Ernest Jones is elected President of the IPA for the second time. In the coming years he will play a central role in helping Jewish psychoanalysts – notably the Freuds and their Viennese circle – escape continental Europe to the US and Britain.
Image: a list of emigres from 1938.
Following the Nazi invasion of Austria – the Anschluss – in March, Ernest Jones and Princess Marie Bonaparte help Sigmund Freud and his family escape Vienna, with the support of the American ambassador in Paris, William C. Bullitt. On 6th June they arrive in London. Among the other European analysts who escape to London are Willi and Hedwig Hoffer, Dorothy Burlingham, and Erwin Stengel.
In the advent of the Second World War, and following the first evacuation of children from London, D.W. Winnicott, John Bowlby, and Emanuel Miller publish an open letter in the British Medical Journal, in which they warn against the long-term damage caused by separating very young children from their parents. These analysts’ experiences of treating evacuated children have a strong impact on post-war psychoanalytic theory (for example, John Bowlby's attachment theory).
The outcome of the Controversial Discussions is a ‘gentleman’s agreement' – sometimes known more aptly as the ‘lady’s agreement’, as it is arrived at by Sylvia Payne, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. It institutionalizes three Groups within the Society, and changes significantly the way training in the Institute is organised and thought about.
'1. There should be one Training Committee responsible for all matters regarding the selection, training, and qualification of students.
2. Students could opt to take Course A or Course B, the latter being run according to the wishes of Miss Freud's Group.
3. Lectures and seminars other than those on technique would be common to all students. 4. Students would attend clinical and technical seminars taken by analysts from their own course. They could attend as guests those taken by members of the other course.
5. In the third year all students would attend clinical seminars run by teachers from Course A and Course B.
6. The first Supervisor must be chosen from the Student's own group, the second Supervisor of Candidates in analysis with a Kleinian or a member of the ‘B’ group, should be selected from those who were independent of both, that is, from a non-Kleinian member of Course A – the Middle group.' (King and Steiner, 1991, pp. 906-07).
Rickman had, alongside Wilfred Bion, been a pioneer of group psychotherapy, and had forged important connections between the Tavistock and British Psychoanalytic Society.
The film instigates a movement against separating children in hospital from their parents.
...Wilfred Bion, Paula Heimann, Betty Joseph, Roger Money-Kyrle, and Hanna Segal are the founding trustees.