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… we have undertaken this week a little piece of our collective self-analysis… though Freud died in 1939, we have never fully come to terms with his transience and his death… Sigmund Freud remains our lost object, our unreachable genius, whose passing we have perhaps never properly mourned… It is perhaps just because he has been so inadequately truly mourned, and, therefore never given up as a fantasied continuing presence, that so many of us have feelings of continuing dependency that can both be infantilizing and stultifying…
This essay seeks to deepen our knowledge of the history of psychoanalysis by centering upon the psychoanalytic movement. If we review the history of scholarship on psychoanalysis, we find that it has neglected the psychoanalytic movement in favor of the study of individual figures, on one hand, and their various contexts—social, political, professional, and so forth—on the other. So it is no surprise to note that most existing discussions of the psychoanalytic movement usually see in it an extension of either the first, in which case the author's scholarly orientation is likely to be psychoanalytic, or if the second, likely to be historical. That each often mixes in a bit of the other, as the sophistication of studies has progressed, does not help.
At the root of this neglect is the failure to recognize that a movement is a distinct kind of social organization the structure and dynamics of which are different from those of the individual person and from those of larger, more stable social formations such as institutions. For this reason the psychoanalytic