ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis’s fragmentation is connected to its trauma history, Sigmund Freud, in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War and the Holocaust, which generated the Diaspora of surviving psychoanalysts mostly to England and to the Americas—a geographical but also a communal fragmentation. In the psychoanalytic history-writing and historiography have begun to emerge from their long period of domination by biography, and then of internal partisanship and external embattlement. Psychoanalytic centres had developed all over the world as the European analytic Diaspora settled, particularly in England, America, and South America, but most histories of psychoanalysis were national histories; there is not yet a worldwide context or a “cosmopolitan intent” in the histories or historiography. Histories of psychoanalysis were written exclusively by analysts from the 1960s until the 1970s, when the role of psychoanalysis in broader social, political, and cultural movements did finally begin to become a compelling topic for academic historians.
