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The past, as psychoanalysis has shown, will always haunt the present. Nowhere is this more evident than in psychoanalysis itself. Different histories are continually reclaimed in an effort to make more sense of how we got here—wherever the here may be. Moreover, when it comes to psychoanalysis, history making is as much part of its origin story as the hysteric in Salpêtrière. Sigmund Freud's (1914) claim in On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement, “psychoanalysis is my creation” (p. 7), is followed by what might feel like a current-day revenge tour to excoriate some of his fellow travelers who he decided had strayed too far from the course and betrayed its roots. The need to secure the center against fragmentation was thus set in motion from the get-go.
From the biographies of Freud, each one written for the times, to the eve of the Revised Standard Edition, the question of how to define and redefine psychoanalysis and its history and how to adapt Freud for new horizons has been an everlasting pursuit. The Émigré Analysts and American Psychoanalysis with its suggestive title evokes a similar project—how does the old meet the new? What to take in and what to discard? We cannot think of American psychoanalysis without the émigré analysts. And yet, what is this relationship and how does reaching into its history lead us into more understanding, more self-awareness, of where American psychoanalysis finds itself today?
The book is the product of a conference organized in December 2019 by the Sándor Ferenczi Center housed in the New School for Social Research, another space that owes its existence to émigrés. Editor Adrienne Harris states that its focus is on “reclaiming our history: our radical and our trauma history” (p. 1). For Harris, these histories are centered around the early wave of émigrés
landing in the United States between the two world wars, arriving into an America whose sociopolitical context included the Great Depression, the anti-immigrant nativi