Emily A. Kuriloff

FIRST, LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY KURILOFF:

Author, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich.

http://newbooksnetwork.com/emily-kuriloff-contemporary-psychoanalysis-and-the-third-reich-routledge-2013/

I grew up with the past in the present. It was 1960s America, but the talk at the dinner table was as much about Nazi collaborators, leftist heroes, and family members I had never met as it was about Vietnam or Civil Rights. The famous and the infamous, and my relatives whose fate had rested in their hands were still with us, frozen in time.

Yet, as an adult psychologist in the late 1980s, I tended to view the Shoah as a prop in a more universal drama. While my family history might determine the content, even the degree of my preoccupation, Nazis were to be viewed as metaphor for more existential conflicts regarding an essential aggression, for instance, or fear of punishment.

It is not that this understanding is incorrect, but that it is incomplete. My training as an interpersonal psychoanalyst gradually taught me to simultaneously consider the predisposition of the individual, the power of social circumstance, and the accidents of fate in determining a life.

In this spirit the iconic dinners of my childhood returned to me. As I began to appreciate their particular influence on my sensibility, I thought not only of my family, but of my professional “family” as well—the many European psychoanalysts who were also caught in the scourge of the Third Reich. What effect, I wondered, did their personal histories have upon their theo- retical and clinical work, and thus the direction of the psychoanalysis then and now.