International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis | Austria

The history of psychoanalysis in Austria is practically indistinguishable from that of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society until the end of the Second World War. The group known as the Wednesday Psychological Society, which met regularly after 1902 in Freud's apartment, later renamed itself the Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung (Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) and was admitted as a regional group into the International Psychoanalytical Association, which had just been founded. In 1911, following the defection of its first president, Alfred Adler, Freud assumed the presidency. When Carl Gustav Jung and the members of the Zurich society left the psychoanalytic movement, Vienna became the sole center of influence.

After a period of inactivity caused by the First World War, the society resumed its activities and, with its youngest members playing an important role, quickly established a treatment facility in 1922 and a training institute in 1924. Only in 1936, after years of migration, was the Vienna society able to take possession of the premises at Berggasse 7, where it was housed along with its training institute, treatment facility, and publishing house.

Between 1934 and 1938 Austria developed politically into an authoritarian Catholic state. Although most members of the society had shown themselves to be sympathetic to the Social-Democrats, its administration made a conscious decision to abstain from politics. On March 14, 1938, the day after German troops entered Austria and after a number of analysts had already left the country, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society held its last meeting. Members unanimously decided that those who felt threatened should leave Austria, and that the society's headquarters would be transferred to wherever Freud happened to be. With the exception of Alfred Winterstein and August Aichhorn, the 68 active and honorary members and approximately 36 candidates left the city. Freud left with his family on June 4, 1938. Between 1938 and 1945 a branch of the Deutsches Reichsinstitut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (State Institute for Research in Psychology and Psychotherapy), directed first by Aichhorn and then by Begsattel, was established in Vienna. Under Aichhorn's presidency a group of analysts and psychologists attempted to free themselves of the command of the Reichsinstitut. In 1944 this secret group had 14 training candidates, 7 of whom later became psychoanalysts.

Following the fall of National Socialism and the end of the Second World War, Austrian analysts did two things during the period of reconstruction: first, they reconstructed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and got it readmitted to the International Psychoanalytical Association, and second, they attempted to bring into the fold analysts and organizations that, under the title of depth psychology, held orientations considered marginal or unorthodox.

The inauguration of the new Vienna Psychoanalytic Society took place in 1946, with August Aichhorn as president. With assistance from Anna Freud, international recognition followed shortly, although it would take decades before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society made any significant contact with the world psychoanalytic movement. After Aichhorn's death in 1949, Alfred Winterstein became the new president, a post he held until 1957. Under the direction of Wilhelm Solms-Rödelheim, the society continued to grow. The 1971 International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Vienna, helped solidify the society's renewed links to international psychoanalysis.

Meanwhile, the Austrian and international student movement grew, and there was renewed interest in psychoanalysis generally. The Sigmund Freud Gesellschaft (Sigmund Freud Society), founded in 1968, together with the sociopsychiatrist Hans Strotzka and the cofounder of the Sigmund Freud Society Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, did much to make psychoanalysis better known to the population at large. Hans Hoff, professor of psychiatry, also helped establish this receptive climate.

Between 1972 and 1974 the presidents of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society included Alois Becker, Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, Peter Schuster, Wolfgang Berner, and Wilhelm Burian. Krista Placheta became president in 1998. As of 2005, Christine Diercks was president of the society.

In 1986 the society moved to new offices at Gonzagagasse 11. As of 1988 the society had seventy members and approximately a hundred candidates, more than the number of members in the former Vienna society. With the post-1968 generation of psychoanalysts came a relaxation of the older, authoritarian climate of discussion and a broader range of issues. Two central themes for the society in the 1980s were anti-Semitism inside and outside the field of psychoanalysis and its history during and after the war. In addition, the society held debates on the relation between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. These discussions led to a training seminar on psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which became an integral part of the general training program.

In 1989, at the annual meeting of the Vienna society, the assembled members voted, by a margin of one vote, to join the Dachverband für Psychotherapie (a supervisory organization), and later it voted to join the Psychotherapiebeirat (Psychotherapy Advisory Committee). In 1993 the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was legally recognized as a training organization for psychotherapy and was a leader in this field.

From 1945 Igor Caruso, an important representative of the various groups associated with psychoanalysis, worked to make psychotherapy more accessible to a greater portion of the population. During the years following the war, he and the discussion circle of which he was a member succeeded in creating a psychoanalytic organization that remained in operation for a number decades. Known as theÖsterreichische Arbeitskreise für Tiefenpsychologie (Austrian Working Group on Depth Psychology) and later renamed the Österreichische Arbeitskreise für Psychanalyse (Austrian Working Group on Psychoanalysis), it initiated throughout the country a series of teaching and clinical initiatives that were Freudian in orientation.

