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What is the significance of history for psychoanalysis? Following the selection of Berlin as the venue and Remembering, Repeating and Working Through as the subject for the International Psychoanalytical Association Congress in 2007, it was clear that external reality in analyses, trauma and persecution were in scope. It was also clear that history needed to be discussed as the context of psychoanalysis and its development. Old Berlin was after all a wellspring of the psychoanalysis that spread rapidly throughout the world after 1933. Furthermore, immediately afterwards Berlin was also the ruling centre of Nazi Germany, which in the persecution of the Jews visited so much suffering on most psychoanalysts of that time and their successors, and had such incalculable consequences for the development of psychoanalysis.
The first IPA Congress to take place in Germany after World War II was held in Hamburg in 1985. At that time the historical focus was on how German analysts had behaved during the Hitler regime, how they adapted to the system or put up resistance, and how Jewish analysts and those on the political left were driven out of Germany. A great deal of work has since been done on these subjects. In three panels, a new question now came to the fore: how psychoanalysis—and which psychoanalysis?—was transferred from Berlin to the new centres on both sides of the Atlantic. The panel organizers, Ludger Hermanns, Ulrike May and Nellie Thompson, worked from the thesis that Berlin influenced the international development in several ways: through the early analysts such as Sylvia Payne or Bertram Lewin, who travelled to Berlin to learn about psychoanalysis there and returned to their homelands as disseminators; those who had studied in Berlin and, like Melanie Klein or Franz Alexander before 1933, were called abroad to work there as teachers and organizers; the many people who were forced to flee by the Nazis, from Therese Benedek to Moshe Wulff; and, finally, through the