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III. Cc. Ego Psychology in Europe after World War II In 1947, Alexander Mitscherlich founded the German journal Psyche , which contributed much to the diffusion of North American Ego Psychology. In Germany, Ego Psychology also played a role, similar to the one it played in the US, in the delayed reception of Kleinian psychoanalysis (see Bergmann 2000). Mitscherlich’s intellectual brilliance and political skill helped him to inaugurate in 1960 in Frankfurt the State-financed Sigmund Freud Institute, which played a particularly important role in the promotion of psychoanalysis in the years to come. Defining a specific diagnosis and therapy of the psychological problems connected to and caused by the Nazi Regime was the topic of his most famous book, written by Mitscherlich with his wife Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen: The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (1975; German original 1967). Not only did Mitscherlich play a major role in reconnecting German psychoanalysis with the international psychoanalytic community, but he was also instrumental in inspiring and training several generations of leading German analysts: Horst-Eberhard Richter, Johannes Cremerius, Hermann Argelander, Wolfgang Loch and Helmut Thomae. Johannes Cremerius played an important role both in Germany and in Italy in promoting ego psychologically oriented analytic work, both through his work as a training analyst and supervisor and through his many technical papers. Collected in the 1990 anthology, Vom Handwerk des Psychoanalytikers: Das Werkzeug der psychoanaltischen Technik [The Craft of the Psychoanalyst: The Tools of Psychoanalytic Technique] , they deal with the defense mechanisms active in a wide range of patients – e.g., those who talk too much, those who talk too little, patients with superego problems – and how to deal with them. Later in his life, Cremerius became a pioneer in the German reception of the work of Balint and Ferenczi, but he never gave up the ego psychological basis of his way of working (Conci 2019, chapter 10). Hermann Argelender (1920-2004) founded the important concept szenisches Verstehen, which can be traced back to what can be called a szensiche Funktion des Ichs, that is, a “scenic function of the ego” (Argelander 1970, 2013; Conci, 2017). In a series of papers, Argelander presented the psychoanalytic work in terms of a dialogue which involves and/or requires the analyst’s participation in the emotional life of the patient, and the relationship resulting from such an interaction. This relationship allows the patient to express the unconscious conflicts that brought him to ask the analyst for help in terms of concrete unconscious behaviors and/or structured scenes, to which the analyst will more or less consciously add his own contribution. In light of Paul Parin ’s (1916-2009) work inside and outside psychoanalytic institutions, the Zurich colleague Thomas Kurz (2017) classified him as belonging – together with Alexander Mitscherlich and Johannes Cremerius – to the so-called “Freudian Left” (Jacoby 1983), founded by Otto Fenichel. For all of them, Ego Psychology was the most useful perspective from which to study the relationship between the individual and his society.
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