In 1947 Caruso created the Wiener Arbeitskreise für Tiefenpsychologie (Vienna Working Group on Depth Psychology), an autonomous scientific community composed primarily of physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and theologians, most of whom were close in age. The first candidates were trained privately and without any specific professional requirements, since the group defined itself primarily as a venue for scientific discussion. For this reason an increasing number of members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society participated in these discussions, although some of them found the intellectual climate overly imbued with Catholicism. Because of the working group's unorthodox approach, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was forced to define strict boundaries between the two organizations at the start of the 1950s. These boundaries may have led the Vienna working group, whose training guidelines were largely those used by psychoanalytic societies having a strictly Freudian orientation, to introduce a more formal and systematic structure for itself. The Vienna working group and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society differed in ideological orientation. In place of psychological analysis, the Vienna working group aimed at an existential synthesis in the form of a universal humanity, blended different trends in depth psychology, and harked to Jung rather than Freud.

With the 1952 publication of Caruso's book Psycho-analyse und Synthese der Existenz (Existential Psychology: From Analysis to Synthesis, 1964), the working group's program became more focused. After 1953 there were no explicit references to Jung's depth psychology and increasingly specific references to psychoanalysis. "Psychoanalysis" was initially understood in its technical sense, and the human aspect inherent in Freudian theory and its offshoots was enlarged in the direction of a personal psychoanalysis.

Caruso's book was translated into six languages, and thus served to spread his ideas internationally, especially in South America, where his ideas where well received. In fact, a number of South American candidates received their training in Vienna. Another example of cross-border activity is the 1954 Brussels symposium on the "Psychology of the Individual," attended by some forty psychoanalysts from several European countries. Presenters included Jacques Lacan, who gave a talk on the internal dialectics of the person in the theory and technique of psychoanalysis. As a result of his talk, Lacan became a corresponding member of the Vienna Working Group on Depth Psychology, a status he maintained until his death.

Theoretically, the working group focused on the concept of symbols and attempted to find a connection between Freudian ego psychology and personal philosophical concepts. There were increasing interdisciplinary attempts to bridge psychiatry, ethology, sociology, group dynamics (especially that of Raoul Schindler), and psychoanalysis. This expansion resulted in the founding, in Innsbruck in 1958, of the International Secretariat of the Working Groups on Depth Psychology, which was replaced in 1966 by the Internationale Föderation der Arbeitskreise für Tiefenpsychologie (International Federation of Working Groups on Depth Psychology) because of the growing number of participant associations.

During the 1960s different attempts to found a second world association, independent of the orthodox International Psychoanalytical Association, were made at the instigation of the German Psychoanalytic Association. Caruso and his working groups rebuffed these attempts in spite of the number of exchanges and conferences within the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft psychoanalytischer Gesellschaften (Inter-national Working Group of Psychoanalytic Societies), founded in 1962 in Amsterdam. At this time the theoretical orientation of the working groups moved further and further away from fundamental theological concepts of Catholicism. There were increasing references to the Freudian foundations of psychoanalysis and greater emphasis on the psychosociological aspects of the field, which resulted from a growing interest in thinkers like G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Herbert Marcuse. In 1972, when Caruso obtained the psychology chair at the University of Salzburg, a number of circles and working groups were formed outside Vienna, and these helped spread awareness of psychoanalysis throughout Austria. In addition to the Linz Circle, created in 1958, these included groups for the study of depth psychology launched in Graz and Linz in 1973 and in Salzburg in 1974, followed by the foundation of the Austrian Society for the Study of Child Psychoanalysis in Salzburg in 1976.

This gathering trend toward orthodoxy found concrete expression when the Vienna Working Group on Depth Psychology renamed itself the Vienna Working Group on Psychoanalysis in 1988. Shortly thereafter all the other depth psychology groups followed its example. Until 1992 these groups were all governed by the Directorate of Austrian Working Groups, which was replaced in 1992 by the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft der Arbeitskreise für Psychoanalyse inÖsterreich (Scientific Society of Working Groups for Psychoanalysis in Austria). This society produced the journal Texte: Psychoanalyse,Ästhetik, Kulturkritik, the only (quarterly) Austrian journal on psychoanalysis, edited by E. List, Johannes Ranefeld, G. F. Zeilinger, and August Ruhs. Because the society met IPA standards, which the working groups had followed since 1970, it asked to be admitted to the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1997, with Ranefeld as president. A commission of inquiry was established in October 1998.

