ABSTRACT
The Nazi occupation of central Europe had been more or less a deathblow to German-speaking psychoanalysis; and the invasion of Holland, Belgium, and France in early 1940 spelled out a similar disaster for the western countries of Europe. The survival of a native psychoanalysis in Britain was perhaps as much to do with Melanie Klein personally as to any other factor. Psychoanalysis during the First World War gained a huge reputation from being the only psychology to explain war neurosis and to offer a treatment method; but in the Second World War psychoanalysis played a different role. Donald Winnicott was originally a paediatrician who became interested in psychoanalysis through the psychology of the infant. American psychoanalysis was set on a different course—developing classical psychoanalysis and its metapsychology, ironing out inconsistencies, and exploring new problems by theoretical deductions from accepted theory as left by Sigmund Freud.
