Abstract
Psychoanalysis in the Czech Republic: External reality and repression. - Repression, Freud's most significant discovery, is a universal human property. It has particular historical and cultural affiliations with central Europe, where external suppression at the hands of religion, political powers, and authoritarian power structures dates far back far into the past.
Life and survival in what used to be Czechoslovakia has spawned in the individuals there complex forms of character defense that are largely based on repression. Accordingly, the history of psychoanalysis in this region is greatly marked by a complicated evolution taking place between external suppression and internal repression.
The article is a contribution to the reconstruction of that history, a task that has yet to be undertaken.