German themes in psychoanalysis. Part three

Michael Ermann’s readiness to accept my invitation to undertake the interview that opens this issue of our journal stimulated me to find a whole series of papers that could be published with it, in a third monographic issue on psychoanalysis in the German-speaking world. The first two issues I edited came out as No.4/2013 and No.2/2015.

The first of these contained the following contributions: Werner Bohleber (Frankfurt) on the history and role of the journal Psyche (1946); Harry Stroeken (Utrecht) on the fate of the German-Jewish psychoanalyst refugees in the Netherlands; Ulrike May (Berlin) on Freud’s 1920 essay “Beyond the pleasure principle”; Hans-Jürgen Wirth (Giessen) on the “militant” and “peaceful” use of nuclear power; and, last but not least, an interview I held with Horst Kächele, together with Ingrid Erhardt, in February 2013.

The second issue centered around the following authors and themes: Michael Ermann (Munich) on the history and role of the journal Forum der Psychoanalyse (1985); the Israeli colleague Ilany Kogan on her analytic work with the children of Holocaust’s survivors; Siegfried Zepf (Saarbrücken) on Freud’s concept of conversion; Michael Buchholz (Göttingen) on conflicts and their reconciliation, both in the history of psychoanalysis and in our clinical work; Horst Kächele, Ingrid Erhardt, Carolina Seybert, and Michael Buchholz on countertransference as the object of empirical research; and, last but not least, an important and still unpublished paper written by Helmut Thomä (1921-2013) in 2010 by the title “Remarks on the first century of the International Psychoanalytic Association and a utopian vision of its future”, with a short Introduction by Horst Kächele.

In my Editorials to these issues (Conci, 2013 and 2015a), I tried to introduce readers to the contemporary German psychoanalytic landscape, both in terms of how it was shaped by the only very gradual and problematic elaboration of the tragedy of the Nazi Regime (1933-1945), and in terms of its not yet so well-known areas of excellence. Two recent useful books on the relationship between past history and present reality of psychoanalysis in Germany are Contemporary psychoanalysis and the legacy of the Third Reich by Emily Kuriloff (2014), and Cold War Freud. Psychoanalysis in an age of catastrophes by Dagmar Herzog (2017).

Having worked in Munich as a Kassenpsychoanalytiker since 1999, I am an active participant in and, at the same time, careful observer of the German analytic community, and this has allowed me to see more clearly how the past still shapes the present. This is for example the case with the German Kassenssystem, a public insurance system unique worldwide, which was created in the late 1960s and still covers psychoanalytic treatment of up to 300 sessions at the frequency of 3 sessions a week (see also the above-mentioned interview with Horst Kächele). Colleagues around the world still know relatively little about this system, not only because of the still relative scarcity – at our international congresses, of both the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) – of small discussion groups centered around our actual work with our patients. But also because many of those German colleagues who participate in international conferences tend to adopt as a model the British so-called “open-ended concept of analytic treatment” (see, for example, Sabbadini, 2014), and do not feel at ease with how the Kassensystem shapes our German daily practice, including the existence of predetermined time frames. Such an orientation, shaped as it is also by the difficult elaboration of the German past, makes it hard for many German colleagues to be as proud as they could be of how well their society can put psychoanalysis at the disposal of many of its citizens - exactly in the way that Freud himself had dreamed of in 1918 (see Freud, 1919).

On the other hand, contemporary German psychoanalysis has other areas of excellence - which are easier to talk about than the controversial Kassensystem. I have already presented these in the two previous monographic issues, but of course they deserve to be discussed further, as I will be doing in this one. I am referring here to the Ulm School of empirical research founded by Helmut Thomä and Horst Kächele; to the Tübingen School of historical research that has grown around Gerhard Fichtner (1932-2012) and the journal Luzifer-Amor (founded in 1988); to the socio-analytical tradition originally created by Alexander Mitscherlich (1908-1982) and Horst-Eberhard Richter (1923-2011), as inherited not only by Hans-Jürgen Wirth (Giessen) and his journal psycho-sozial (originally founded in 1978), but also by the journal Psychoanalyse. Texte zur Sozialforschung (see below); and, of course, to the German traditional capacity of both founding new institutions (think of the Berlin Institute founded by Max Eitingon, in 1920), and also subjecting them to significant critical scrutiny, as I myself was taught to do by Johannes Cremerius (1918-2002) and Paul Parin (1916-2009).

To such an institutional tradition belong two of the six contributions in this issue: Lilli Gast on the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) founded in Berlin in 2009; and Ross Lazar (1945-2017), with his radical critique of the present analytic training system and the ways in which it heavily limits our capacity to make psychoanalysis attractive for the younger generations and for society as a whole. The Munich colleague Herbert Will’s paper on the 50-minute hour and my paper on my own clinical work with Italian patients in Munich are meant to illustrate further positive aspects of the Kassensystem. The paper by Galina Hristeva and Philip Bennet (a Bulgarian historian working in Stuttgart and a North American historian) deals with a little-known aspect of Wilhelm Reich’s (1897-1957) activity, that is, a central episode in his relationship with Soviet Russia. Our corresponding editor Henry Zvi Lothane closes the issue with a book review of the issue of the journal Psychoanalyse - Texte zur Sozialforschung specifically dedicated to the seventieth birthday of one of its five editors, i.e., the analyst Bernd Nitzschke (Düsseldorf).

