Netherlands

Interest in psychoanalysis within Holland developed from 1905 onward and came from three different sources. The first source consisted of psychiatrists who were struck by Freud's studies on dreams. August Stärcke corresponded with Freud and J. van Emden had an analysis with him during a holiday in Karlsbad in 1911. Both became members of the Viennese Society in 1911. The second source came from psychiatrists who went to Jung in Zürich for analysis between 1911 and 1913. The third source was Leiden University. Jelgersma's rectorial address in 1914 at Leiden University was the first official recognition of psychoanalytic science in Europe. Thirteen representatives of these three groups, Freudians, Jungians and theoretical university analysts, founded the Dutch Society of Psychoanalysis on March 24, 1917. It was the seventh branch society of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), formed with the goal of supporting the development of psychoanalysis according to Sigmund Freud. The Sixth IPA Congress took place in The Hague in 1920, chosen (because of Dutch neutrality during World War I) to facilitate the reunion of analysts who had been territorial enemies.

After that, however, there followed a period of quarreling and lessened productivity, which was partly due to the diversity of the members. The main points of controversy were the question of lay analysisntil 1938 only medical doctors were admittednd the introduction of the tripartite training system, especially the obligation of personal analysis, introduced by Max Eitingon and Hanns Sachs in 1925 for all IPA branch societies. The conflict was mainly between the Society's president, Van Ophuijsen, who defended both lay analysis and the tripartite training model (he was treasurer and later vice-president of the IPA), and the theoretically-oriented psychiatrists of the university and Van Ophuijsen's former analysand Westerman Holstijn. The conflicts escalated and led to a split when in 1933 four Jewish analysts emigrated from Germany to Holland: Karl Landauer, Theodor Reik, Levy-Sühl and Watermann. The poorly-trained Dutch analysts, with lesser income from analytic practice, felt threatened by the arrival of four more competent analysts. A few expressed their panic in open anti-Semitism. Most were not anti-Semitic but refused to accept the refugees as members of the Society. Van Ophuijsen, however, saw a possibility to improve the quality of psychoanalysis in Holland with the help of the refugees and arranged Landauer's participation in his psychoanalytic institute (founded in 1930 in The Hague). In the resulting uproar by the members Van Ophuijsen resigned as president and member and founded, with Van Emden, Maurits Katan and a few others, a new society, the Society of Psychoanalysts in the Netherlands, of which the German immigrants became members. In the years to come the diplomatic analyst Westerman Holstijn put much energy in the reconciliation of the two societies, which succeeded in 1937. However, he himself resigned as a member, badly hurt by the lack of appreciation of his colleagues.

In 1938, after the Anschluss of Austria, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot and Hans Lampl came from Vienna to Amsterdam. Jeanne de Groot, a Dutch psychiatrist, had gone to Vienna in 1923 for analytic training with Freud and in 1925, after her marriage with Hans Lampl, to Berlin. In 1933 they had returned to Vienna. In Holland they started to reform the training program according to Viennese standards in cooperation with the members Le Coultre and Maurits Katan. Both the tripartite training model and lay analysis were accepted.

In May 1940 Holland was occupied by the Germans. When in November 1940 Jews had to resign as society members by German law, the non-Jewish psychoanalysts resigned as well in an act of solidarity and the Society virtually ceased to exist. Psychoanalytic training was organized underground with only two analysts functioning: Jeanne Lampl-deGroot and Le Coultre. In November 1945 the Society was refounded.

In 1946 some members founded the Psychoanalytical Institute (PAI), an ambulatorium where patients could come for psychoanalytic treatment at limited cost by candidates who earned a small fee. The house of the PAI became and as of 2005, still is the center of training, where, among other things, seminars are held and scientific meetings organized.

In 1947 Westerman Holstijn and Van der Hoop, who both had left the Society in discontent, founded with others the Dutch Psychoanalytical Association. Initially, the Association was meant to be a forum where one could discuss psychoanalysis in a free atmosphere without the stress of training. Soon, however, a training program was organized, though with much milder requirements than those of the Society. Training analyses were performed at low frequency and for a short period. During the first twenty-five or thirty years of its existence, the relationship between Society and Association varied from non-existent to very bad. Three successive presidents of the Association; Jan Groen, Poslavsky, and Stufkens, managed to raise the quality of training gradually to IPA level, coinciding with a much more friendly cooperation with the Society. The societies share an increasing number of mutual members. In 1983 the Association founded its own institute in Utrecht, the PIU. The psychoanalytic institutes of Society and Association fused into the Dutch Psychoanalytic Institute (NPI) in 1995, which serves the candidates of both societies. It is expected that the Association will be a component society of the IPA in the near future.

