Otto Fenichel: ideas between two continents (Machine Translated by Google)

Otto Fenichel: ideas between two continents-Published in Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane, 55, 1.

(Starting with the article by Arnold Richards)

Alberto Angelini

The European period

Richards’ article highlights a part, still worthy of further study, of the historical encounter between Marxism and psychoanalysis which involved, in the first half of the twentieth century, many illustrious exponents of the psychoanalytic movement, both in Europe and in America. Chronologically, Europe was the first theater in which Freudian theories and Marxist philosophy came into contact. In that context the meeting was fruitful and continued, in some declinations, even in the second half of the last century. The situation was different in the United States. Richards shows how adepts of Marxist psychoanalysis existed in the USA as well, but how these presences, which were small from the beginning, then became extinct.

In the European context, numerous second generation psychoanalysts were openly Marxists and worked intellectually to integrate Marxism with the psychoanalytic conceptual heritage. Racial persecutions and war events prompted many of them to emigrate to the United States. Here they, on the public level, abandoned the ideological aspects connected to Marxism and gradually concentrated on theoretical and technical questions belonging mainly to psychoanalytic theory and its clinic.

The story of Otto Fenichel represents an example of this situation. His early studies are little known and his work, historically, stands out precisely for the clinical and theoretical works published during his stay in the United States, from 1938 until his death in 1946. The Treatise on Psychoanalysis (Fenichel, 1945) universally succeeded in conquering the rank of a model of the most exemplary psychoanalytic information. According to R. Fine, author of a classic history of psychoanalysis, it “summarizes the most important knowledge in the field of psychoanalysis reached up to that moment” (Fine, 1979, 82). Other works related to the same genre have had a similar, favorable fate, such as the Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique (1941).

On the other hand, the importance acquired by the works produced in Europe, in the period preceding his emigration to the United States, is absolutely small. Even the historiographical literature is objectively scarce compared to this part of Fenichel’s scientific life, which took place while Europe was in crisis and Hitler was rising to power. To explain this deficiency, it should be remembered that a large part of Fenichel’s European period appears, directly or indirectly, to be influenced by Marxist thought (Angelini, 1979, 1979a). This ideological background, which later vanished, but was so evident in that first phase of activity, certainly could not be positively received by the rigid US psychoanalytic world. Since repression works even within small and large human institutions, these early interests were simply overlooked and little or nothing cited. In the European years, many of his works on historical and cultural topics appeared. Fenichel wanted to use psychoanalysis to better understand the great social events that upset the world and individual consciences.

Richards cites Fenichel indicating him as the author, in 1934, of an essay “on the links between psychoanalysis, socialism and Marxism”, as well as the promoter of “contacts between Marxist analysts throughout the country”. This tribute by Fenichel to Marxism, entitled Psychoanalysis as the Core of a Future Dialectical Materialistic Psychology, echoes ideas previously expressed by both Wilhelm Reich and the Russian psychologist Aleksandr R. Lurija, advocate of psychoanalysis, in his youth.

In the hot years that followed the First World War and the Russian Revolution, psychoanalysis and Marxist thought made a strong presence in Europe. This theoretical cyclone came from the lively intellectual world of the fledgling Soviet Socialist Republic, in the culturally brilliant and dynamic period that preceded the gray collapse of the Stalinist regime.

Luria, in 1928, published a work of a methodological nature, “Die modern Psychologie und der dialektische Materialismus”, in a magazine well known and widespread among the intellectuals of the German and Austrian left: Unter dem banner des Marxismus . This article took up various concepts of a previous work, exquisitely methodological, “Psychoanalysis as a system of monistic psychology” (1925), published in the anthology Psichologija i Marksizm , edited by KN Kornilov (1925), then director of the Institute of Psychology of Moscow University. The magazine Unter dem banner des Marxismus which also had a Russian edition; it hosted, in 1929, the work of W. Reich “Dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis”. This article, which echoes the theme put forward by Luria, triggered, in 1930, a heated and controversial reply by the theorist of the regime I. Sapir (1929-1930), again in the aforementioned magazine.

Fenichel’s work Psychoanalysis as the nucleus of a future dialectical materialistic psychology (1934) addresses the methodological argument.

The approach he proposes here is based on biology. In his perspective, human biological needs, or needs, are at the basis of both psychic processes and the same processes of economic production. Indeed, he writes: «The materialistic bases that set the processes of production in motion are rightly human needs; and these needs (although deriving from a somatic source, as we shall say) are of a psychic nature “(Fenichel, 1934, 124).

The need to resolve the hiatus that would arise between the biological ­world and the psychic world is faced , in an empirical key, through the category of experience, which must be analyzed in a perspective that considers it, “on the basis of the natural sciences” all the complexity.

The psychoanalytic dimension itself is brought back to the dimension of experience; but the latter, which also cannot be disconnected from the physical criterion of individual biology, is elevated to the noble rank of historical phenomenon. In modern language, here he would like to move from biology to biography. From the point of view assumed by Fenichel, this is a necessary step, if we want to propose psychoanalysis as the nucleus of a psychology, capable of filling the void that appears between the social moment and the individual moment of the existing structure.

Both Fenichel and Reich visited the Soviet Union at that time, meeting numerous exponents of Russian psychology and the scientific world. Fenichel described his journey on Imago in 1931.