One of the most interesting aspects of my interview with Michael Ermann is what I can call the “interinstitutional” character of his professional life. He was, on the one hand, president of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG) between 1987 and 1995, and, on the other hand, a member of the executive committee of the IFPS between 1983 and 2016. He was the pioneer of the long and complex operation that brought the DPG back into the IPA in 2009, and, at the same time, contributed to keeping the IFPS alive and well. This interinstitutional character was also one of the specific ingredients underlying the success of Forum der Psychoanalyse, the journal he founded in 1985 with Jürgen Körner (DPG president, 1995-2001) and Sven Olaf Hoffmann; this was an important model for the foundation of our own journal, in 1992 – a connection documented by the name, Forum, that we share. Before leaving the IFPS, Michael Ermann provided the decisive impulse for the creation of the Individual Members Section, also becoming its first chair.

In a world where many analysts work with sessions lasting 45 minutes, the 50-minute hour is as peculiar to Germany as the Kassensystem itself. This topic is dealt with by Herbert Will, a former director of training of the Munich Akademie für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie, and the author of two very well received books on analytic technique such as Was ist klassische Psychoanalyse? (2003) and Psychoanalytische Kompetenzen (2006). A biographer of Georg Groddeck (1866-1934), the German pioneer of psychosomatic medicine (see Will, 1984), Herbert Will continues to deal also with historical and cultural topics, as he did in his latest book, Freuds Atheismus im Widerspruch (2014). Such a distinguished scientific production recently allowed him to become a member of the new editorial board of the journal Psyche (Werner Bohleber having retired as editor-in-chief in the summer of 2017), and this is a further reason why his contributions and his name deserve to be known also outside of Germany as well.

Another positive aspect of the German Kassensystem is the possibility that migrant patients can not only go through a psychotherapeutic treatment covered by the social insurance system, but also do this in their mother tongue. I have been doing this kind of work since 1999, as I show in the paper, “Working with Italian patients in Munich – The case of Penelope”, included in this issue, which I had originally presented at the 2009 Chicago IPA Congress. Among the pioneers of the importance of working in the patient’s mother tongue and of the concept of a multi-lingual treatment, Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri, played a major role through their book The Babel of the unconscious. For this reason, together with Hediaty Utari-Witt, in 2010, I promoted its German edition, accompanying it with a detailed Introduction (see Conci, 2010). For many years, Hediaty (an Indonesian colleague who trained in Munich) and I worked on this topic with Ilany Kogan (see Conci, 2015b).

The growing international interest in this topic – which has dominated not only German political life in the last years – has been demonstrated by the publication of books such as the anthology Immigration in psychoanalysis, edited in 2016 by Julia Beltsiou (a Greek-German colleague who trained and works in New York City), and Vamik Volkan’s 2017 book Immigrants and refugees. Today we know that every language we are familiar with catalyzes the development of a peculiar specific self dimension, which needs to be specifically explored and dealt with in every analytic treatment. Freud was himself multi-lingual, and so also should we be.

In her contribution to this third monographic issue, Lilli Gast presents the IPU as the realization of Freud’s utopia to have the university teach and promote psychoanalysis. A private university, the IPU was established in 2009 through a very generous donation of Christa Rohde-Dachser (an emeritus professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Frankfurt) and thanks to the passion put into such an important project by Jürgen Körner, an emeritus professor of social pedagogy at the Freie Universität in Berlin (who also played such an important role in the life of the DPG; see above).

The daughter of a famous German businessman, Christa Rohde-Dachser was such a good analyst and scholar that she was invited to become Alexander Mitscherlich's successor at the University of Frankfurt in 1987, where she taught till her retirement in 2003 (see also her biography in Wikipedia). The author of pioneering books on the borderline syndrome and on the psychoanalysis of femininity (see Rohde-Dachser, 1979, 1991), in 1994 she founded the Frankfurt DPG Institute, which she chaired for 10 years. Having been able not only to live a very creative and successful life outside of her family of origin, while, at the same time, not losing touch with it, she ended up being in the unique position of utilizing a part of her father’s inheritance to finance the foundation of the Berlin IPU.

This new institution was recognized by the German State in 2014, and in the academic year 2015/2016 it had 583 students and 112 scientific collaborators, 59 of whom had a permanent appointment. The IPU offers several BA and MA programs both in German and in English, and it has already become an important research center attended by highly motivated and bright students coming from all over the world. These will hopefully grow into a new generation of researchers and analysts capable of promoting psychoanalysis in many different countries.

