Introduction: Austrian Émigrés and Exiles and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain

Abstract

Neither Sigmund Freud nor his colleagues directly addressed the subject of emigration within theory in the first half of the twentieth century, even when it was of great urgency for himself, his family, for psychoanalysts in Vienna and Central Europe, for intellectual and creative professionals, and for all those persecuted and forced to leave or in fear of leaving Austria in the 1930s. Yet given how Freud came to terms with the threat of emigration from the historical perspective of the discriminated Jew, and how he integrated constructed models of Diaspora (also imagined displacement) into his theories, it is here suggested that psychoanalysis became a tool for émigrés to reclaim their voice in the face of loss. The overarching hypothesis is that psychoanalysis came to serve as a methodology that allowed this book’s prominent protagonists (including émigré and exiled authors, psychoanalysts, sociologists, and artists) to newly reconfigure relations between personality and culture. Employing psychoanalysis as an “émigré language” helped them produce a vision of modernity that promoted humanized relations between the individual and society during a time of persecution and migration. Psychoanalysis would also support their inclusion in society in Britain, where many of them emigrated. At the same time psychoanalysis is presented as a specifically Viennese cultural language that émigrés perceived as a bridge between Austria and England and which provided them with creative authority. As a methodology, it facilitated how they would come to terms with the humiliation, hatred, and rejection pervasive at mid-century and lead to the reclamation of an internationally recognized cultural authorship.