The idea was widespread that psychoanalysis was a revolutionary tool for understanding the world and for alleviating social unease. Richards writes that “Freud himself, in 1918 had matured this conviction, when at the Fifth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Budapest he stated that” the poor have the right to psychological assistance no more and no less as they already have the right to surgical intervention “( Freud, 1918, p. 27; quoted in: Richards, 2013, p. 824) “. During the period in which Freud was giving his lecture, the Soviet Republic of Hungary was established, which entrusted Sandor Ferenczi with a cat ­Tedra at the University of Budapest. Historically, it was the first academic space conquered by the psychoanalytic movement, even if the office lasted as long as the government itself, about a hundred days. Later, in 1920 in Berlin, in the context of the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis, then the largest European training center, a “Psychoanalytic Polyclinic” was founded with the aim of offering psychoanalytic assistance to the less well-to-do classes. For Richards, «Many exponents of the so-called ‘ Freudian left’ … believed that psychoanalysis should be accessible to all, there were twelve free clinics scattered throughout Europe, a remarkable achievement. Left-wing analysts of the interwar generation, at least in their European homelands, shared a spirit that Helene Deutsch called “revolutionary” (Danto, 2005), which manifested itself in this quiet subversion of capitalist expectations “(Richards, 2020, 5-6). Many promoters of these free assistance initiatives, including Fenichel, were Marxists. The Berlin Institute was headed by two pioneers of psychoanalysis: Max Eitingon and Ernst Simmel. Participants included Karl Abraham, Franz Alexander, Paul Federn, Edith Jacobson, Karen Horney and Melanine Klein. With the ideas of Klein and her followers, Fenichel would not have had good relations (Cfr. Reichmayr, 2002). A strong influence was exercised by some analysts close to the Social Democratic and Communist parties, such as Helene Deutsch, Wilhelm and Annie Reich, Erich Fromm and Siegfried Bernfeld.

Despite the humanitarian and committed imprint proposed by Eitingon and Simmel, the Berlin Institute, with its hierarchical organization ­and its formalism, discouraged, in the younger analysts, open confrontation, on a social and political level. Thus it was that Fenichel, despite having official duties in the structure, wanted to organize and conduct a seminar outside the Institute. The group became known as the “Seminar of the Sons” ( Kinderseminar ) and brought together, in ­particular, the youngest and most politically committed analysts. The meetings continued as long as the Institute was alive or, more precisely, until most of the analysts were put on the run by Nazism. The group of the “Children’s Seminar” met in the private homes of the participants. The number of those present ranged from five to twenty. There were 168 meetings. During the last meeting, held in October 1933,before ­the group dispersed, Fenichel gave a paper entitled Psychoanalysis, Socialism and Tasks for the Future . In that period, Fenichel’s work testifies to a strong social commitment; there were numerous lectures on the ­political implications of psychoanalysis. However, both due to the approach of the advent of Nazism and the formal constraints deriving from his attendance at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, he tried to maintain a public and political attitude without excess. His friend Wilhelm Reich would have greatly reproached him for this; a character who, in the face of excesses, did not retreat.

On the theoretical level, throughout his life, Fenichel strove to maintain a difficult equilibrium in concepts. On the one hand, he reiterated the importance of instinct and sexuality, as he would also have done in the USA, against the extreme culturalism of the neo-Freudians. At the same time, as a socially engaged psychoanalyst, he denounced the biological reductionism and social myopia of official psychoanalysis. It is a balance of concepts rare, after Freud, in the history of psychoanalysis and of science itself. Although not theorized, it is a philosophically “dialectical” scientific attitude, which can be linked to that strand of dialectics which has its origin in Hegel. It is also the same methodical position that had emerged in Russia in the writings, relating to psychoanalysis, of L. Vygotskij (2002) and above all of A. Luria (Cfr. Angelini 2019, 20-31). Fenichel perceives the imperative need to free psychoanalytic thought from the mechanical separation between a possibly biologizing subjectivism and a historicism borrowed from his contemporary Marxism. In the history of psychoanalysis, this position of his is, little or nothing, valued, but it represents the hinge between the conceptual patrimony of Soviet philopsoanalytic thinkers and some important ideas present in the Western psychoanalytic movement.

Still under the effect of an “immersion” in Marxism, Fenichel touches, as a psychoanalyst, the delicate problem of the relationship between what the Marxists of the time defined as a subjective factor and human history.For psychoanalysis, the usefulness of his contribution consists above all in having avoided a mechanistic interaction between the two poles. He points to a higher synthesis ; identifies a different quality that, from these two entities, is formed in a person’s mind. He wrote: “Economic conditions affect not only the individual directly, but also indirectly, through a change in his psychic structure” (Fenichel, 1934, 131). Fenichel’s effort, then influenced by Marxism, tended to avoid an absolutization of economic determinism, in historical events, which would have neglected the individual and the subject. At the same time he did not want to fall into the always open trap on the side of psychoanalysis: that is, meta-historical psychoanalism. This is probably one of the roots of Fenichel’s eternal fidelity to Freudian thought. Freud, unlike many of his followers and successors, certainly cannot be defined, as has happened in the past, a proponent of psychoanalism (Rollins, 1978); just as it does not deserve historical criticisms, even authoritative ones (Sulloway, 1979), which would like to place it in the biologist context.

Fenichel always remained faithful to the original Freudian thought, because he was able to perceive its aspiration to balance between internal and external thrusts . Freud, even without making use of dialectical concepts, proved to respect, together with the instinctual dimension, the profound influence of family factors and, in particular, with the notion of super-ego, also of cultural factors. Perhaps the only situation in which Fenichel does not share Freudian positions is represented by his position in the essay A critique of the death instinct (1935).

Historically, the concept of death instinct has been among the most debated , from the Freudian formulation in Beyond the pleasure principle (1920) up to the contemporary period.

Going back to the origins of this concept, it should be remembered that, as early as 1908, Alfred Adler had proposed, during a meeting of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, the concept of aggressive drive, clearly rejected at that time by Freud. In 1911, in the context of a similar meeting, the idea of a real death drive had been put forward by the Russian psychoanalyst Sabi ­na Spielrein, to whom Freud, in 1920, acknowledged the merit of having anticipated this thought.

