ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis should be recognized as a Holocaust survivor. This stunningly compelling observation, recently made by Prince (2009), begs further discussion. The role of persecution, marginalization, and immigration in the development of psychoanalysis has not yet been acknowledged, neither in its founding generation nor as it was compounded in the next generation, après-coup, by the trauma of the Holocaust and the resulting exodus from Europe. For the European émigrés fleeing Hitler, America was not an “average expectable environment” (Hartmann, 1939). The years post-World War I witnessed a rise in American anti-Semitism, which, fueled by economic depression and the prospect of another war, reached its peak during World War II. The émigrés faced an undercurrent of prejudices rooted in beliefs similar to those they had encountered in Europe. Surveys conducted throughout the 1940s and 1950s showed an uninterrupted increase in popular disapproval of Jews in America from the early stages of World War II through the immediate postwar period, with anti-Semitism reaching its highest point in 1946. Jews were described as clannish, pushy, aggressive, and unscrupulous, avoidant of military service, overly influential in government, and wielding excessive financial power.
