PARIS — A nation's relationship with its past is crucial to its present and its future, to its ability to "move on" with its life, or to learn from its past errors so as not to repeat them. This includes the past that isn't dead and buried — "in fact, it is not even past," as William Faulkner famously said. Such a past obsessively blocks any possible evolution toward a necessary reconciliation with oneself and a former or current foe.

Such a past is painfully visible today, for example, in the Balkans, a region largely paralyzed by a painful fixation on the conflicts that tore it apart in the 1990s. An absolute inability to consider the point of view of the other and to go beyond a sense of collective martyrdom still lingers over the entire region.

What the Balkans need nowadays are not historians or political scientists, but psychoanalysts who can help them transcend their past for the sake of the present and the future. It is to be hoped that the promised entrance into the European Union will constitute the best "psychoanalytical cure."