While the reestablishment of contact between professional and scientific groups in post-Nazi Germany and their counterparts abroad presented difficulties, these problems were limited in scope because of the technical nature of issues on which collaboration became necessary. The reestablishment of contact with German psychoanalysts was and is more complex for many reasons, among them the central position in psychoanalysis of affects, and the value attached to self-knowledge, to individuation, and thus implicitly to individual responsibility.

What motivates a Jewish Austrian emigré to reestablish or to establish contact with the current German-speaking psychoanalytic world?

There are of course all the proper, more or less official, answers. It is good for psychoanalysis as an institution, for psychoanalytic education and the availability of psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically based treatment facilities; the new generation is not responsible and should not be penalized; and so