Spielrein was, culturally, heir to a long Russian philosophical tradition, expressed by nihilism, the true precursor of the concept of death instinct. In the wake of nihilist ideas, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authors such as the psi ­chiatra Tokarskij and the physiologist Mecnikov had re-evaluated the ancient stoic idea of death (Angelini, 2002). Fenichel maintained, throughout his life, a clearly critical position regarding the possibility of a primary drive towards death. He considered such an idea to be contradictory with respect to the Freudian theory of drives (Cfr. Greenson, 1966, 379) and, reaffirming the indivisibility of aggression from libido, he believed essentially to respect the fundamental Freudian indications. Love and hate have a common origin and this is confirmed by the migratory capacity of the energy charges. «If quantities of energy – writes Fenichel – can be transposed from the sexual instincts to the ego instincts and vice versa, then it seems to us, the sexual instincts and those of the ego must derive from a common origin. Shouldn’t it contain both Eros and destructiveness? ” (Fenichel, 1935, 189, 190). The ne ­vrotic conflict does not arise between the self-destructive and self-preservative instinct, but between the instinct and the defenses activated by the pressures of the outside world. According to Fenichel, the individual does not tend towards nirvana, but manifests a desire for stimuli that is frustrated by reality. This “historical pressure” of the world on individual instincts has, fundamentally, a social and cultural origin.

In 1935, when he wrote A Critique of the Death Instinct, Fenichel was still very close to Marxist thought and the possibility of an ­aggressive and destructive push, psychologically intrinsic to the individual, contrasted with the historical and economic determination attributed by Marxism to all. thehuman conflicts, from individual ones to wars between peoples.

Indeed, it is possible to identify, starting with Marx, a line of thought relating to individual psychological problems.

As is well known, Marx had clearly expressed the conviction that the dominant economic relations and the consequent social relations within which human existence takes place were prior to the formation of the individual psyche; that it existed, that is, a primacy of the socio-historical dynamics over the psyche. This concept is expressed in several works in a ­more or less systematic form. It appears since the economic-philosophic manuscripts ­of 1844 and re-emerges, lucidly, in the German Ideology of 1846, where everything that is mental is traced back to the material process of life, from which it originates. Consequently, morality, religion, metaphysics and any other ideological form do not possess autonomy in the philosophical sense. It is concrete life that generates consciousness and not the reverse.

The list of concepts of psychological importance expressed by Marx and Engels and, later, taken up by Lenin, could go on further; however, in this context it is sufficient to reiterate the primacy of the historical and ­economic data over the psychological one. The great theme of human aggression, from the Marxist perspective, had to be evaluated as a product of economic and social conflicts. Admitting the existence of a destructive and biologically grounded death instinct would have erased any possible historical optimism. This idea promoted the extreme pessimism of Thomas Hobbs, convinced of human wickedness, against the optimism of Jean Jacques Rousseau, liked by the Soviets, who believed they could create the new man with the right educational processes, in socialism. It is an attitude that had similarities in the psychoanalytic environment, on the left. «The influence of Marx – writes Richards – can also be identified in the therapeutic optimism so surprisingly characteristic of the members of the ‘collective’, who believed that analysis could change the individual in the way that Marx believed that communism could change the world. They had prodigious expectations of psychoanalysis that far exceeded the pessimistic ambitions of Freud and his more pragmatic followers. They never admitted that there were some limitations, which other analysts accepted as realistic ” (2020, 12) .

Fenichel, while avoiding an open contradiction with respect to the Freudian vision of aggression, oriented himself in the sense expressed by Marx. He repeatedly referred to Wilhelm Reich (1929) who had manifested similar convictions.Fenichel contradicted the Freudian hypothesis of the death instinct (Angelini, 1979, 1979a) because, as mentioned, it would have shifted the cause of human suffering from external social repression to an internal biological necessity. This position had not even been taken into consideration by Soviet psychoanalysts, because it would have eliminated the social factor from the etiology of the neuroses.

Unfortunately in Russia, from 1931 to 1936, a series of resolutions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR led to the disappearance of psychoanalysis, together with scientific heritages such as, for example, the theory of relativity and the first sketches of contemporary biology (Angelini 1988 ). In that context, Vygotsky’s ideas were also banned.

Fenichel, in a country on the way to Nazism, did not perceive the ­social risks expressed by the Soviet model. Indeed, precisely in those years, his greatest tribute to Marxism was maturing, which he would publish in 1934 with the title Psychoanalysis as the nucleus of a future dialectical materialistic psychology. A significant passage in this work echoes concepts coming from Soviet psychoanalysis and, in particular, from the possibility of a historicization of some interpretative aspects of the psyche, in a psychoanalytic sense. These ideas are present in Vygotsky and Lurija, in the first phase of their scientific work. « Analyzing a man from the psychoanalytic point of view – writes Fenichel – means analyzing him from the historical-genetic point of view, that is, establishing how the interaction of environmental influences and biological data has gradually produced the existing structure. This investigation notes the immense preponderance of early childhood events in the formation of this structure. In this sense, psychoanalysis can be defined as a historical science “(Fenichel, 1934, 135-136).

Fenichel and Reich’s reflections ­on the death instinct and the historical dimension of psychoanalysis were part of the great debate on the “subjective factor” in historical processes, which then developed in European m arxism, (Cfr. Angelini, 2019, 52, 53). Various political and philosophical exponents of Western Marxism had begun to reflect on the problem of the role of the individual in history: the subjective factor. Examples include György Lukàcs (1923) who, without going into the subjective dimension, reasoned on the centrality of the “social subject” and Karl Korsch (1923) who safeguarded the “ideal sphere”, giving it a certain “dialectical autonomy” with respect to historical mechanisms . Psychoanalytic ideas could have made a contribution. Unlike Soviet theorists, who were progressively taking sides against psychoanalysis, prominent personalities, such as the Austrian socialist politician Max Adler (1930), confronted psychoanalytic theories trying to make use of them to better understand the relationship between the individual and the “Historical forces”.

