[Beyond guilt? The inability to grieve in the second generation].
The largely favourable response accorded to Tilmann Moser's critique of the book The Inability to Mourn (in Psyche 5/1992) makes it plausible to assume that with his remarks Moser has touched the very nerve of the present-day "Zeitgeist". The time appears to have come to reinterpret and revise the attitudes called for by the Mitscherlichs 25 years ago, i.e. recognition of guilt and empathy with the victims of German's extermination drive. Unlike Moser, who urges a strict divorce between therapy and morality and calls for empathy with "those involved in the crimes", Schneider shows that morally de-contextualized psychoanalysis/psychotherapy has been--and still is--in danger of being pressed into service for a variety of ends. Schneider sees it as a major achievement on the part of Alexander Mitscherlich, in the aftermath of National Socialist crimes affecting millions of people, to have restored the moral context that is an integral part of the human essence of psychoanalysis if it is to be both enlightening. Without such a context, he argues, psychoanalysis would be reduced to a form of purely "therapeutic" morality remote from social and political concerns, a development that Freud himself feared most of all.
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Schneider
D006117:Grief; D006167:Guilt; D006801:Humans; D009014:Morals; D010553:Personality Development; D011056:Political Systems; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D014857:Warfare