From 1945 until roughly 1970 psychoanalysis blossomed in Holland. The number of candidates steadily increased; there were more patients for analysis than could be treated; there was an active scientific life. Three IPA congresses were organized in Amsterdam, in 1951, 1965 and 1993. Van der Leeuw became vice-president of the IPA in 1963 and president from 1965-1969. Montessori was secretary from 1965-1969 and vice-president after that until 1975. Lampl-deGroot was honorary vice-president from 1963 until her death in 1987. Several Dutch held an office in the European Psychoanalytical Federation: Thiel and Dalewijk as vice-president, Mekking as treasurer, and Groen-Prakken as president.

In 1966 a child-analytic training was organized within the Society by Teuns, with great support of especially Frijling-Schreuder through many years to come. Teachers from the Hampstead clinic came to Leiden or Amsterdam for theoretical and technical seminars and supervision. Also in 1966 the government decided to subsidize psychoanalytical treatments as far as the patient could not afford the treatment himself. In 1980 therapies at the Institutes for mental health, including the analytic Institutes, became virtually free from payment. The important chairs in psychiatry, child psychiatry and clinical psychology at the universities were mainly occupied by psychoanalysts.

Over the course of the 1980s there was a decline in interest in psychoanalysis, as in most western communities. In Holland, the growing grip of the authorities on psychoanalytic practice, the near-disappearance of private practice, and the replacement of psychoanalytically-oriented university teachers by biologically oriented ones were important factors. The same period, however, saw a mounting interest in the application of psychoanalysis to other fields. In 1979 the analytic societies founded together the Dutch Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and in 1989 the Foundation for Psychoanalysis and Culture was established, by the analysts Baneke and De Jong and the scientists in literature Schönau and Hillenaar, to connect psychoanalytical with general cultural experience. The annual workshops, organized by the Association, to introduce modern analytic views to a wide audience of psychotherapists are always overbooked.

Traditionally, the Dutch have been tradesmen for many centuries. They played an active role also in the export of psychoanalytic knowledge to Germany in the first period after the war, and in the late twentieth century to some former Soviet satellite countries: Prague first, and from 1994 onward, to Romania and Lithuania, where regular seminars are organized.

Four main scientific threads have developed, mostly after 1945. From the predominantly ego-psychological orientation after 1938 a continuous trend emerged to integrate drive- and ego- psychology with observations on narcissistic development and pathology (Lamplde Groot, Le Coultre, Van der Leeuw, Spanjaard, Treurniet). Many analysts from before the war already came from Child Guidance Clinics. The direct observation and treatment of neurotic and psychotic children has led to a mutual influence of adult and child psychoanalysis and to the use of psychoanalytical approaches in prevention of childhood disorders (Frijling-Schreuder, Kamp, Van Waning). The Dutch training programs are founded upon integrated child and adult theoretical seminars. In the third place there was and is a vivid exchange between psychoanalysis and the adult psychiatric clinic (Kuiper, De Blécourt, Van Tilburg). The fourth mainstream is centered around the aftermath of war in the first, second, and the contemporary generation (Keilson, De Wind, Jacques Tas, Louis Tas, De Levita, Bruggeman). Among the solitary theoreticians in the widened scope of psychoanalysis, De Jonghe, Ladan, Stufkens, and Bögels should be mentioned.

Regularly, textbooks and analytic books on a specific topic are published in Dutch. In 1978 Keilson published his long-term investigation on Jewish war orphans in Germany, Sequentielle Traumatisierung bei Kindern (now translated into English). In 1985 the collected papers by Lampl-de Groot were published in English titled Man and Mind. In 1991 Halberstadt-Freud published Freud, Proust, Perversion and Love. In 1993, at the thirty-eighth IPA congress in Amsterdam, Dutch Art and Character, a Psychoanalytic View was edited by Baneke and others. In 1993 and 1995 two volumes of the Dutch Annual of Psychoanalysis appeared, edited by Ladan, Groen-Prakken, and Stufkens, and in 1996, on the occasion of a celebration of Treurniet, Psychoanalysis in a Post-Classical Context was published, edited by Groen-Prakken and featuring Treurniet's article "On an Ethic of Psychoanalytic Technique," alongside papers by foreign and Dutch friends.

HAN GROEN-PRAKKEN