These interventions testify to the richness of an intellectual and social environment which, despite the progressive denial of the Soviets, saw a strong and culturally significant presence in psychoanalysis. Fenichel, in his phase of approaching Marxism, ideally places himself in this context, but he deepens the theme, going beyond the exclusively philosophical aspect and trying to reach, through psychoanalysis, the subjective psychic dimension. At the same time , in those Berlin years, Fenichel was known as a clear systematizer of psychoanalytic knowledge, essentially by virtue of clinical works. They apparently remained extraneous to political commitment, while not failing to offer food for thought. In 1931 he had published Perversionen, Psychosen, Charakterstorungen and Hysterien und Zwangsneurosen. These writings were published, in English, under the title: Outline of Clinical Psychoanalisys (1932-1934). In the first of the two texts, the historical parameters of the neuroses were taken into consideration, rejecting biologization as a possible criterion of method. He would later dedicate a great deal of space to historical and social themes in the Rundbriefe, the “circular letters” sent to his colleagues during exile. The Rundbriefe were indeed ­letters typed, in several copies with carbon paper, which Fenichel, throughout his life, wrote and sent affectionately to his friends and colleagues of the primitive group that had gathered around him in Berlin. . 119 of these circulars were found in the archives and sent from 1934 to 1945 (See Reichmayr and Mühlleitner, 1998). In various circumstances, considerations appear in the Rundbriefe on the situation of psychoanalysis in Italy. In a communication dated April 23, 1936, he unfortunately expressed his perplexity with respect to the recognition, which took place at the last Congress, of the Italian group as an affiliated Psychoanalytic Society. In his opinion, a full scientific maturity was still lacking. However, in other writings, he examined with interest the work of Edoardo Weiss and, surprisingly, praised Ignazio Silone’s book The School of Dictators , stating that “Silone, to my great satisfaction, knows psychoanalysis quite well” (Reichmayr and Mühlleitner, 2001, 41).

The correspondence of the Rundbriefe , or circular letters,in those years between Feni ­chel and his colleagues, testifies to his maximum concentration on social issues. On several occasions he entered the scientific debate involving historical figures of psychoanalysis. He highlighted the risks of psychological reductionism inherent in the ideas of René Laforgue and Géza Rohéim. Both, albeit with different nuances, assumed that cultural and historical products could be explained in terms of individual psychology. Precisely for this reason, Fenichel considered Rohéim’s psychoanalytic anthropology to be defective in theoretical elaboration, albeit correlated by field research. At the same time, in his correspondence concerning ­Michael Balint, he wanted to distance himself from cultural reductionism. Balint was a Hungarian disciple of Ferenczi, initially inclined towards biologism; but after the death of his master he fell, secondFenichel in an “opposite extreme” (Cfr. Jacoby, 1983, 94).

Also on this occasion, in which Fenichel preferred to express himself informally through the Rundbriefe, his thought manifests the attempt to connect, in a single conceptual building, biology and history. Re censored ­Abram ­Kardiner’s book ( 1939), The individual and his society , highlighting its excessive distance from the drive theory.Later, he became interested ­in the works of Margaret Mead and Karen Horney, always trying to maintain the same difficult theoretical and clinical balance. In reviewing Horney’s work, (1937) The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, he fully expressed his fears about the risk of underestimating ­the role of sexuality. On the other hand, according to Fenichel, Horney, after reading the review, reiterated that they diverged radically on the theory of drives, declaring: “I consider it as something that must be overcome” (Cfr. Jacoby, 1983, 97 ).

It was with Erich Fromm that Fenichel had the largest intellectual controversy. This conflict which, as will be illustrated, would later become clear in the American period, began in Europe.

For several years, Fromm had been part of the Institute for Social Research, the so-called Frankfurt School , together with Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. In 1935 Fromm published an article on the social foundations of ­psychoanalytic theory in the review of the Frankfurt School: Die gesellenschaftliche bedinghteit der psychoanalytischen therapie . Fromm’s essay attacked Freud’s therapeutic position of ­personal non-involvement with the patient. It is a topic that attracts interest and discussions even today. The analytically neutral attitude, for Fromm, was ideologically correct and apparently open, but in reality masked an authoritarian tendency. This was a question that had already been debated for some time in the context of the international psychoanalytic movement. The first historical protagonist of this debate, undertaken with Freud himself, was Sandòr Ferenczi. In fact, Fromm praised Ferenczi, because he had had the courage to favor the presence of affectivity within the therapeutic relationship. Freud remained, for Fromm, a nineteenth-century liberal aristocrat, correct in his therapeutic behavior, but unable to positively position himself towards the happiness of his patients.

Fenichel rejected Fromm’s positions and defended the Freudian ones, considering them on the whole more transformative and radical both with respect to the innovations proposed by Ferenczi and towards Fromm’s ideas. Fenichel’s criticisms of Fromm, then deepened in the American years, begin in the Rundbriefe, when he asserts that Fromm’s objections recalled a methodological error by Reich, who reproached Freud for “not being a communist” (Cfr. Jacoby, 1983, 98) . This is also a clue as to why the friendship between Reich and Fenichel had broken down. The latter, however, always defended the Freudian positions as, on the whole, more transformative and radical than the innovations proposed by Ferenczi.

In 1938, Fenichel published the essay Psychoanalysis ­and social sciences. In this work he re-elaborates his political thought and tries to insert Marxism in the cultural context in which it was manifested. Fenichel argues, quite simply ­, that psychoanalysis and Marxism cannot ignore each other and cannot be ignored. The psychoanalytic point of view is defended as an autonomous reality, on a philosophical and scientific level. Psychoanalysis is a perspective dialectically linked to historical and social evaluations and to the biological dimension. Even today, with regard to the psychic apparatus, the “psychologist” or ” ­logistician” attitude is present in the scientific field, where it does not slip into biological reductionism, when it is necessary to evaluate the complex relationships ­between the individual and society. Fenichel is the forerunner of a more adequate ­and complex way of conceiving the problem , which echoes Russian psychoanalysis. A way that, even in the contemporary era, has difficulty in emerging with simplicity and firmness.

Mühlleitner (2008, 278) noted that, throughout his life, ” Fenichel did everything in his power to strengthen the scientific opposition within the International Psychoanalytic Association”. In the European period, this attitude was strongly fueled by an “aspiration to scientificity” coming from his Marxist culture.

