Introduction

Every country creates the psychoanalysis it needs, although it does so unconsciously. For national traditions, interests, beliefs, and institutions influence both the general public and its avant garde, by conditioning a kind of collective unconscious. I do not mean to imply that psychoanalysts reflect what has been called “national character” (Inkeles and Levinson, 1954) or “social character” (Fromm, 1942) but only that even the best psychoanalysts, those who manage to cure their patients, inevitably function within the native philosophical assumptions, intellectual controversies, and fashions of their culture. And these ultimately affect not only the professional activities of the analysts but their larger intellectual concerns, such as human freedom, democracy, or war and peace.