100 Years of the IPA

The Centenary History of the International Psychoanalytical Association 1910-2010: Evolution and Change

Peter Loewenberg, Peter Loewenberg, Nellie L. Thompson, Nellie Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781905888160
• eBook ISBN: 9780429910180
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book offers a close glimpse of the nuanced dialectic between major psychoanalytic concepts and the sociopolitical environments in which such ideas were germinated, spread, took roots, and further evolved.

Part I
Europe

1
Austria

The three histories of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society

Andrea Bronner

The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society [Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (WPV)] has not one but three histories: the Society is not merely the cradle of psychoanalysis, the “mother of all psychoanalytic societies” (Jones, 1939), which in its first history underwent an incredible development from its founding in 1908 to 1938; in its second history, it had to endure its own brutal destruction (1938–45); and in its third history, beginning in 1946, it experienced a difficult and slow but steady rehabilitation. The founding of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society by Freud and his disciples in 1908 was only the formal beginning of the WPV. In reality, the WPV was the logical consequence of a development that had begun much earlier: namely, in the autumn of 1902. It was at this time that Sigmund Freud, together with four doctors—Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, Rudolf Reitler, and Max Kahane—created the “Psychological Wednesday Society” to discuss Freud’s work. The gatherings took place every Wednesday at 8:30 pm in Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19 in Vienna’s 9th district. By this time, Freud had written, together with Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895d) and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b). Freud was subjected to increasing isolation in the medical and academic world at this time because of his unsettling discovery of the unconscious, and especially following the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), which contained many intimate and, at times, humiliating details of his self-analysis.

Freud was sharply criticized by countless colleagues, many of whom—even former friends—avoided his company. About this difficult time, Freud once said that “people took care to handle him like a freshly painted wall: nobody dared to touch him” (Minutes of the WPV [Nunberg & Federn, 2008], p. XXI). Even his appointment to a professorship in 1902 did not change much. Nevertheless, he was then permitted to give lectures, and some interested listeners did, in fact, come to hear him on Saturday evenings: at first doctors, and then other educated people who were interested in psychology and—dissatisfied with the current doctrines—were on the lookout for new ideas. In them, Freud found people with whom he could exchange views. At this time he published, among other works, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). One of those who attended his lectures—Wilhelm Stekel, a doctor whom Freud had treated successfully and who was especially gifted at understanding symbols—had the idea to meet weekly. They would discuss psychological problems and interpret each other’s dreams: this was the birth of the Wednesday evening gatherings.

Soon other interested people began to attend the gatherings, such as Paul Federn in 1903 and Eduard Hitschmann in 1905. Federn remained both a loyal friend and tarot partner of Freud’s for his entire life and was Vice President of the WPV from 1924 to 1938. Hitschmann became head of the newly founded outpatient clinic in 1923, a position he held until 1938, when the Nazis dissolved the WPV. Beginning in October 1906, the group’s secretary—Otto Rank—took minutes at the gatherings. Until the quarrel with Freud in 1924, Rank was Freud’s favourite student and was slated to become his successor. The group had appointed Rank secretary so that he could thereby finance his study of philosophy.

The minutes reveal that the members of this group had a wide-ranging conception of what psychoanalysis should concern itself with—people who were ill were not alone at the centre of their attention—so were issues of literature, religion, philosophy, sociology, and pedagogy: “To this circle of friends, which together undertook the task of trying out Freudian ideas in different domains, I gave a speech about Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman”, wrote Max Graf, a professor at the Viennese Academy of Music who was also a member of the WPV and the father of “Little Hans” (from the Foreword to Graf, 1911; cited in the Minutes of the WPV [Nunberg & Federn, 2008], p. XXXIV).

In 1907, foreign guests began to attend these Viennese gatherings. The first was Max Eitingon, later the founder and patron of the Psychoanalytic Institute and Outpatient Clinic in Berlin as well as the founder of the Psychoanalytic Society in Palestine. Eitingon came to Vienna to consult Freud on a particularly difficult case. Shortly thereafter, Carl Gustav Jung and Ludwig Binswanger first attended. For a time Jung played a very important role in Freud’s life, and Binswanger, who in 1910 became the first president of the local group in Zurich, was a lifelong friend of Freud’s despite their many scholarly differences. All of them came from the Sanatorium Burghölzli in Zurich, where Eugen Bleuler—a highly regarded professor of psychiatry and one of Freud’s very few sympathizers in academia—taught and practised.