The last year of his stay in Europe, 1938, was a politically difficult period. The annexation of Austria would take place in 1938, while the Munich pact and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia loomed on the horizon. In addition to Switzerland, Fenichel lectured in France, Holland and England. The prospects for life and work during this European trip were constantly decreasing. Eventually he made the decision to emigrate to the United States. Emigration was the final act of an itinerary which had recently seen his presence in Prague for a few years. This presence profoundly influenced Czechoslovakian psychoanalysis which, at the time, didwas in its formative phase. Fenichel coordinated there a small group of closely related analysts from Vienna and Berlin, such as Annie Reich, Steff Bornstein and Henry Lowenfeld. However, in 1938, half of the analytic group had left Prague, while the other half were on their starting foot. In 1939 , only Steff Bornstein, among senior analysts, was still in Prague and he died that same year. Doctors Otta Brief and Therese Bondy, who had associated with the Prague group were later killed in concentration camps. Only one analyst, Theodor Dusužkov, survived the German occupation.

Evaluating, in a general perspective, the ideological orientation of the European psychoanalysts of the time, Richardson wrote: «Even a brief excursus shows how many of them identified with leftist politics. Sigmund and Anna Freud were Social Democrats, as were Bruno Bettelheim, Grete Bibring, Helene Deutsch, Paul Federn, Willi Hoffer, Karen Horney, my analyst Henry Lowenfeld and his wife Yela, Annie Reich and Ernst Simmel. Berta Bornstein, Frances Deri, Otto Fenichel, Erich Fromm and George Gero called themselves socialists. Among the openly communist psychoanalysts were Anny Katan, Edith Jacobson, Edith Ludowik-Gyomroi, Edith Buxbaum, Marie Langer, Ludwig Jekels, and Wilhelm Reich. Margarete Hilferding, the first woman admitted to the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna, was married to the eminent Austromarxist Rudolf Hilferding ”(Richards, 2020, 4). For these people, mostly of Jewish origin, the whole of Europe, threatened by a Nazi and expansionist Germany, was no place to live peacefully. Richards recalls that, between 1933 and 1941, forty European analysts emigrated to the United States.

In the Rundbriefe of June 25, 1938, Fenichel bade farewell to his European colleagues, writing: «The fate of psychoanalysis no longer depends on the capacity that we, naturalistic psychoanalysts, will have to oppose“ mystical deviations ”within our science. The processes that take place within the so-called “psychoanalytic movement” now have no importance. The fate of psychoanalysis will depend, in general, on the fate of the world and of science where, in any case, one can still admire the principle of dialectics: they [the Nazis, ed.] Must destroy science because it affects the sacredness of their ideologies, which must remain absolutely sacred. At the same time it [science] holds itself anchored in power, but with the help of technology, and there can be no technology without science. We hope that this contradiction may one day create serious difficulties for them “(Reichmayr J., Mühlleitner E., 2001, 40). A short time later, with his wife and son, he left Prague. The family flew to France and at Le Havre boarded the SS Manhattan, “the largest steamer ever built in America,” crowded with Central European Jews pouring into the United States.

From Europe to America

Since 1934, Simmel, former founder of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, had moved to California, Los Angeles. It should be remembered that Simmel professed both socialism and psychoanalysis. For a certain period “he was simultaneously appointed president of the Association of Socialist Doctors and of the German Psychoanalytic Society” (Danto, 2005, 177). In 1927 he founded the Schloss Tegel sanatorium, near Berlin, which would serve as a model for the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

Fenichel, with a view to emigrating, wishing to obtain the necessary guarantees of work and support, made contact with Simmel and the Californian Psychoanalytic Study Group chaired by him. Generously, Ernst Simmel strove to secure his colleague a teaching assignment that would guarantee him a monthly salary. In doing so, he followed a path well described by Richards, who saw many of the psychoanalysts from Europe become teachers. Their provenance guaranteed them scientific weight and personal prestige, favoring their transformation into a “ruling class” in the psychoanalytic institution. However, Fenichel does not appear to have pursued this power goal while he lived in the US. Ralph Greenson, who was in analysis with Fenichel, describes him as “incorruptible” and offers the profile of an affectionate person “with a disarming smile, warm concern and affable frankness” (Greenson, 1966, 376). What emerges is a figure certainly extraneous to bureaucratic or hierarchical submission, in the institutional sphere and, in the USA “he was often judged by many psychoanalysts whom he had criticized as a tactless man” (Ibidem, 380). Fenichel did not seek hierarchical consensus within the American Psychoanalytic Association, but had to defend himself, on the outside, from the distrust that American society expressed towards anything that could be connected to socialism and Marxism.

Starting from Europe, in his farewell message of 1938, he had declared himself in disagreement with those who, in the fight against Nazi extremism, had approached left-wing extremism. This suggests that his strong political and practical approach to Marxism was undergoing some transformation. Fenichel’s Marxist ideological background, evident in the European phase of his activity, ended up being subtended when he moved to America, as it could not be positively received by the rigid culture of the American psychoanalytic world, far from Marxism. In reality, even in the USA there were elements close to Marxist thought; but they were in a minority position and feared for their professional and social security. Richards writes, citing Jacoby (1983), that of the forty or so psychoanalysts who arrived in America at that time, ‘most of them seemed to have thrown politics into the Atlantic Ocean during the voyage. One reason was certainly the great difficulty of building a new life after the trauma of immigration. Another threat still present was deportation, as US politics gradually turned to the right … Otto Fenichel, Martin Grotjahn, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich were just some of the analysts who, as we know, were controlled by the FBI; Joseph Wortis’ passport was revoked because he was, or had been, a member of the Communist Party. Immigrants’ fear of reprisals for their leftist backgrounds was not irrational ”(Richards, 2020, 8). The cultural and sociological pressure of the visceral American anti-communism pushed immigrant psychoanalysts to shy away from the ideological debate. Richards argues that some of them maintained Marxist ideas but, paradoxically, among them there were several characters who participated in a very authoritarian way in the institutional life of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Mutatis mutandis, it happened in the small, what had happened in the great and tragic revolutionary events and had been well described by Wilhelm Reich (1932; 1933); or that the arsonists became firefighters.

Fenichel too had to soften the open positions inspired by socialism and Marxist philosophy. He accentuated his scientific production of a clinical nature, devoting himself a lot to teaching. There remain, however, from his American period, before his premature death, some important works that testify how his mind was always engaged in safeguarding the social as well as scientific value of psychoanalysis.

