Poland

Poland was divided between Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary when psychoanalysis came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ludwig Jekels, a follower of Freud, practiced psychoanalysis in Austrian Poland in the clinic he directed outside Lvov, a city that has been Ukrainian since 1945 but was Austro-Hungarian at the start of the twentieth century. Jekels was joined by Hermann Nunberg until the latter emigrated to the United States. We also have to thank him for the first publications in Polish dating from 1908. Between 1911 and 1914, three titles appeared in the Polish Psychoanalytic Library.

After World War I psychoanalysis went through a dynamic period of development in the new Polish state. As a result of its many publications and conferences, its influence extended to the medical world and the cultural life of the country. The majority of Polish analysts at the time were trained in the Berlin Institute. Two names stand out: Roman Markuszewicz and Gustav Bychowski. The first published an apologetic work in 1926 on psychoanalysis and its therapeutic function and, ten years later, a critical work: "Toward a Revision of the Fundamental Freudian Notion." Bychowski was trained in Berlin and published on methaphysics and schizophrenia there before returning to Poland to take up a position in Warsaw as a university professor. There he published on the psychoanalytic aspect of the psychoses. The following names are also worthy of note: Stefan Borowiecki, Maurycy Bornsztajn, Jan Kuchta, Rudolf Kesselring, Wladislaw Matecki, Joseph Mirski, Norbert Praeger, Adam Wisel, and Leopold Wolowicz.

Eugénie Sokolnicka deserves a special mention. She trained in Zurich, Vienna, and Budapest between 1911 and 1920 but, not being a physician, she failed to find her place in the Warsaw psychoanalytic milieu of 1920. Freud, who had been her analyst, advised her to go to Paris, where she arrived in 1921. She met with no better success in the Paris medical world, but she analyzed René Laforgue andouard Pichon. She did, however, take an active part in founding the Paris Psychoanalytic Society in 1926 and became its first vice-president.

World War II and the ensuing communist régime reduced this first development to dust and it took another ten years before the Polish psychoanalytic movement again showed signs of life. Three young psychiatrists went to train in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where psychoanalysis was leading an underground existence. The first of these, Jan Malewski, went first to Prague and then, more importantly, to Budapest, where for ten years he alternated six months of analysis with Imre Hermann and six months of activity in Poland. The second, Zbigniew Sokolik, had Theodor Dosuzkov as his analyst in Prague. The third, Michael Lapinski, was analyzed in Prague by Otakar Kucera.

Greater freedom of circulation between eastern countries and later between them and the West fostered a new period of development for psychoanalysis: Young psychiatrists and psychologists in analysis went on to become the active practitioners of contemporary Polish psychoanalysis. In this climate the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) elected two direct associate members at the 1989 Congress in Rome: Elzbieta Bohomolec, a psychiatrist who was analyzed by Michael Lapinski in Warsaw and who was in supervision in Berlin; and Katarzyna Walewska, a psychologist in analysis in Warsaw and then in Paris, and who was in supervision in Warsaw and London. They are at the root of two psychoanalytic groups. The first, the Polish Society for the Development of Psychoanalysis, was founded in 1991; the second, the Institute of Psycho-analysis and Psychotherapy, was founded in 1992. The names of these two groups clearly reflect the nuance that distinguishes them: increasing the number of practitioners for the first, the quality of the training for the second. Members from both groups work together in the Raztów Center for Psychotherapy of Neuroses, founded in 1965 by Jan Malewski. Having been prohibited during and after World War II, psychoanalysis began to be taught in the psychology faculties of Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin in 1961. Psychotherapeutic practice has developed in these cities and in Gdansk.

Only Zbigniew Sokolik has remained in Warsaw. Michael Lapinski emigrated to Australia in 1983 and became a member of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society. Jan Malewski settled in Heidelberg in 1975 and became a member of the German Psychoanalytic Association. At the same timeémigrés who fled the Nazi persecutions, like Hanna Segal, have reestablished contacts with Poland. Analysts from the international analytic community have visited Poland to give clinical and theoretical training in psychoanalysis. The vitality of the Polish group was demonstrated in 1991 at Pototsk, near Warsaw, on the occasion of the third seminar for East Europeans, a seminar that was organized under the auspices of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis.

MICHEL VINCENT