At the beginning of April 1908, as previously mentioned, the WPV was established for the “nurture and advancement of the psychoanalytic science founded by Prof. Dr Sigmund Freud in Vienna”, as the statutes still read today. Shortly thereafter, the first congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association was held in Salzburg, with twenty-six Austrian, six Swiss, five German, two English, two Hungarian, and one American participants. It was also in 1908 that the first psychoanalytic periodical—the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen [Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research]—was founded; Sigmund Freud and Eugen Bleuler were its publishers and C. G. Jung its editor. The first volume appeared in 1909. Bleuler (who never became a psychoanalyst) and Jung played important roles. To a certain extent, it was Bleuler who opened the academic and medical world to Freud. Jung, as the first non-Jewish psychoanalyst, helped to free psychoanalysis from its reputation—especially damaging at the time—as a “Jewish” science. It is also likely that this is the reason Freud appointed Jung the first president of the IPA, which was founded in 1910. But Freud also felt a deep professional and personal connection with Jung, making him publisher of the Yearbook and designating him as his successor.

It is not difficult to comprehend why Freud’s decision deeply offended his original Viennese followers: they felt overlooked. Freud tried to compensate by lending his support to Alfred Adler, who in 1910 became chairman of the WPV, with Stekel as his deputy. But the peace did not last long: Adler’s theory about the inferiority of the organs and the implications of this for the psyche was increasingly in opposition with Freud’s theories. In Freud’s view, Adler’s psychology was a theory of consciousness, not of the unconscious.

Freud ultimately perceived a threat to the very foundations of his teachings; this came to a head in 1911, and after intense discussions, Adler and some of his followers resigned from the Society. Adler went on to found his own school of “Individual Psychology”. The second serious fracture followed in 1914, with C. G. Jung, an incident that deeply hurt Freud. Jung subsequently also established his own school. In 1913, to protect both Freud from defectors and psychoanalysis from disintegration, Ernest Jones came up with the idea of creating an unofficial executive committee of the IPA. The “Secret Committee”—composed at first of Freud, Ferenczi, Rank, Sachs, Abraham, and Jones—was intended to help Freud in future differences of opinion. Eitingon joined the Committee in 1919, and Anna Freud in 1924.

In 1910, in consequence of an application by one of Vienna’s first female doctors, Dr Margarethe Hilferding, a discussion ensued about whether women should be admitted as members. A few men objected as a matter of principle, particularly Isidor Sadger, who had made important contributions to the understanding of perversions and homosexuality. Sadger’s nephew, Fritz Wittels, a writer and fierce adversary of Karl Kraus, also vehemently opposed the idea of women joining. Freud, by contrast, viewed it as inconsequential. Eventually, a clear majority favoured allowing women to join, and in April 1910 Margarethe Hilferding became the first female member. In 1911, however, she left the WPV together with Adler and, as one of the “individual psychologists”, dealt with women’s rights and birth control.

In the meantime, membership had expanded so much that Freud’s apartment was no longer large enough for the Wednesday evening gatherings, and so these had to be moved elsewhere. In 1912, the magazine Imago was founded. Slowly, psychoanalysis established itself not only in Vienna but in other countries, as evidenced by the founding of local groups and societies in Berlin and Zurich (1910), New York, Russia, and Munich (1911), and Budapest and London (1913). It was during these years that narcissism assumed an increasingly important role in Freud’s thinking, and in 1914 his paper “On Narcissism: An Introduction” was published.

And then the First World War broke out, halting for the time being the previously uninterrupted development of psychoanalysis. More than a few members were subject to military conscription, and it was no longer possible to maintain international contacts. The number of patients fell, and consequently so did the incomes of psychoanalysts. For a while Freud was able to continue working, first using the experience of the atmosphere in the War to write “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915b), which dealt with aggression, death, and ambivalence towards loved persons, then making an important contribution to metapsychology with “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917e [1915]). But eventually the destitution all around him led to the slowing of his scientific work.

The end of the war and the large number of shell-shocked soldiers, however, led to a gradual revival of the psychoanalytic movement: in the autumn of 1918, the 5th IPA Congress took place in Budapest. Among those present were official representatives of Central European governments who wanted to hear what psychoanalysis had to say about shell shock, which had in part been very successfully treated by psychoanalysts. A few fundamental themes were addressed. Herman Nunberg, a psychiatrist who had completed his training under Paul Federn, petitioned for the introduction of mandatory training, and he had Freud’s approval for this, but the motion was not accepted until 1925, at the IPA Congress in Bad Homburg. In 1918, the idea of an international psychoanalytic publishing house was put forward; a year later one was founded, with Vienna as its hub. The money for the publishing house was supplied by Anton von Freund, a brewer from Budapest who was first a patient of Freud’s and later a friend and patron. The first head of the publishing house was Otto Rank, who was followed in 1925, after his falling out with Freud, by A. J. Storfer. Storfer, according to Alfred Polgar, was “a real Bohemian” and “an original” of the Viennese literary scene.

