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Although there is little in psychoanalytic theory to prepare one for it, different countries continue to have quite separate national psychotherapeutic traditions. When one thinks of France the name of Lacan comes to mind even more immediately than those of Klein and Winnicott crop up in connection with Britain; in turn, the Americans have had ego psychology as well as Kohut's thinking about the self. The Italians are notably receptive to a wide variety of different ideological strains. Concerning the Germans, there is uncertainty about what most characterizes psychoanalysis there today.
This collection of essays should help us become acquainted with the nature of some of the most interesting German psychoanalytic thinking. The editor, Johannes Cremerius, opens with a blistering piece that deals with the authoritarian and hierarchical structure of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He has assembled a variety of arguments, all true, unfortunately, about how training at institutes bears too many analogies to the religious instruction of an organized church. Psychoanalysis, he holds, is threatened by its failure to keep in touch with the broadest philosophical, political, and social questions. Above all, the crisis in psychoanalysis can be traced to its unwillingness to cease to be a “movement” and its hesitancy to fulfill Freud's hopes of having created a science.
An unspoken part of Cremerius's thesis is the extent to which the bulk of German psychoanalysts have seemed by and large identified with the powers-that-be in American psychoanalysis. Perhaps such links were inevitable, given the post-World War II role of the United States in helping with the reconstruction of Germany. But the present-day gloom within American psychoanalysis has afflicted the German analysts as well. Unlike in France, where Lacan managed to keep analysis vital by being in touch with philosophy, literature, and university academic life in general, the Germans allowed themselves large