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  • Response to Karen Brecht, "In the Aftermath of Nazi Germany: Alexander Mitscherlich and Psychoanalysis--Legend and Legacy"
  • Anson Rabinbach

Karen Brecht’s paper offers an important corrective to many of the myths and exaggerations which Alexander Mitscherlich encouraged and promoted concerning the history of psychoanalysis in Germany and his own role in its refounding after 1945. Her paper focuses primarily on Mitscherlich’s “legend” of a persecuted profession, and to a lesser extent on his “legacy” for the re-emergence of German psychoanalysis. Mitscherlich, she argues, largely disregarded the contributions of an earlier generation of progressive analysts, obscured the continued presence of the compromised analysts of the pro-Nazi Göring Institute, and cloaked his own lack of formal psychoanalytic education and training (until relatively late) in a rather hazy autobiographical account. As a public figure, Mitscherlich’s emphasis on psychoanalysis as an instrument of cultural theory and general enlightenment as opposed to clinical treatment served the corporate interests of psychoanalysis while obstructing the reception of new clinical developments. By perpetuating the “legend” of a persecuted profession, she claims, Mitscherlich endowed German psychoanalysis with the legacy of an immaculate inception. In postwar Germany “the mythical overestimation of Mitscherlich” coincided with a variety of “unconscious collective needs” on the part of both a general public and German analysts.

As far as the legend is concerned, Dr. Brecht’s paper, and much of the recent research on psychoanalysis during the Third Reich, demonstrates how self-serving were many of Mitscherlich’s autobiographical and public statements (Cocks 1985; Brecht, Friedrich, Hermanns, Kaminer et al. 1985). However, Dr. Brecht goes beyond a historical reconstruction— [End Page 313] which she and her colleagues admirably accomplished in the exhibition “Hier geht das Leben auf eine sehr merkwürdige Weise weiter”—to suggest that legend and legacy are closely connected. She alludes to the lingering debate about the significance of his and Margarete Mitscherlich’s most famous book, Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (The Inability to Mourn), and points to its tendency to mix “well-founded criticisms with generalized prejudices about the German national character” (Mitscherlich 1967, 16). I will therefore concentrate my remarks on the question of the legacy which, in light of the ongoing reevaluation of Mitscherlich’s influence now taking place, will also allow me to take up some of the larger issues her contribution raises.

Dr. Brecht’s approach, with its emphasis on deflation and demystification, attests to the rather precipitous decline in prestige that Alexander Mitscherlich’s reputation has suffered in the public sphere since his death in 1982. I refer here to the rather unsympathetic portrait presented in his filmmaker son Thomas’s 1986 documentary “Vater und Sohn,” which was shown on German television, as well as to several recent journalistic and scholarly attacks on The Inability to Mourn. In June 1993, for example, a full page article entitled: “The Inability to mourn or something like that, a particular chapter in the cultural history of misunderstanding,” appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Dismissive and scornful to say the least, its author, Eckhard Henscheid called the Mitscherlichs’ work “a collection of contradictions” (Sammelsurium von aporien), packed with competing and often mutually exclusive definitions of “mourning work.” If its precise meaning was unclear even at the outset, it became still less so the more arbitrarily and imprecisely it was repeated. After twenty-two years the phrase “inability to mourn,” apart from being “horrendous German,” descended from an almost universally adopted and ritualistically repeated public cliche to “blank and uncompromising nonsense” (Henschied, 1993). The diagnosis ultimately became a symptom of the peculiar German obsession with the ghosts of the Nazi past.

Henscheid might be dismissed as a journalist with an axe to grind. But at a major conference devoted to “Memory: The [End Page 314] Presence of the Holocaust in East and West Germany,” held near Frankfurt in January 1992, the psychoanalyst Tilmann Moser claimed that the aggressive moralizing of the Mitscherlich’s diagnosis was responsible for the inability of many Germans of the 1968 generation to empathize with the experience of an older generation. Moser called it “tragic” that the Mitscherlichs’ text had found such a remarkably wide reception in certain “cultural circles...

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