Foreword

The papers making up this Special Issue of Psychoanalysis and History are the record of a conference held in London on 29 and 30 November 2008, itself the result of a collaboration between the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, the Freud Museum, London and The Société Internationale d'Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychanalyse (SIHPP), Paris. The very first planning discussion took place almost two years ago between Elisabeth Roudinesco, president of the SIHPP and one of the guest editors, on a long walk through East London, taking in Brick Lane, an iconic London street which bears the history of successive waves of migrants into the capital, and whose present creative exuberance allows for the different idioms of and fruitful co-existence between its most recent incomers, the London Bangladeshi community, and urban youth culture. It was a fitting location for that first discussion which already touched on questions of hospitality, politics and creativity that would become central themes of the project.

It was decided that London would host the next annual conference (the XXIInd) of the SIHPP, that this conference would question and explore the potential of psychoanalysis to engage with the most current and pressing social and political issues, of which fundamentalism stood out with particular urgency, and that it would do so with an a priori openness, which would look broadly and without forceful agenda at many different forms of fundamentalist intolerance and hatred of the other. It was also clear to us that such a topic was intrinsically subject to historicization, and Fascism was introduced as a third organizing term, with respect to making a link back