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The world is currently living through the most dangerous period of war and violent political conflict since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, with the advent of hypersonic weapons, able to carry a nuclear payload, and potentially managed by artificial intelligence, this has become the most dangerous period in human history. For the psychoanalytic world too, it is a time of deep division and profound danger.
Prior to the First World War, Freud and his colleagues focussed largely on the material that emerged in individual psychoanalytical work, with the sexual instinct foremost. However, such was the upheaval and torment across Europe during the 1914-1918 war that they had to pay attention to the psychology of societal disturbance and, going ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, developed psychoanalytic theory to address the aggressive drive, and postulated a death instinct. In the years that followed more was written about the societal applications of psychoanalysis, but then the world was plunged into a second global cataclysm. There were many horrors, not least the ending of the war with the first use of nuclear weapons, but the awfulness of the Holocaust had a very particular impact on psychoanalysts and their professional communities because many of them were Jewish. Some survived in continental Europe but many more fled to Britain, the USA and elsewhere for safety – Freud and his daughter Anna, seeking refuge in London. After such terror and trauma many psychoanalysts turned away from thinking so much about societal relations, focussing entirely on their clinical work, as a reaction to their terrible experiences. They had learned what can happen in the larger society when dangerous movements develop with the terrifying and seemingly irresistible destructive force of a tsunami.
For some Jews these traumas gave momentum to the Zionist movement that sought to create a state which would be a safe and secure place for Jews. Despite the exile having lasted for almost