ABSTRACT
The 1938 arrival in London of Sigmund Freud and the Viennese analysts marked the end to the relative freethinking that had prevailed beforehand. During World War II the Controversial Discussions took place within the British Society. Freud’s own power lay in his capacities as a writer, clinician, and pioneering leader; only in America has psychoanalysis rested on an institutional base intimately bound up with the official psychiatry Freud scorned. Psychoanalysis in France has had a fascinating history, one that highlights that which has been exceptional in the British reaction to Freud. In contrast to the fate of Freud’s work in North America, where it became part of the medical establishment and therefore to some extent an instrument of social control, in France the critique of psychiatry has become allied with psychoanalysis. Even aside from French culture’s notorious inaccessibility to outside influences, psychoanalysis in France got off to a slow start.
