ABSTRACT
Twenty-first-century psychoanalysts no longer believe in their therapeutic neutrality. Still, we recognize that we are not always able to know when and how our own context – our subjectivity – enters the analytic process. Ironically, our own participation in the interactive matrix often eludes self-reflexivity. As D. B. Stern (2010) reminds us, “The eye does not see itself,” perhaps most pointedly when we are required to see our least valorous, more destructive or hateful selves. On the other hand, finding bias in the words and acts of our more distant foremothers and fathers feels easier, although nuance and complexity are lost in the absence of their lived experience. It is with such challenges in mind that I explore the impact of hateful and destructive experiences and affects that touched psychoanalysts amidst one of the most destructive and darkest experiences in human history. From Budapest to Paris, the Nazi scourge invaded the work of this seminal group of thinkers and clinicians, a century that belonged as much to Freud as it did to Hitler. How were these analysts professionally affected by a context of creativity and death?