Unfortunately, the severe American psychoanalytic world, far from ideological propensities, did not give space to this heritage offered by Fenichel. Mechanisms of repression work, both in individuals and in institutions and social contexts. Fenichel’s first politically and ideologically committed European contributions were, after his death, simply overlooked and little mentioned. A fruitful period of the scientific and social commitment of an exceptional thinker was thus set aside and removed. In that first phase, his greatest works on methodological, historical and cultural subjects appeared.

Although the American scientific production of Fenichel is mainly of a clinical type, it is nevertheless a clinic inspired by the scientific method of theoretical research and verification. In the perspective of the maximum scientific rigor, Fenichel always remained tied to the primitive Freudian thought, of positivist inspiration. This also applies to

Psychoanalysis of the character, from 1941, where some of Fenichel’s positions linked to Reichian thought also echo. Don’t forget that Fenichel and Reich were friends for many years. Their friendship cracked after 1934. In that year Reich managed to get expelled, at the same time, by both the German Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytic Association. For the Communists he was a corrupt bourgeois who talked about sex, for the psychoanalysts a dangerous political extremist. But this was not the reason why Fenichel turned away from his friend. He did not share, in terms of method, the criteria that would have led Reich to hypothesize orgone energy . The so-called Reichian orgone concretizes the fantastic desire to attribute an extension and a divisibility ­, in the Cartesian sense , to the Freudian libido ; that is a real quantity.

‘s Psychoanalysis of Character (1941a) echoes, in the title itself, Character Analysis (1933), written by Reich and, also in the contents, we find concepts present in that work. The essentially informative nature of the text demonstrates how the author was sensitive to the need to make psychoanalysis known even in non-specialized environments. This attitude is, in itself, a testimony of Fenichel’s interest in the social dimension, even if, in the American environment, his ideas had to be proposed with prudence, in order not to incur political criticism. Years after leaving Europe and immersed in the US environment, certainly more interested in the clinic than in sociology and epistemology, Fenichel did not lose his overall vision. He was always concerned with maintaining a scientific perspective on the methodological foundations of psychoanalysis. In Psychoanalysis of Character (1941a) he proposes a typical economic and dynamic point of view. In a general sense, the economic basis rests on instincts; while the dynamic aspect concerns, in the first place, the relationship between instincts and the external world. This, in terms of method, is what Reich had also proposed and, some twenty years earlier, generalizing, the Russian psychoanalysts had also indicated. Fenichel begins classically by re-proposing the idea that all symptoms, but also dreams, are the consequence of a profound repression of instinctual satisfactions. He then makes a fundamental assertion; or that, from a genetic perspective, the unconscious dimension assumes a higher importance than the other components of the psyche, including the ego. “Psychoanalysis – he states – which was the first to study the unconscious and instincts, can be applied to the whole human mind, as long as it demonstrates that the conscious and non-instinctual phenomena are derived from unconscious and instinctual phenomena” (Fenichel, 1941a , 224). These few lines are in a nutshell a real manifesto of what will take the name of “Psychoanalytic Psychology”; or rather of a conception of psychology that develops from the study of the unconscious. For Fenichel, following a logic that would have made Occam happy, if the investigation is not complicated with metaphysical variables or arbitrary postulates, ” it is assumed that non-instinctual phenomena can be explained as derived from instinctual phenomena and that they have taken shape under the influence of the external world “(Ibidem, 224). The concept of the “external world” is not fully developed here, in the historical and social sense, as Reich and, above all, the Soviet psychoanalysts had tried to do, in the light of historical Marxist materialism; but, on the philosophical level, the conceptual setting is the same. Fenichel enters into the merits of “character resistances” and recognizes the need for a “Psychology of character”. He enters, in his own personal way, into that vast psychological territory, aimed primarily at studying the human personality which, in those years, attracted a faction of the psychoanalytic movement, which would take the name of “Psychology of the Ego”. Richards recalls how the US psychoanalytic left, present even if it is totally in the minority, looked with suspicion at Ego Psychology, contesting the underestimation of dialectics in psychoanalytic psychodynamics.

«The direct influence of Marx is most evident in the insistence of the ‘collective’ on the centrality of the conflict. For Arlow, Brenner and their colleagues, psychodynamics was a process in which thesis and antithesis had to lead to synthesis or compromise formations. The parallel with the dialectical philosophies of Hegel and Marx is evident. These theorists criticized the very idea of a “conflict-free ego sphere” proposed by Hartmann and ego psychologists. I believe that Arlow and Brenner’s well-known opposition to Hartmann’s adaptive approach was influenced by their Marxist belief that confrontation was the driving force of change ”(Richards, 202, 12).

Fenichel compares the concept of “personality” to the notion of “character” of Reichian origin. But, since Reich regarded character as the result and instrument of a defensive process, personality is also conceived as a defensive organization. Unlike the neurotic symptom, it does not cause suffering and, consequently, it does not produce the desire for change or, in the best cases, the awareness of the need for a cure. The ego, Fenichel observes, fundamentally depends on the relationship it has had with the surrounding world. However, he understands how this apparently obvious statement contains considerable methodological depth. The “outside world” consists of much more than a simple family and school educational moment. The common morality, which is transformed historically and the neurotic phenomena themselves, or the damages produced in criminal personalities should be considered in this perspective. But, above all, “in order to fully understand the concept, however, one should look at the social changes that have taken place in our culture in recent decades” (Fenichel, 1941a, 226).

In this phase, Fenichel’s full understanding of the fundamental role played by culture and society in the formation of a person’s psychic functions is clearly expressed.

The general sense of the discourse consists in indicating the need to connect all the phenomena of the “Psychology of the Ego”, in this case the character, to non-perceived, or rather non-conscious, economic causes. The various psychological elements, present in the individual psychic dimension, enter into a dynamic relationship with the external world and with each other. It is not necessary to enter any other variables. Paraphrasing Reich, Fenichel indicates the “forced and rigid nature” of character.

