Developing psychoanalysis under socio-political pressure: Viewpoints from Eastern Europe1

Stajner-Popovic opened the proceedings with a short introduction trying to define the former Eastern Europe, endeavouring to find and depict the analytic frontiers within and outside it. She finished her address by proposing topics for discussion:

1. Are there specifics of developing analysis in a society in transition?

2. What is the impact of the totalitarian regime in the given group?

3. How much has analysis been integrated into the respective society?

4. Does the training ‘produce’ second-rate analysts?

5. Is there an Eastern European analytic identity or community?

6. Where in the process of integration are the analysts of Eastern Europe today?

Kafka stressed that psychoanalysis had appeared and developed during a period of rapid social change that characterised Freud's Vienna. A favourable environment for the development of psychoanalysis is precisely a period of rapid, but not explosively, catastrophic social change that corresponds to the possibilities for individual change. According to his opinion, during the last two decades there appeared such conditions in Eastern Europe enabling and facilitating the work to foster an impressive development of psychoanalysis in that part of the world. He continued comparing the frequently discussed crisis in psychoanalysis in the Americas and in Western Europe with the enthusiastic interest in psychoanalysis among the young colleagues from the regions behind the former Iron Curtain. As a man who belongs (together with the recently deceased Han Groen-Prakken) to the initiators and competent organisers of the development of psychoanalysis in Eastern Europe immediately prior to the fall of communism, he reviewed the different local conditions in various countries that began to receive the help of IPA and EPF since the 1980s. Some of the societies receiving assistance were among the pre-war founders of psychoanalytic groups and their descendants surviving underground; the others arose without any professional tradition. The establishment of pre-w