The organizing of psychoanalysis in Britain

This paper describes the organizations that were the earliest attempts to establish psychoanalysis formally in Britain. This process of institutionalization occurred between the years 1910 and 1925. Interest flowered at times in the universities and in the progressive school movement. However these seem to have been more ephemeral developments. It was the clinical and professional interest which demanded the first and most long-lasting base. A complex process of interaction between a number of organizations occurred. Their memberships initially intermingled and overlapped until the British Psycho-Analytical Society was consolidated by the mid-1920s.

We (not-so) happy few: symbolic loss and mourning in Freud's psychoanalytic movement and the history of psychoanalysis

This paper addresses today's many criticisms of psychoanalysis by exploring their origins in its history. It proposes deepening and broadening our understanding of that history by examining the phenomenon of symbolic loss and mourning as it occurred, not only in Freud' s personal life, but especially in his leadership of the psychoanalytic movement, and in his struggle to recognize and to come to terms with his cultural heritage. It is claimed that these issues persist, in varying degrees and in different forms, in the institutes of today. They do so chiefly in the inability to mourn, first, the loss of Freud as an exemplar of introspective courage and, second, the loss of the symbolic dimensions of Freud's creative oeuvre.