The Intersect of Psychoanalysis and Totalitarianism

This conjunction is fraught with danger, with difficulties, and with irreconcilables. I discuss three examples: (a) very briefly, the Soviet Union, where psychoanalysis, established before the October Revolution, came finally to be abolished, as incompatible with Soviet-enforced psychological theory; (b) somewhat more, Nazi Germany, where psychoanalysis struggled to survive in a truncated and grossly distorted form, as a Nazi-sponsored “Aryanized” depth-psychology stripped of Freud’s name and of its necessary conditions of safety and confidentiality; and (c) in considerable detail, my personal experiences on behalf of the International Psychoanalytical Association, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, dealing, after the overthrow of the military junta that had ruled in the 1970s, with the psychoanalytic aftermath, the complete breakdown of the analytic society’s functioning consequent to the shielding of a government torturer during the dictatorship years.