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The reader should not expect to find here a chapter by a historian, but rather a sort of recension which will bear the marks of the uncertainties of memory, written by a witness who cannot avoid the pitfalls of a subjective vision. More explicitly, the task I have set myself is one of painting a fresco of the recent history of psychoanalysis, arranging the acquired knowledge fragment by fragment, in the manner of secondary dream-elaboration, in order to attribute it with a certain coherence – even if it is seen as artificial or questionable retrospectively.
Where did psychoanalysis stand at the end of the Second World War? I will focus my remarks on four regions: North America, South America, England, and finally France. The North American continent was spared the upheavals of war. Just prior to its outbreak, the United States had gone through a period of uncertainty and instability. Reik’s trial (he was not a doctor and legal proceedings had been brought against him for practising a discipline reserved for doctors in North America;he had also benefited from Freud’s support, the latter being hostile to the monopoly of psychoanalysis by doctors) had made the headlines. The conflict between the American Psychoanalytical Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association resulted in a compromise granting the former a monopoly concerning the definition of its own rules in matters of training, whether they were in line or not with those of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Faced with the exclusive medicalization of psychoanalysis in the official institutions, the development of American culturalism gave birth to a dissident movement led by K. Horney, Fromm, Sullivan, etc., giving a boost to the revolt against Freud and his ideas in the name of a conception highly impregnated with socio-anthropology. The emigration (which had already begun before the war) of psychoanalysts from Germany and other central European countries fleeing from Nazism, modi