Genocide: What Psychoanalysis Lost in the Holocaust

In this roundtable #3 Genocide: What Psychoanalysis Lost in the Holocaust, panelists will discuss what was lost when entire institutes were destroyed through emigration, war, and genocide. While some institutes like the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society were reestablished, the roundtable will look at the ways the individuals, their families, organizations, and the field grappled with loss and death in the post-war period.

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.