Letter from Reichenau

Major proponents of psychoanalysis seem to have drawn the conclusion that only clinical psychoanalysis has a future; and that this clinical psychoanalysis is also of a very special kind, having developed from ego psychology, Kleinian psychoanalysis, object relations theory, and self psychology.

For those of us in the German-speaking world, many of whom were trained by Alexander Mitscherlich, Gustav Bally, Medard Boss, Paul Parin, and Igor Caruso, this dominant understanding of clinical psychoanalysis is inadequate. Our teachers saw Freud in the Louvre looking at da Vinci's Mona Lisa but not thinking about what went on in the painter's mind. We see Freud departing from a nazified Vienna, not least because of his writings on culture. We also have Freud looking at the Sistine Chapel in Rome and asking himself how Michelangelo and other artists came to be painters in the first place.

It is not obvious to us that the enduring value of psychoanalysis lies only in its clinical aspects as determined by many of the major analysts in the UK and the USA. Even the cultural side of psychoanalysis does not make up the whole of psychoanalysis. The whole of psychoanalysis is more than its parts. Psychoanalysis in the Realm of Democratic Psychiatry demonstrates this view.

In 1993, a new book, In Search of Common Ground: Psychoanalysis and Democratic Psychiatry in Exchange appeared in three volumes. Twenty-two years of close cooperation between Italian psychiatrists working in the new Democratic Psychiatry and psychoanalysts associated with the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Zurich can be studied here. The book demonstrates that psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious and defense mechanisms can be applied to processes in society and that a patient's outer world must be studied as well as his inner world. Many contemporary psychoanalysts neglect this close correspondence between one-person, two-person, and many-person psychology and thus overlook how important, for example, simple wor