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Ernst Federn is best known to the psychoanalytic community as coeditor of The Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 1906-1918 (Nunberg & Federn, 1962-1975) and for a collection of papers by his eminent analyst father, Paul Federn, Ego Psychology and the Psychoses (Federn, 1952). Born in Vienna during the early days of the psychoanalytic movement into a home in which psychoanalysis constantly was “in-the-air,” the young Ernst met Freud and other pioneering analysts who were his father's colleagues. Although he originally studied law, economics, and history at the University of Vienna, when he settled in the United States in 1948, after surviving seven years' internment in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, Federn studied social work at Columbia University and received training in psychoanalysis. Thus, he is a living link between the early days of psychoanalysis and the present, and this collection of 18 of his papers, some of them previously unpublished, is appropriately titled Witnessing Psychoanalysis: From Vienna back to Vienna via Buchenwald and the USA.
The essays in this volume are grouped under four major headings: On Social Psychology, On the Psychology of Terror and Violence, On Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and On the History of Psychoanalysis. The book opens with a brief but moving personal account of Federn's encounters with Bruno Bettelheim and a Dr. Brief in Buchenwald. Although only Dr. Brief among them was a fully trained analyst at the time, nevertheless, Federn reports that “Bettelheim and I had noticed the degree to which the mechanisms of defense…described as identification with the aggressor could be observed amongst the camp inmates.” Further, they “found confirmation of two important psychoanalytic findings: Under severe mental strain man regresses and develops infantile