Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Dr. Otakar Kučera (1906-1980). "Psychoanalyst, be the salt of the earth!"

Publication at First Faculty of Medicine |
2022

Abstract

Otakar Kučera played a significant role in preserving psychoanalytic movement continuity in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1980. He trained numerous colleagues who later became training analysts and psychodynamic psychotherapists spreading "alternative culture" of psychoanalytic perspective within the Communist Regime.

He translated and edited psychoanalytic literature into Czech language including Freud's collected work and wrote papers about regression, sublimation, homosexuality, active technique. He studied modern French poetry from the psychoanalytic point of view.

As a child psychiatrist he applied psychoanalytic thinking in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. The author discusses the position of training analysts in semilegality and the potential impact of their adaptation to life in socialist Czechoslovakia on the use of setting and the overvalued role of psychoanalysis.