ABSTRACT
Children are burning all over the world in wars waged in the name of religion and ethnic cleansing. Children are washing up dead on the shores of western democratic nations. Psychoanalysis incorporates a rich, complicated tapestry of sources and influences. Ernst Federn, co-editor of the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, was himself a survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald. Comparing Sigmund Freud to other great revolutionaries of thought, Isaac Deutscher declared to the World Jewish Congress in 1968, as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures. The rigid emphasis on intrapsychic conflict and oedipal dynamics over actual external events may also help to explain the reluctance of psychoanalysts to recognize the pervasiveness of childhood sexual abuse, and the necessity of working empathically with survivors to heal from real traumatic events in their lives. Children are washing up dead on the shores of western democratic nations.
