ABSTRACT
Many of the better-known psychoanalytic studies on anti-Semitism were written in circumstances marked by involuntary emigration and first-hand experience of the persecution and extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime. In the early 1980s, German psychoanalysts had embarked on a painful process of considering the involvement of their own profession in the Nazi era. This produced a heightened awareness of the ongoing effects of the Nazi heritage on subsequent generations. S. Volkov (1990) has taken issue with the theory of continuity between nineteenth century anti-Semitism and the Nazi variety. She insists that the role of anti-Semitism can only be understood in terms of the needs and problems of a given age. Psychoanalysis must pay due heed to the autonomy of the social sphere and the abstract nature of social control mechanisms and systemically stabilized patterns of action.
