ABSTRACT

In a speech about psychoanalysis and education at the First International Psycho-Analytical Congress in 1908, Sandor Ferenczi denounced the prevalent teaching methods as leading to faulty character development and serious illness; schools, he said, were hothouses fostering neurosis. By about 1926, psychoanalytic education had become a new academic specialty in the German-speaking countries. In Vienna, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth explicitly designed an educational therapy based on extrapolations from Sigmund Freud's case of "Little Hans". The Freudians spoke of the child's inner and outer worlds, of lapses and advances in learning to talk, or of impulse control and success. German psychoanalysts did not deal with "narcissistic" adolescents but with the children of former Nazis. Thus, most applied psychoanalysis became marginal, and Anglo-Saxon Freudians gradually came to reserve the term for case studies that support their theories or for discussions of literature, art, film, and other such cultural products.