ABSTRACT
In our book, A Psychotherapy for the People (2012), Karen Starr and I trace a genealogy, an architecture, a deep binary structure embedded in the history of psychoanalysis along the fault lines of the split between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, especially psychoanalytic psychotherapy. We trace this history to a two-stage, nachträglich development of psychoanalysis, first in Europe and then in post-Second World War America, by founding analysts who were on the margins of their society, at most second-generation immigrants: Jews repeatedly fleeing persecution, poverty, prejudice, and anti-Semitism, people who were traumatized and vulnerable. To summarize, we argue that psychoanalysis repeatedly arose out of traumatic circumstances. The discipline of psychoanalysis therefore suffers from a traumatic history that accounts for its lack of history, its disrupted narrative, its tendency toward splitting and fragmentation, and its structure of reversal and manic defense in which all vulnerability is projected, displaced, denied, and dissociated.
