ABSTRACT
Social applications of psychoanalysis remain a relatively unexplored area. The authors consider that it is possible to explore it without neglecting the specific state of mind of psychotherapy and the psychoanalytic tradition that it has always contained, as an implicit characteristic a kind of challenge to the status quo. They set about looking for the psychological causes of the very radical change in Sigmund Freud’s way of thinking between one text and the other, this total renunciation of the psychoanalytic mind-set. The so-called “correspondence” between Freud and A. Einstein, which in fact consists of only two letters, is in many ways an anomaly in Freud’s work, not only because of its genesis and its contents, but also because of Freud’s attitude towards it. Eitingon, at the suggestion of Freud himself, had been co-opted in 1919 as a member of the small committee which was to preserve psychoanalysis after Freud’s death.
