A GERMAN CHRISTIAN JEW IN ROME: ERNST BERNHARD AND THE FIRST YEARS OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN ITALY

Ernst Bernhard, the first analytic psychologist in Italy, was a sui generis student of Jung and became the leader of Italian analytic psychology almost in spite of himself. His story is indicative of a period dense with complex choices and paradoxical fates for psychotherapists of Jewish descent forced into exile. After the advent of Nazism, Bernhard tried in vain to move to Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Italy was a third choice. Here he initially seemed to be able to begin a fruitful exchange with fellow Freudian analysts, but racial laws forced him to stop his work. During the war he was forced first into confinement, then into hiding. In the second half of the 1940s, however, he was able to undertake an intense activity as an analyst, popularizer and trainer.