Epilogue

The preceding papers have offered us the opportunity to reflect on various dimensions of the interrelation between psychoanalysis and ethical issues. We were offered new areas for reflection as we struggled to reconceptualize, to reconsider our positions via-à-vis social pathology and its consequences.

Our contributors have led us in the exploration of subjects that have occupied psychoanalysis since its founder understood how the culture is embedded in the psyche, as he also envisioned an educational and social role for the method he created, with the implied ethical questions thereby posed.

During World War II and soon afterward in Britain, analysts from the continent—Vienna, Berlin, Budapest—and their British colleagues dedicated much thought and effort to the development of therapeutic nurseries, to the application of psychoanalytic principles to health systems, to education, and to “prevention.” Perhaps at a time when a world that had existed (and had been taken for granted) was in ruins, those pioneers had not much time for theoretical reflections that linked their idealism to action. They affected their society in ways that now seem extraordinary and exemplary. In contrast, since then, psychoanalysts in most of the world seem to have retreated into their offices and institutions, while the world that seemed in ruins was rebuilt but not recovered.

We have seen distinct lines emerge in the course of our reading: our contributors enlarged the focus of the here-and-now to include the social context. Their experiences in the various countries in which they practice had forced them to examine more sharply