Editorial

It is one of the curious ironies of the history of that most private of relationships, the psychoanalytic encounter, that the fortunes of the movement associated with it have been so profoundly affected by the historical upheavals of the twentieth century. Yet the quest into the secrets of the soul was, almost from its inception, associated with the idea of revolution, a revolution within civilization. Freud's identification with the conquistador entailed that he would always envisage psychoanalysis to be a revolutionary movement of discovery, one that had come to shake the foundations of culture and civilization. It is difficult to remember, since the term ‘positivism’ became a term of disapproval if not of abuse, that the positivists and Darwinists of the Kulturkampf of the 1870s, amongst whom we must count Freud, were self-conscious revolutionaries. The self-conscious student revolutionary would wait until 1917, that revolutionary year in the middle of the First World War, to bring to fruition his post-Comtean vision of how psychoanalysis was in the process of visiting upon the pretensions of mankind the third narcissistic blow. But the impulse to visit the powers of the underworld on the unsuspecting world was already vividly present in 1900, as advertised by the frontispiece of Die Traumdeutung. It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that a self-consciously revolutionary movement would be tossed by the waves.

With one exception, the papers in this volume testify to that turbulent history. Nobody doubts that the position of psychoanalysis in cultural and intellectual life was transformed by the First World War. Yet the details of this transformation are the matter of much debate, and each local culture demonstrates very different processes at work in this transformation. In Britain the influence of psychoanalytic ideas and therapeutic methods upon the treatment of ‘shell-shock’, the ‘war neuroses’, has been much studied in recent decades, but there is still a la