Editorial

We all know psychoanalysis as the practice and discipline of recollection - and particularly recollection in its most radical forms, that is, against the obstacles of motivated forgetting, resistance, defensive projection, displacement, denial, and the many other kinds of convenient and inconvenient screens our psyches provide for us. Nonetheless, it has repeatedly not fared so well in dealing with the events and figures in its own history that it has wanted to forget. In the British context, M. Masud R. Khan presents an eminent example; on the more global scene we could point to the obvious case of Ferenczi, and in a different way to Jung, Rank and Adler. Once key collaborators and pioneers of psychoanalysis, they became one after another persona non grata. This is not in itself hard to understand. It is precisely through such repudiations in the earliest decades of the movement (one can of course add Fließ and Breuer to the list, and then Reich, Horney and very nearly Melanie Klein) that it became a movement, and then a discipline and a set of institutions. Such segregations established points of principle. They were defences against the fear of divergence, diffusion or ‘dilution’, yet in the name of methods and theories whose main claim to security often lay in the fact simply that they could be doggedly hung on to. But they were also, just as obviously, exercises of institutional power - the increasing ability of at first local and ad hoc social and disciplinary configurations to hold themselves together over time, and over an expanding geographic reach. I think it is not just romanticizing to say they did so - or psychoanalysis established itself as a lasting professional and cultural institution - in the face of formidable challenges: the disbelief in hysteria; charges of immorality; antisemitism; opposition from medicine and psychiatry; then enforced migrations, the threat of murder, and the closing down of professional opportunities due to the rise of Nazism