With a comparison worthy of reflection, he compares the follies and brutalities of human history to perversions. By accepting the latter, repression is spared. Character is a constant defensive attitude, usable both with respect to the demands of the outside world and with regard to instinctual contents. However, historically, the influence of the outside world must be considered first. Fenichel considers the character as a constant “stiffening”, echoing the Reichian “character armor” and proposes the idea, coming from the same source, that anxiety is linked by defensive character attitudes.

In the second part of the work, before explaining the experience of two brief clinical cases, Fenichel explores the concept more than any other linked to the activation of defense mechanisms; or the notion of Superego. He observes how, initially, the superego is connected, in the child, to an idea of danger coming from outside. This perception is initially linked to family upbringing and possible parental punishments. «At a certain point, however – writes Fenichel – there comes a phase in which the child begins to behave like a ‘good child’ even when the parents, who could punish him, are not present and may never find out about his behavior. Fear, then, was transformed into a feeling of guilt “(Fenichel, 1941a, 231). The function of the superego is social. It is not just rules of conduct that are passed on from one generation to the next. For Fenichel «What is created by the transformation of fear into feelings of guilt is the same goddess of good and evil and the way in which this idea is considered in our society; it is the authority that asks for obedience and promises protection, in exchange for obedience “(Ibidem, 231). It should be noted, regardless of social utility, that the Superego is also necessary, since it allows to control the anxiety coming from the outside and represents the overcoming of the need to be loved passively. Apart from further investigating this theme, what matters is the fundamental importance of the Superego in the management of instincts, from a social point of view. «Instincts – Fenichel writes – are interposed between social institutions and changes in personality. It is clear that the character of the individual, which is the result of infantile instinctual conflicts, depends on the content and intensity of the prohibitions and encouragement that the different instincts encounter within the institutions of society. In reality, various cultures produce various types of characters “(Fenichel, 1941a, 234). In a broad sense, the latter concept theoretically and historically evokes the ideas of Russian psychoanalysis.

In this perspective, the therapy should consist in the “re-mobilization” of the anxiety that had caused “stiffening” of the character. “The patient learns to understand historically the reasons why the defenses were forced to take a specific form and to understand what he was afraid of” (Ibidem, 235). The analyst, in turn, is faced with the problem of the transference, or rather of the “defensive transference”. The ego reproduces, with an overall attitude of character, the particular forms of defense developed in past situations. At this point, Fenichel writes, concluding the theoretical treatment, “One wonders if there are analyzes that are not ‘character analyzes'” (Ibidem, 235). The work ends with the presentation of two short clinical cases; but its value is mainly methodological, as it testifies to the author’s philosophically realistic and scientific perspective.

With respect to the theoretical developments of psychoanalysis in the social field, one of Fenichel’s greatest contributions, belonging to the American period, is represented by a long critical review of the book, published by Erich Fromm, in 1941, Escape from freedom . The article is entitled, in fact, Psychoanalytic Observations on Fromm’s book Escape from Freedom (1944).

With regard to Fromm’s work, it should be noted that it is a sociological work, where the author makes a transition, implementing a departure from classical psychoanalysis. However, it must be premised that Fromm’s theoretical and historical position is, in principle, placed in the context of the so-called neo-Freudians; that is, within the “culturalist school” essentially represented by Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Clara Thornpson, Abraham Kardiner and, in the anthropological sector, by Margaret Mead. An illustrious precursor of this analytical orientation is considered Alfred Adler who, first, influenced also by Marxist thought, underlined the “sociality” of the human being and the need to achieve, even therapeutically, an optimal balance between the needs of the community and those of the individual. The instinctual forces were thus placed in the background. For some historical authors, Adler is considered a forerunner of ego psychology (Jacoby, 1975, 56). In fact, the starting point of the culturalist critique of Freud is the underestimation that he would have demonstrated about the incidence of the social, economic and cultural environment on the evolutionary destiny of the individual. Instead of dwelling on the social dimension of the conflict between the individual and the environment, Freud would have taken the reductivistic path of a biological-drive theory of the subject, whose fate is, in practice, determined, in the first years of life, by events linked to sexual development. This theme runs through all the historical-sociological criticism of Freud. Sartre also tends to express himself in this sense in The Being and the Nothing (1943). In this perspective, Freudian thought would be, individually, deterministic, making the accent fall on the past and on the biological-instinctual constitution of the subject. Culturalism, on the other hand, would tend to shift attention from the past to the present, from nature to culture, from the individual to the relationship. Fromm’s reflection reveals a double disappointment: both with respect to the Marxist theory which, on its own, does not seem capable of interpreting history, and with regard to psychoanalysis which, in his opinion, would have lost its liberating charge. He considers Freudian ideas heavily influenced by the mechanistic concepts of the time; even if he recognizes them the merit of having synthesized the two fundamental components of Western thought: the rationalist one, of the Enlightenment tradition and the romantic one. Ultimately it would be the reason that, in the very moment in which it recognizes itself as overdetermined by extra-rational elements, it would control and dominate them, in its most powerful apparatus.

Fenichel correctly observes how Fromm’s criticism of Freud often turns into an arbitrary simplification of Freud’s thought, reducing itself to polemics. On the other hand, the Freudomarxist synthesis proposes a unified field of study of individual and social phenomena. Some considerations present in Marx’s Economic Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 echo in Escape from Freedom . A socio-political analysis is attempted, informed by psychology, starting from the primitive state up to the modern era, with particular attention to the medieval and Renaissance periods. Man went from a primitive condition of “cosmic unity” with nature and from a limited social environment, to an intermediate state, in which he was separated from nature, but still integrated with society. In the contemporary world, this process, which would tend to propose freedom, produces in the individual an isolation both from nature and from society. The result, for Fromm, is the neurosis which is a misuse, or rather, an escape from freedom. The individual feels the urge to refuse the ever greater freedom he could enjoy, in order to return, regressing, to a safer existence. This security is guaranteed by a condition of dependence.

In this work, written while Nazism was still in power, Fromm argues that authoritarian ideologies attract people because they seem to offer a possibility of escape, from an intolerable condition of freedom, towards a more reassuring state of dependence.

