Guest Editorial

1989 saw the fiftieth anniversary of Freud's death in exile. His personal predicament as a refugee was, of course, shared with numerous men of science. In his case, at least, the choice of London as a haven was far from arbitrary. Nor did it lack historical precedent. Following the influx into this country, from early Hanoverian times onwards, of talented German musicians, artists, financiers, scientists and scholars—one of the two present writers (RW) occupies a Chair at King's College London of which the first holder, from 1831, was Adolphus Bernays, a native of Hesse-Darmstadt, although with connexions to the well-known Hamburg family, and a distant relative by marriage of the poet Heinrich Heine—the revolutions of 1848 had caused flight from political oppression on such a scale that a recent book on exile and asylum in Victorian England came to be entitled Little Germany(Ashton, 1986). Whatever the exact resonance of the term, it would not be out of place in an account of London in the 1930s.

Freud arrived there too late in his career (June 1938)—and died too soon afterwards—to experience completely or to typify the enduring realities of émigré life. When an international conference was held on the theme of 'Freud in London' at the Institute of Germanic Studies (University of London) in late October 1986 there was nevertheless an element of commemoration in the event, which had been timed to allow publication of the proceedings in 1988. But the title given to the volume by its editors, Edward Timms and Naomi Segal— Freud in Exile. Psychoanalysis and its Vicissitudes —indicates a wider purpose.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis had established itself as a major intellectual and cultural influence. Under Nazi persecution, however, its centre of gravity and the focus of its activity shifted in the course of the thirties from Austria and Germany to Britain, the United States, and Latin America. It was thus, for instance, that the