Reunion in Vienna

Although Sigmund Freud conceived his theories of psychoanalysis in Vienna and founded his movement there, the city still has few Freudian analysts. So last week, when the International Psycho-Analytical Association convened its biennial congress in Vienna for the first time, there was little more than a corporal's guard of 26 resident analysts to greet the more than 2,000 visiting delegates.

Overshadowing the occasion was Anna Freud, 75, youngest of Freud's offspring. To Analyst Anna, Vienna was no waltzing City of My Dreams but a city of nightmare: after she and her father were driven from it by the Nazis in 1938, she vowed never to return. Now she had relented, but maintained an austere aloofness as the visiting analysts, plus wives and children, trooped through Freud's onetime consulting rooms in the house where she was born on the Berggasse. But when the city's deputy mayor burbled that "all Vienna appreciates your coming here." Anna melted. "I am greatly pleased and deeply moved," she said.

Old Terms. Despite all the atmosphere of a reconciliatory love feast, the congress's stated central theme was aggression. With this the orthodox analysts had difficulty coming to grips, as had the master himself long ago. Freud at first identified aggression with sadism and therefore related it to sexuality. In the 1920s he revised his views and accorded aggression the status of a separate instinct. He also related it to his theory of a death instinct. Five eminent analysts had been invited to make major presentations on aggression at a plenary session, and most of their long discussion was devoted to what critics of psychoanalysis condemn as abstruse theorizing.

No less eminent an insider than Harvard Professor Erik Erikson took that critical view. His white mane looking like a halo, Erikson warned the congress against an abstract use of the term aggression and accused the delegates of treating the topic too theoretically. He asked that it no longer be discussed in "decades-old formulations."

One of the lead-off speakers, Professor Alexander Mitscherlich of Frankfurt, agreed. "Nobody is going to take us seriously if we continue to suggest that war happens because fathers hate their sons and want to kill them," he declared. "This congress treats its main topic as if aggression were limited to relations between two individuals, as if we were not faced constantly with war and mass murder." Then Mitscherlich made a heretical suggestion: analysts should get out of the couch-lined offices where they treat only one patient at a time, and join the action alongside the social sciences. "What can we as analysts do in our respective communities? How can we bring reason to bear on dangerous rationalizations that are being used to justify openly aggressive behavior?" he asked. His answer: analysts must become engaged and involved with larger groups in order to tackle the problems of group aggression.

Total Rejection. Roughly half of his hearers gave Mitscherlich a tremendous hand for that, while the other half sat on their hands. Their stony silence, said one analyst, was really "total rejection."

Strong support for Mitscherlich's call to action came also from South America. It was dramatically presented by Buenos Aires' Dr. Marie Langer, a petite, young-looking blonde of 60, who declared that psychoanalysis and Marxism are not mutually exclusive, as Freud and his orthodox followers have maintained. She urged analysts to study the interplay between "love of aggression" and private property. By abolishing private property, it is held, a country would abolish one of the ways in which people express their aggressions. Critics of that view, however, could point out that there is no evidence of diminished aggression in socialist societies.

At the congress's end, Anna Freud summed up. She tried to smooth over previous speakers' differences and conceded that analysts still had a "clouded vision" on aggression. Then, sounding like a reincarnation of her father, she added: "But who should arrive at valid results if not we?" Everybody applauded. But nothing had really been settled. Psychoanalysis, which has survived two great schisms provoked by Jung and Adler, seemed headed for a new and challenging schism.

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