Between 1985 and 1990 an interdisciplinary group of Viennese scientists, in collaboration with the Institut culturel français, organized a two-year international seminar entitled "Psychoanalysis and Structuralism: Freud and Lacan," which included some of the best known representatives of the Lacan school. This resulted in the formation of the Neue wiener Gruppe/Lacan-Schule, composed of an "aesthetic" section (under the direction of Walter Seitter) and a "clinical" section (under the direction of August Ruhs). It organized regular interdisciplinary conferences, usually followed by one or more publications.

In 1984 a group of students founded the Werkstatt für Psychoanalyse und Gesellschaftskritik (Workshop on Psychoanalysis and Social Criticism) in Salzburg. Until 1996 the organization refused to accept any form of orthodoxy or dogmatism and insisted on maintaining a political focus. The Werkblatt, the organization's publication, is still published, although the organization itself no longer exists.

In 1967 Eric Pakesch, a student of Caruso, created a chair of medical psychology and psychotherapy in the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz . At the suggestion of Hans Strotzka, a popular psychoanalyst and sociopsychiatrist, the Institute of Depth Psychology and Psychotherapy was founded in 1971 within the School of Medicine of the University of Vienna. It was intended to house psychoanalysis along with the other generally recognized schools of psychotherapy in a single facility. Eventually, psychoanalysis became its primary focus, and in the current university depth psychology clinic, run by Marianne Springer-Kremser, all practitioners use psychoanalysis or depth psychology, with the exception of one practitioner who uses systemic family therapy. A psychoanalytic focus can also be found at the university institutes of medical psychology (and psychotherapy) in the universities of Graz, Innsbruck, and Vienna (directed by W. Pieringer, G. Schüssler, and G. Sonneck, respectively). The Psychology Institute of the University of Klagenfurt, under the direction of Professor J. Menschik-Bendele, also has a strong psychoanalytic orientation.

Legislation on psychoanalysis instituted in 1992 had important repercussions for the field of psychoanalysis in Austria, for it drastically reduced the autonomy of psychoanalytic societies in their training activities and therapeutic practices. Psychoanalysis became recognized as equivalent to other therapeutic practices, so it had to comply with the general training program for psychotherapists. Before becoming a psychoanalyst, candidates had to complete a two-year program required for all forms of psychotherapy. Since health insurance recognized only some psychoanalytic treatments and reimbursement was partial, the five principal Viennese psychoanalytic and depth-psychology associations decided to create a parent organization in 1997 to make special agreements with insurers for long-term psychoanalytic treatment. For the first time in the history of psychoanalysis in Austria, member and nonmember associations of the International Psychoanalytical Association worked together in an organization to promote their mutual interest. Thanks to the concerted efforts of these societies, the Viennese municipal health service began to offer analyses for fifty citizens, without restriction as to duration or the frequency of treatment. Sixty years after Vienna's Ambulatorium shut down under Nazi administration, this treatment center reopened in 1999 and represented another sign of reawakened interest in psychoanalysis. Finally, plans for the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychaonalyse to join the IPA moved forward when it was granted study group status in 2003.

Another important parent organization for psychoanalysis is the Sigmund Freud Society and Sigmund Freud Museum at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. The society, founded in November 1968 with the help of Anna Freud, succeeded in creating a museum where Freud had his consulting room. In addition to supporting research into the history of psychoanalysis and its founders, the society holds discussions on important contemporary clinical, sociocultural, and therapeutic issues in a spirit of interdisciplinary cooperation. Harold Leupold-Löwentahal, president of the Society from 1976 to 1998, was succeeded by Johannes Schülein, who presided until 2003, and Dieter Bogner. The library, with 25,000 volumes, represents one of the major collections of its kind in Europe and includes archives with over 50,000 records of all kind. Since 1997, at the instigation of American artist Josef Kosuth and Austrian art dealer Peter Pakesch, the Sigmund Freud Society has acquired a collection that demonstrates the influence of psychoanalysis on contemporary art. In 2003, under director Inge Scholz-Strasser—albeit against the wishes of many Viennese psychoanalysts—the museum turned into a private foundation. This event led to a noticeable coolness between the administration and the city's psychoanalytic societies.

AUGUST RUHS