The force of ideas

The Force of Ideas describes a little‐known aspect of both educational history and Viennese psychoanalysis during the interwar years: the movement for psychoanalytic pedagogy. The author traces her father’s own story, beginning with his application to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for training as a psychoanalytic pedagogue, as a way to follow this now‐forgotten movement. Psychoanalytic pedagogues saw themselves as part of building a democratic socialism in Austria by bringing a psychoanalytic understanding of themselves and others to teaching. The movement was cut short by the Anschluss, as psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic pedagogues, most of whom were Jews, escaped Austria. Although some of the ideas developed during the interwar years continued as émigrés worked in clinics, child welfare organizations, and schools, in the face of survival and assimilation in postwar US, an identifiable theory and practice of psychoanalytic pedagogy were largely lost.