The formation of the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV): regaining the psychoanalytical orientation lost in the Third Reich.

The author of this paper is concerned with exploring the motives for the so-called split in the German Psychoanalytical Society (DPG) that took place in 1950 with the foundation of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV) and the way this has been described in recent accounts. Considering alternative interpretations which assume a positive development of psychoanalysis in the Third Reich that have recently been put forward (e.g. Dührssen, 1994) in the light of archival evidence (particularly circular reports written by Otto Fenichel), the author postulates that the so-called split in 1950 had its roots in the dissolution of the DPG during the Third Reich, which in reality deserves the characterisation as schism, and that the foundation of the DPV was actually an attempt to repair the damage caused by the violation of civilised standards and the ways these were responded to by psychoanalysts at the time. The author questions the ahistorical tendency in accounts which deny the discontinuity of civilisation after 1933 and concentrate on the policy issues of the 1950s. He suggests that the foundation of the DPV was part of a conscious technical and scientific objective, namely the restoration of a psychoanalytical orientation that had become lost and buried in the Third Reich.

Identification and its vicissitudes in the context of the Nazi phenomenon.

The following vicissitudes of identification predominate among many others in my case material: The primary identification, independent of the historical background, with the lost mother who returns in the transference and who receives the ancillary role of a Nazi victim. The coexistence of contradictory, secondary identifications, partly characterized by intrasystemic conflicts, in the ego and superego (e.g. the existence of the peaceful and the warlike ege as 'doubles'), producing a multiple personality in which the formation of the ego ideal, moulded by themes of terror, threatens to exert a transgenerational influence owing to a superego identification with the Nazi aspects of the father, while the 'borrowed guilt' from the father corresponds to a melancholic identification; the regressive concretization in the form of a transitory delusion also belongs to the context of the latter. A restitutive, self-curative identification with figures in world literature and cultural values capable of linking up with a pretraumatic past not personally experienced and of countering the threat of loss of orientation to the world--a feature which seems comparable to the struggle for attainment of the depressive position as described by Melanie Klein. The Nazi Phenomenon can only be defined adequately with reference to delusional anti-Semitism.