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This special issue of the journal is a compilation of papers from the 41st IAPSP Annual Conference entitled “Vienna-Kohut-Self Psychology: Searching for Creativity in Times of Crisis.” As first-time guest editors, we appreciate the close collaboration generously afforded by the authors in this selection and the keen support from Chief Editors, Annette Richard and Elizabeth Corpt. We have grouped these diverse and rich papers around three broad themes: first, how history shapes experience; second, self-agency and the selfobject and alter-ego experience and; third, creativity, resilience and protest in self-development and in acts of witnessing.
Our first set of papers from the opening plenary, “History Flows Through Us: Psychoanalysis, Historical Trauma, and the Shaping of Experience,” explore how historical memory shapes the self and how history, remembered and unremembered, infuses the lives of families, communities, and patients and therapists alike.
Frie, with a courageous personal story, begins and locates the “felt sense of history” through the buried family secret of his beloved grandfather’s membership in the National Socialist (Nazi) party. He describes the impact of the unspoken, inherited, unwanted fragments of his grandfather’s perpetrator history in part through his grandparents and parents’ silence and the gaps in narrative. Frie challenges us to reflect on the way the history and the culture we are born into shape our self-development. He calls on us to interrogate the unremembered and sometimes disavowed intergenerational secrets that permeate the familial and cultural atmosphere. As Ornstein (2017) writes in the forward to Frie’s book, Not in My Family, “The commitment to remember has the power—at least potentially—to redeem the crimes committed by the previous generation … an act that in my view transforms his inherited shame and guilt into a sense of moral responsibility” (p. xiii).
Aichorn follows with a riveting narrative about his grandfather, Augu