According to Ross Lazar, if we want to succeed in keeping psychoanalysis alive and well, we need do our best in terms of the re-organization of our training programs, including the transformation of the so-called training analysis into a personal analysis, and the abolition of the training analyst status and its substitution by a group of competent analysts ready to apply to play such a function. The author’s critique and his proposals are based on the long critical tradition represented by the important contributions of Otto Kernberg, Johannes Cremerius, Kenneth Eisold, and Douglas Kirsner (see Lazar's reference list), as well as mainly on his own experience as a supervisor and consultant for many German-speaking analytic institutes.

Horst Kächele and Helmut Thomä themselves had in 2000 clearly expressed their position in support of “a radical disentanglement of the professional curriculum from the self-experience”, given a situation in which “none of the contemporary models and practices secure the autonomy of the candidate’s personal analysis” (Kächele and Thomä, 2000, p.807). Also focusing on this topic is the book The future of psychoanalysis. The debate about the training analyst system recently edited by the Munich colleague and friend Peter Zagermann, with a Foreword by Stefano Bolognini. In this, the former IPA president (2013-2017) emphasizes the need for a “quadripartite model” of analytic education, centered around ”the capacity to work together, to share constant working through with the colleagues, and to actively participate in institutional life” (Bolognini, 2017, p.XIX).

Ross Lazar, a North American Jew who grew up in a suburb of New York City, graduated from Harvard University in the field of education, and at the beginning of the 1970s, went to London to do his analytic training at the Tavistock. Here he worked in particular with both Esther Bick (1902-1983) and Donald Meltzer (1922-2004), whose so-called “atelier model” (see Meltzer, 1971-1994) played a fundamental role in his supervisory and teaching activity. Lazar's German wife Gisela (they had married in the USA in 1969) came with him to London, where their two children were born, the family then moving to Munich at the end of the 1970s. Here Ross Lazar worked several years at the department of child psychiatry chaired by Jochen Storch, a pioneer of child psychoanalysis in Munich, before moving into full time private practice in 1982. At the time, the work of both Klein and Bion was very little known in Germany, and Ross Lazar played a crucial role in introducing their important psychoanalytic contributions. The same is true of the methodology of baby observation, and for the Tavistock model of analytic work with groups and institutions (see, for example, Lazar, 1998) – as Mathias Lohmer underlined in his Trauerrede on July 31, 2017. Having worked with him myself for many years in both analysis and supervision, I was also very saddened by his sudden death at age 72, on July 23, 2017, from a form of cancer that he had been heroically struggling against in the last couple of years of a very busy life – one almost totally centered around his huge passion for and commitment to psychoanalysis.

“Wilhelm Reich in Soviet Russia: Psychoanalysis, Marxism and the Stalinist reaction“ is an original historical paper that we received from Galina Hristeva and Philip Bennet. I have known and valued Galina Hristeva’s work in the field of historical research in psychoanalysis since I chaired the panel (at the 2011 IPA Congress held in Mexico City) in which she presented the paper that won the IPA Sacerdoti Award – the award financed by Cesare Sacerdoti, the Florentine Jew better known as the former owner of Karnac Books, London. Thanks to Hristeva's knowledge of Russian, the paper includes as an Appendix her translation of the summary of both the lecture “Psychoanalysis as a natural science”, held by Reich in Moscow in September 1929, and of the five major responses it received, originally published in the journal of the Communist Academy. According to Hristeva and Bennet, in the negative reactions that Reich’s paper received are planted the seeds of the negative concept of psychoanalysis originally formulated in the 1935 edition of the Great Soviet encyclopedia. Furthermore, they also express the opinion that the report which Reich wrote of his trip to Russia for the journal Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung was so heavily biased in favor of Soviet Russia as to most probably represent “the first step along the path that eventually led to his expulsion from the IPA in 1934”.

Being one of the last Jewish New York City colleagues to be fluent in German, Henry Zvi Lothane’s review of the No.2/2015 issue of the journal Psychoanalyse - Texte zur Sozialforschung is meant as a tribute to his friend Bernd Nitzschke, whom he defines as “one among Freud’s oppositional heirs”. That issue contains papers by André Karger (the editor of this current issue, together with Bertram von der Stein) on Nitzschke’s life and work; a paper by Bertram von der Stein on interdisciplinary dialogue; a paper by Albrecht Götz von Ohlenhausen on the anti-conformist analytic pioneer Otto Gross (1877-1920); a paper by Andreas Peglau on Wilhelm Reich, on whose drama Nitzschke edited a book together with Karl Fallend in 1997; a paper by Galina Hristeva on Georg Groddeck; a paper by Thomas Anz on the relationship between psychoanalysis and modern literature; and a paper by Helmut Dahmer on Marx and Freud. As readers can see, this Festschrift is also a good proof of how much psychoanalysis in Germany is still cultivated by an enlightened intellectual elite.