From 1932 until March 1938, the publishing house was led by (Jean) Martin Freud, a lawyer and banker and Sigmund Freud’s oldest son, who had been named after Jean Martin Charcot. Martin Freud’s primary task was rescuing the publishing house, which was deep in debt. Though it was an important instrument of scientific communication, the publishing house encountered financial difficulties from the very beginning. With the outbreak, in 1931, of an economic crisis in Central Europe, the publishing house slid into a precarious position and urgently needed to be put back on its feet. The WPV stepped in and contributed a sum that was third only to funds given by Germany and the United States, which is evidence of just how powerful and important the WPV was at this time (Huber, 1977, p. 23). In 1922, Felix Deutsch—a university lecturer in internal medicine and a co-founder of psychoanalytic–psychosomatic medicine—established, with his wife Helene and Eduard Hitschmann, an outpatient clinic in Vienna. Like the Psychoanalytic Institute and Outpatient Clinic in Berlin, this outpatient clinic was intended to make an education in psychoanalysis possible as well as to ensure treatment of the poor. It would be maintained by private donations, and members who were medical doctors pledged to take on at least one patient free of charge. Colleagues agreed to submit to regular supervision by an experienced psychoanalyst and also had to participate in additional seminars and training evenings.

Wilhelm Reich—appointed as the first resident physician in November 1923—established a therapeutic–technical seminar that he himself led from 1924 to 1930, and to which he would also occasionally introduce difficult cases from his own practice. He concentrated especially on the analysis of character and resistance as well as on the negative therapeutic transference. But because only trained medical doctors were permitted to treat patients who were ill whereas analysis by lay people was meant to continue as before, a line had to be drawn between treatment and training. A training institute was thus established in October 1924, and by its opening at the start of 1925 it had 15 students (including a few from abroad). Its first head was Dr Helene Deutsch, a specialist in psychiatry who had completed her training analysis under Freud and who was a pioneer in researching female psychology. Her husband, Felix Deutsch, gave lectures in English, together with Paul Federn, at this time. The atmosphere in the training institute was open and tolerant and was marked by scientific curiosity. Students and faculty were often friends with one another and met together regularly in their free time—to play cards at night, for instance—where “problem patients” were frequently reported on and keenly discussed (Reichmayr, 2004, pp. 147–148). It was primarily the young people associated with the psychoanalytic movement who viewed themselves as revolutionaries. Pedagogical and sociopolitical questions—e.g. school reform, sexual education, and adult education—were of particular concern to many psychoanalysts, especially those on the left, such as Siegfried Bernfeld, Otto Fenichel, and Anni and Wilhelm Reich. As a result, there was a close relationship with the Social Democratic Party in Vienna—especially with famous city councilman for health (and professor of anatomy) Julius Tandler. The WPV itself was, however, not politically active, and Freud himself was a liberal of the old school: “There was … a small [liberal] party, which once or twice put up a candidate in Freud’s district; when that happened, Freud would vote for him” (Jones, 1955, p. 435). Nevertheless, education was of great concern to many psychoanalysts. Anna Freud pioneered the field of child psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically influenced pedagogy. Together with Dorothy Burlingham and a few other psychoanalysts, she offered courses and seminars on child psychoanalysis. In 1936, they opened an experimental kindergarten run with a psychoanalytic point of view in mind, for toddlers at risk of neglect: the Jackson Nursery. It was closed in 1938, with the arrival of the Nazis.

August Aichhorn, one of the most active psychoanalytic educators and a pioneer in social work with neglected youth, offered very popular courses for educators and social workers. He was, incidentally, one of the few members of the WPV associated with the Christian Socialist Party. In 1923 the first parenting support centre was established as part of the outpatient clinic; its first head was Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth. Children and young people from poor families were the beneficiaries of this new WPV facility. It was in this fertile atmosphere for psychoanalysis that Freud further developed his science of the unconscious: in 1920 he wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he introduced the concepts of “repetition compulsion” and the “death drive” as contrasted with the “life drive” (libido). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego followed in 1921 and, in 1923, The Ego and the Id, a work in which Freud introduced the concepts of the ego, the superego, and the id as the three parts of the psychic apparatus. In 1925, a propaganda committee was created to popularize psychoanalytic idea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE IPA
• FOREWORD
• Introduction
• PART I Europe
• PART II North America
• PART III Latin America
• PART IV Asia & Oceania
• PART V International survey
• PART VI IPA leadership
• IPA SOCIETIES
• IPA CONGRESSES
• INDEX