Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with the roots of the local and national assumptions and with their impact on psychoanalysis itself. It focuses on the variables that tend to affect particular trends and views within psychoanalysis. The book traces not only how Freudian ideas evolved, took hold, and led to conflict or harmony but also how they are refracted in the mirror of several different cultures. It also focuses on the reception of psychoanalysis, its early history, its basic ideas, and their applications before 1945. The book addresses psychoanalytic applications, and specifically the elaborations of psychoanalytic concepts in response to intellectual and political issues within each milieu. It looks at postwar psychoanalysis. After the Second World War, when the majority of European analysts had become "Anglo-Saxon," psychoanalytic theories and practices began to diverge more and more.