The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child: A Narrative of Postwar Psychoanalysis

The essay begins in 1945, a moment in psychoanalytic history when three events converge: the closure of the Anna Freud’s war nurseries, the end of the Controversial Discussions in the British Society, and the first appearance of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (PSOC), edited by Ernst Kris, Heinz Hartmann, and Anna Freud. This paper highlights how PSOC during its first two decades, 1945-1965, continuously engaged with the theoretical and clinical evolution of postwar psychoanalysis. Reviews of PSOC throughout its early history illustrate its extraordinary influence and reach and thus make it an ideal vehicle for studying postwar psychoanalysis. The paper argues that the founding of PSOC represented an act of restitution, an effort to recreate a sense of continuity with an irretrievably lost European psychoanalytic community.