been to introduce the impelling influence of the unconscious of group members that created an impervious structure of attitudes and beliefs which individual conscious effort can do little to change until their unconscious presence in the group is raised for debate (struggling with conformism and with survival). Though the account is more of a sketch for a research project than a project thoroughly carried out, I think I can claim that the fact of troubles unresolvable by conscious effort almost certainly points to quite unconscious influences—even in psychoanalytic societies and amongst analysed psychoanalysts.
We need a method to grasp the unconscious elements of two groups meeting and joining. There are four elements—anxiety, defence, work
practice, and cultural attitudes. On the basis of the kinds of exemplifying illustrations in this paper it would seem there are inexplicable phenomena which demand explanation in terms of hidden and thus unconscious motivations, and which can be formulated in terms of the psychoanalytic anxiety-defence structure at the level of group dynamics. A research project needs a wide scope of literature of a personal kind, letters, and notes as well as published books and papers of this period to discover facts, events, opinions and attitudes hard to explain just on conscious grounds. Of course, one can only infer those unconscious dynamics that form the background and contributory factors to the data that might be retrieved.