German themes in psychoanalysis. Part four

I am happy to propose to our readers a fourth monographic issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis on the topic “German themes in psychoanalysis,” a topic whose treatment I inaugurated in 2013. That was Issue 4/2013, which contained the following authors and articles: W. Bohleber on the history and profile of the journal Psyche. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse; H. Stroeken on the dramatic fate of German-Jewish refugee psychoanalysts in the Netherlands ; U. May on Freud’s “Beyond the pleasure principle”; H.-J. Wirth on the militant and peaceful use of nuclear power; an interview with H. Kächele conducted by me, M. Conci, together with I. Erhardt; and my report on the XVIIth IFPS Forum in Mexico City in October 2012.

In the second monographic issue, 2/2015, I was able to include the following authors and articles: M. Ermann on the history and profile of the journal Forum der Psychoanalyse; I. Kogan on psychic holes and psychic representations; S. Zepf on Freud’s concept of conversion; M. Buchholz on the concept of psychic growth as a reconciliation of conflicts; H. Kächele, I. Erhardt, C. Seybert, and M. Buchholz on countertransference as an object of empirical research ; and H. Thomä on a utopian vision of the future of the IPA.

The third part came out as Issue 1/2018 and centered around the following authors and contributions: an interview with M. Ermann made by M. Conci; H. Will on the German 50-minute hour; M. Conci on his analytic work in Munich with Italian patients; a report by L. Gast on the Berlin International Psychoanalytic University; an analysis by R. Lazar of the history of post-war German psychoanalysis; a paper by G. Hristeva and P. Bennet on W. Reich in Soviet Russia; and a review by H. Lothane of the issue of Psychoanalyse. Texte zur Sozialforschung in honor of B. Nitzschke.

Since at least the publication of Edith Kurzweil’s (1926–2016) book The Freudians. A comparative perspective (1989), we have been familiar with the complex relationship between the international and multiple roots of psychoanalysis and the ways in which it has been received, assimilated, and further developed in the individual countries of the world. Having worked in Munich as a Kassenpsychoanalytiker since 1999, after having originally trained at the Milan IFPS institute founded in the 1970s by Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013) and Johannes Cremerius (1918-2002), and having later become a member of both the German and the Italian Psychoanalytic Societies, and the IPA, I have chosen to publish this series of monographic issues in order to bring our readers into contact with the specific aspects of the German analytic landscape.

As I showed in the previous issues, specific areas such as, for example, the historical and empirical research done in Germany in the field of psychoanalysis are so good that they deserve to be more internationally known than they still are. For one thing, German colleagues in contact with the international analytic community still find it more important to cultivate and stress what they have in common with their foreign colleagues than to tell them about the specific aspects I have just mentioned and, furthermore, about how they really work with their patients, in the context of the German Kassensystem – about which the international analytic community would certainly like to know more. This is probably one of the reasons why they seem not to dare to better develop and talk about a “German school of psychoanalysis,” as Edith Kurzweil tried to do in her book.

My Italian colleagues, after elaborating a series of analytic concepts typical of our tradition (for example, the analytic field concept), were eventually able to come so far, as they documented with the publication of the anthology Reading Italian psychoanalysis (Borgogno, Luchetti, & Marino Coe, 2016). The specific lines of development and the specific contributions of French psychoanalysis had already been documented in 2010 in the volume Reading French psychoanalysis (Borgogno, Luchetti, & Marino Coe, 2010). And what about German psychoanalysis? From this point of view, the fourth of the monographic issues I have edited also represents my personal stimulus in this direction. A direction that still evokes in the most conscientious of our German colleagues the tragedy of the so-called Göring Institute of 1936–1945 as the first and perverse attempt to create “a German psychoanalysis,” as opposed to, and not as an enrichment of, international psychoanalysis. In fact, the desire to further promote our international analytic dialogue is also the conceptual frame behind my latest book, Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis (2019).

Given these premises, I can now come to the introduction of the authors and contributions in this issue, starting with Ulrike May (Berlin) – whom I have known since 1996. In fact, Grigoris Maniadakis and I are very happy and proud to have the chance to publish in our journal the English translation of the paper she originally gave in Berlin in March 2018, “Do we need to change our image of Freud? Reflections on Kurt R. Eissler’s interviews in the Freud Archives of the Library of Congress”; this was presented in the context of the 31st “Symposion on the History of Psychoanalysis” organized by the journal Luzifer-Amor – a journal founded in 1988 that is specifically dedicated to the history of psychoanalysis. As the reader will see, Ulrike May clearly shows us how Freud’s general idea of psychoanalysis differed from our own, as she also documented in her 2018 book Freud at work.

Henry Zvi Lothane is not only another old friend, and the colleague who has illuminated the German topic of the “Schreber case” as no one before him, but also – since the death of Martin Bergmann (1913–2014) – the only US colleague I know who can lecture and discuss his work directly in German, thus contributing in an outstanding way to the international dialogue I am talking about. His work on President Schreber became his life task and he revisited it in his paper “My life with Paul Schreber,” specifically written for this issue.

With Rainer Krause, and with the publication of his article “The development of different selves on the basis of leading maternal affects: Metatheoretical, clinical and technical reflections,” we have gained another German friend. He is one of the most sophisticated German and internationally known psychoanalysts and researchers, particularly well known for his research work on affects, which Otto Kernberg himself always held in high esteem (see Krause, 2012). As in the case of Lothane, we can also find in Krause’s article a fascinating synthesis of a life’s research work, centered around the possibility of demonstrating how the affect expression of the mother comprises the organizational nucleus of the child’s future personality, and generates the “emotional scripts” that we carry into our adult life.

“Mentalizing and emotion regulation: Evidence from a nonclinical sample,” co-authored by Peter Fonagy and by the German researchers Schwarzer, Nolte, and Gingelmaier, represents a further evidence of the high quality of the empirical work carried out in Germany, which can play an important role in keeping psychoanalysis alive and in guaranteeing to it the financial support of the German Kassensystem.

Nils Toepfer, a Berlin candidate of the DPG and the IPA, was happy to put at our disposal the paper “‘Where does it come from?’: A call for explicating implicit theories of interpretative and supervisory techniques in psychoanalytic supervision,” which he presented at the IPSO Study Day held in Berlin in February 2020. We are happy to publish such a good paper by a candidate.

A very much appreciated gift to complete this issue came from Michael Buchholz, represented by the interview with the title “At my core, I am a psychoanalysts, but … ,” conducted with him by Alekxandar Dimitrijevic, which throws a very fascinating light not only on the extraordinary creativity of a former associate editor of this journal, but also on how creative it can be to work as a psychoanalyst in Germany. This is also what Buchholz does in his Obituary of Horst Kächele (1944–2020), also a former collaborator of the IFP.

In my review of Hale Usak-Sahin's book, a historical and personal reconstruction of psychoanalysis in Turkey, I have been able to show how well a Turkish-Austrian analytic candidate was able to demonstrate the importance of international collaboration and dialogue for the reception and development of psychoanalysis in Turkey.