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This review of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition by Emily A. Kuriloff will be very personal, but before I tell my own story, I would like to comment on why I so strongly recommend this book. The history of ideas is many times taken out of context, and when one is part of a movement, it is often difficult (if not impossible) to see the moment in history of which one is a part. This was very much the case for psychoanalysis in the United States after World War II. Those in training during the 1950s and 1960s were introduced to Freudian psychoanalysis through a lens that was quite different from the way analysis had been understood and practiced by Freud and his followers from the turn of the century until the 1930s, when the clinics were closed and the analysts had to flee. Kuriloff takes up this story and tries to give the reader a sense of what these analysts experienced. She tries to explain why this revolutionary theory not only became so rigid in the United States, but why the theory turned so far away from environmental causes (unlike the views of analysts like Ferenczi and Abraham as conveyed in their work before they died). One of the most fascinating parts of the book is Kuriloff's emphasis on the lack of interest in trauma for people who not only had to flee their homes, patients, and livelihood but were also frightened of being killed. I do not know any work that has portrayed this situation as poignantly as this book.
I am not going to emphasize so much the effect on theory and technique as much as how these refugees denied their Jewishness. I went through the index and could identify 60 of these individuals whom I knew personally as mentors or role models. They were part of the post-Holocaust generation who were in the ascendance in psychoanalysis during my training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from 1964 to 1969 and also during the two decades before and the two decades after.
Although I wa