Editorial

Politics, catastrophe, ruins and exile … and the fate of psychoanalysis in times of sociopolitical disaster. These provide the main themes for our Special Issue on ‘Psychoanalysis and Political Ruin’. We open with the first English publication of Andreas Peglau's dramatic account of the shattering impact on psychoanalytic political attitudes of the opening years of the National Socialist regime in Germany: ‘“I Fear This will Drive us Apart”: The Break Between Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Reich as Told in Unpublished Documents, 1933–1934’. Focusing on sets of newly discovered letters and responses to each other's work, written by Reich and Fenichel, the article also tracks a number of different crises through the gradually articulated ‘break’ between these two prominent figures of the left-wing second generation of psychoanalysts, who were also intimate friends and colleagues. Besides the cooling and straining of relations between the main protagonists, the article charts the emerging fractures between the possibility of a ‘political’ psychoanalysis, or one aligned with political activism, critique and protest, and one that attempts to ‘salvage’ the psychoanalytic by differentiating it from overt political stances. Embedded in that complex divergence are further questions about how psychoanalysts translated the imperative to counter the rise of Nazism; the relation between Western Marxism and Soviet communism, and between both and fascism; the rising threat to psychoanalysts who were Jews, or radicals, or both; as well as the reactive organizational decisions – by the International Psychoanalytical Association and by local groups, and by Freud himself – to preserve psychoanalysis by expelling the ‘subversive’ element. Woven throughout all of these emerges a further complex, ideological argument about the nature of

desire (sexual, political, bourgeois or working-class) and to what ends it should be directed, particularly in a time of social crisis. It is a collection