Beyond Forced Emigration: Contemporary Émigré Experience in Psychoanalysis

The field of psychoanalysis in the 21st century has been shaped by the history of emigration in the 20th century—this panel #4 Beyond Forced Emigration: Contemporary Émigré Experience in Psychoanalysis looks at the way that today’s immigrant psychoanalysts experience identity, otherness, and place and how those histories will continue to change the field.

Refugees and Immigrants: Their Experience and Contribution to Psychoanalysis in North America

This series of round tables, hosted by Tom Kohut, President of Freud Foundation US and Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Professor of History at Williams College, will examine topics related to the influence of refugee psychoanalysts on the training and practice of psychoanalysis in the USA, genocide and the impact of loss and destruction on psychoanalysis, and the and the experience of contemporary immigrant analysts. The events will be set up and broadcast via Zoom, featuring different experts from Europe and the USA. Both institutions will make the recordings available on their online media sites.

The roundtable series is part of the project From Despair to Hope: The Holocaust, Immigration, and Psychoanalysis in North America

The cooperation serves to honor Anton O. Kris' legacy, as the Executive Director of the Freud Archives, and for his work building relationships across the ocean and across generations of psychoanalysis. These events will pave the way for a planned exhibition project at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA (June–October 2023), based on the exhibition Organized Escape – Survival in Exile. Viennese Psychoanalysis 1938 and Beyond by the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.