This condition implies that the quality of the human being is determined by cultural and social factors, rather than biological factors. Above all, it would be the fear of loneliness, which Horney had described in her early childhood experiences, to push the individual to trade his freedom for social addiction. Fromm would also like to offer an alternative to the authoritarian and regressive criterion used, socially, to regain a sense of security. It therefore proposes a socialist humanism, with an idealistic flavor, in which individuals should collaborate, among themselves, in a spirit of mutual understanding. The role of the instinct is contained, as are the specific manifestations of libido, such as the psychosexual stages of development. Anguish and the various forms of anomalous behavior do not derive, in this perspective, from instinctual bases, but develop in connection with the experiences of social relations.

In the following years Marcuse, in Eros e Civiltà (1955), contested culturalism arguing that, with the culturalist attitude, Freudian psychoanalysis is reduced to an ideology. By purifying the psychoanalytic doctrine from the hegemony of the drive dynamics, culturalism transforms psychoanalysis into a “Philosophy of the soul”. According to Marcuse, by erasing the discomfort of civilization as an index of the underlying disharmony between the demands of human sexuality and the repressive ones of society, culturalism extinguishes the critical power of psychoanalysis towards the existing order of things. The criticism of society is replaced by the hypothesis of the best possible adaptation for the subject posed, even, as the goal of the therapeutic work.

Richards recalls that “Kurt Eissler (1965), for example, was opposed to the idea that psychoanalysis should promote adaptation. He was interested in preserving the subversive inspiration of psychoanalysis to protect individual freedom. According to Eissler, society only evaluates behavior and does not care about motivations, and psychoanalysts should never become puppets of society and accept superficial behaviors as indices of psychic reality “(Richards, 2020, 15).

Returning to the difference of opinion between Fenichel and Fromm, it originated, as has been written, from debates that had arisen in previous years. In reviewing Escape from Freedom , Fenichel found himself faced with a difficulty he had already experienced. He shared, in part, the attention placed by Fromm and the neo-Freudians, such as Horney, Mead and Kardiner, on social and historical categories. The latter, however, in their eagerness to transform psychoanalysis, had abandoned its critical spirit and the aspects relating to the qualities of the unconscious and to sexuality. These aspects were, however, defended by the classical Freudians. Otto Fenichel, who identified a part of the truth in each position, ended up not being welcomed by both sides.

In the debate, he distanced himself as much from conservative psychoanalysis as from the neo-Freudians who developed the culturalist orientation. Fenichel wanted to elaborate, in a single corpus, the divergent positions of official psychoanalysis and of the culturalist neo-Freudians. With regard to this particular theoretical orientation, he shared, in many ways, the attention placed by the neo-Freudians on ­social and historical categories. However, he realized that they, in their eagerness to transform psychoanalysis, had abandoned its critical spirit and its peculiar aspects, relating to sexuality and the qualities of the unconscious. Fenichel was aware that his position, with respect to the neo-Freudians, required a finely tuned theoretical ear.

The combination was difficult to make, but it was the one that Fenichel had always proposed, from the very beginning of his work. On the one hand, a solid connection to the reality of ­instinctual phenomena and sexuality. On the other hand, a lucid critique of biological reductionism and the social disinterest of official psychoanalysis. He therefore greeted possible allies in the neo-Freudians, but at the same time criticized their revisionism. On this point he was aligned with the so-called psychoanalytic conservatism, with which, moreover and paradoxically, he had little in common. The need for a synthesis was present in his mind (Angelini, 2009, 53, 54).

Fenichel writes, in Psychoanalytic observations on Fromm’s book Escape from freedom (1944): “Man is governed by certain fundamental biological impulses which do not present rigid forms at all but which are formed and developed according to the experiences of satisfaction and frustration had, or through social forces. The way in which and how the social forces form the individual mind becomes comprehensible in detail thanks to the knowledge of unconscious impulses and their ability to displace. Freud said: man is an instinctive being, driven by innate forces. Fromm said: man is above all a social being. There is no contradiction between these two statements »Fenichel, 1944, 128). The review concludes with a synthetic judgment that makes Fenichel’s thought explicit: «Fromm’s book can in general be considered as we do with the writings of Kardiner and Horney. They want to avoid and correct the errors that psychoanalysis has admitted to having made, abandoning psychoanalysis altogether instead of making a better application of it “(Ibidem, 141).

Fenichel’s last writing, published in1946, with the title ­Some observations on Freud’s place in the history of science, is a precious reflection of a historical and methodological nature. From a meditated social perspective, the work recalls, in the first part, how psychoanalysis can represent, due to certain characteristics of the unconscious it reveals, a narcissistic offense to the community. At the same time, most of the work is devoted to enhancing the scientifically cognitive value ­of Freudian thought and its ability to replace, with reasonable explanations, phenomena that previously belonged to the magical and religious world.

They are reflections, of method and substance, which have great scientific value and which contemporary psychoanalytic thought is not always able to support.

The life and work of Otto Fenichel, in Europe as in America, were characterized by cultural vastness, curiosity, intellectual courage, rigor in research and in the clinic. Unfortunately, he arrived in the USA when a historical process, internal to psychoanalytic institutions, was already underway in that country, which wanted to transform psychoanalysis from weltanschauung into a therapeutic tool only. Richards writes: «Psychoanalysis was once a subversive worldview. He fought institutionalized self-deception, and in doing so he freed us to seek a more vital meaning and to promote a freer society, beyond conventions and prescriptions “(2020, 16).

Fenichel wanted to found psychoanalysis on a methodological basis marked by rationality and inspired by scientificity. Already in the thirties, he perceived the looming, in the psychoanalytic movement, of anti-rationalist and more generally anti-Illuminist ideas, which find space even today. The merits and limits of this thinker’s commitment must be evaluated historically. However, his contributions, beyond the undisputed clinical value, express the civil and moral enthusiasm of a man who, for a season of his life, generously believed he could understand and improve society even with the tools offered by psychoanalysis.

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