What are the politics of psychoanalysis? Several decades after the trauma of Nazism, the occasion of an International Psychoanalytical Association Congress in Hamburg presses upon every psychoanalyst the need to reconfront questions of values and politics, the ethics of the unique method we profess. Such a reconfrontation is necessitated not only by the events of the holocaust and the psychoanalytic exodus to less totalitarian climes, but also by the fact that a collaborationist “psychoanalysis” survived in the context of Nazism (see Antonoysky, Brecht, Beland, and Juelich, this issue). The latter highlights serious questions concerning the relation between the discourse of “talking cures” and the machinations of the state apparatus. It compels us to reconfront the politics of our practice—a task which, I believe, is integral to the process of being and becoming a psychoanalyst in any circumstances.

If we take the term “political” in its broadest classical