ABSTRACT
At the end of 1935, the arrest of Edith Jacobsohn—who was at that time a militant left-winger belonging to a group of politically involved analysts led by Otto Fenichel—by the secret police in Berlin would seem to have thrown the situation into turmoil once again. Ernest Jones had originally opposed the resignation of the Jews from the Berlin Institute, because he had feared that it would have confirmed the Nazis' belief that psychoanalysis had a Jewish ideology at its core. Jones chaired the famous meeting held at the Berlin Institute, the result of which was the voluntary resignation of its Jewish members. Jones's need to view the persecution of Jewish analysts as being separate from the institutional problems of psychoanalysis, so as to preserve his vision of psychoanalysis as being a science and therefore neutral, is indicative of just how limiting it is, not to mention dangerous, for one to want to harbour such convictions.
