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I shall be confining my remarks to the years from 1945 to circa 1980, and moreover to developments in clinical theory by psychoanalysts organized in the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV). I have had to confine my account to the essential currents and positions and to their leading representatives. Nor have I been able to go into the associated spheres of applied psychoanalysis and psychosomatics, which have played an important role in the development of German psychoanalysis.
After the collapse of the Nazi regime, German psychoanalysts at large were convinced that—as Werner Kemper has put it—all the depth-psychological schools had ‘by historic necessity … rallied their forces behind the façade of the German Institute’ (Kemper 1947, p. 7). Harald Schultz-Hencke claimed that he had fused the various doctrines into a depth-psychological and psychotherapeutic whole. He also thought that ‘international scientific opinion had come to look upon Freud's sexual theory as outdated and had dismissed large parts of his so-called metapsychology’ (quoted in Lockot 1994, pp. 94f.). Carl Müller-Braunschweig was the spokesman of a small group of analysts anxious to reject this approach and to restore the work of Sigmund Freud as the basis of theoretical research and therapeutic work. This led to a split in the DPG and to the foundation in 1950 of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV), which was recognized by the IPA in 1951. Regular psychoanalytic training within the IPA had thus been restored in Germany.