El psicoanálisis 1919-1933consolidación, expansión e institucionalización

Abstract

The psychoanalysis history and international psychoanalytic movement has received little attention from the psychoanalysts themselves. In the last years, many authors have claimed the relevance of developing a psychoanalytic historyography from which to review the current disputes between schools and therapeutic approaches, and at the same time to recover the original impetus that psychoanalysis meant to the European scientific thought. From history we can be able to reach a better understanding of the theory and the nature of psychotherapy practice. After the First World War the psychoanalytic movement leaned, for its consolidation and expansion, in a project of social commitment based on the creation of welfare institutions where to take care of ample layers of the population, specially the most underprivileged. The project, to create a "psychotherapy for the masses", required free of charge psychoanalytic clinics and a large number of psychoanalysts. In the shadow of the clinics were formed the training institutes from which the "second generation of analysts" came out. The project was completed with the development of an international psychoanalytic publishing house, the "Verlag", and the attempt to introduce psychoanalysis at the university. The "Polyclinic of Berlin” (1920) was followed by the "Ambulatorium" of Vienna (1922) and throughout the 20’s decade, clinics and institutes emerged in London, Moscow, Paris, Boston, New York, Frankfurt, Prague,... The consolidation and expansion of psychoanalytic movement was achieved until the economic crisis and the rise of fascism dismantled everything. Later, after World War II, the psychoanalytic movement erased all traces of its previous commitment in its necessity to adapt to the depoliticized Anglo-Saxon world, creating a new project characterized by the medicalization of psychoanalysis, their training and technical, philosophical and political neutrality of the analysts and their movement.