Treating Mind and Body: Essays in the History of Science, Professions, and Society Under Extreme Conditions (review)

When Cocks was a graduate student in German history at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a special interest in psychohistory, he assumed (like the rest of us) that psychotherapy was repressed during the Third Reich as “Jewish science.” He found out that he was mistaken when one day, while searching for a Ph. D. thesis topic, he came across bound volumes of a journal called Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. Noting that they covered the years from 1928 to 1939, he assumed they must have been published in Switzerland or Austria. But this organ of the “General Medical Society of Psychopathology” was published in Leipzig and edited by Carl Jung and Matthias Heinrich Göring, the first cousin of Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Cocks’ subsequent groundbreaking study of the Göring Institutes in his thesis would demonstrate that these institutes in Berlin and other German cities must be given credit for preserving and promoting psychopathology during the Third Reich.

The name Göring in itself was a great help—as helpful to the treatment of mental illness as the name Sigmund Freud was hurtful. But the Göring Institutes also prospered because they cooperated with the Nazis. They promised, for example, that they could return mental patients quickly and inexpensively to war front and factory. They also told the Nazi government that they would increase the health of the racial stock, and “cure” homosexuality. This approach was preferable to that of their rivals, traditional psychiatrists who prescribed punishment and extermination. The Institutes provided valuable psychotherapeutic training, but they also cooperated with the Gestapo in rooting out Jews.

This volume of essays includes the author’s superb introduction to his edition of the correspondence of Heinz Kohut, one of the few post-Freudian psychoanalysts who, in the 70s and 80s, made major theoretical and clinical innovations. Cocks has provided a sensitive and rich profile of this private and gifted man, as well as a revealing portrait of his personal relations with his family and professional colleagues.

He shows that Kohut’s seminal contribution of “Self Psychology” grew from his own experience, his personal “working through” of the insecurities and self-doubts occasioned by his mother’s paranoia and by his father’s affairs with other women in his “flight from mother.” Cocks argues persuasively that Kohut was himself the subject of his most important case study, “Mr. Z.” His analysis of Mr. Z concerned his own “narcissistic impairment,” and he applied to his own person the introspection and empathy that would become crucial to his clinical practice.

In his essay on Jung and the Nazis, Cocks notes how the “disturbing ambiguities” of Jung’s thought were welcomed by the Nazis. Jung accepted traditional negative stereotypes about Jews, claiming a distinction between able German psychoanalysts (himself) and suspect Jewish analysts (Freud). His ideas about collective memories and national cultures were also congenial to Nazi racial claptrap about the “Aryan Volkish soul.” Indeed, Cocks might have quoted Jung’s statement of 1933 that Adolf Hitler “is the incarnation of the Volkseele.”

Several essays paint a damning picture of traditional German medicine. German psychiatrists actively supported the Nazi program of sterilizing and murdering patients who were deemed “unworthy of living.” German doctors also condoned horrendous “scientific experiments” on concentration-camp victims. They did so not because they were Nazis—although over 45 percent of them were—but because they were “acting on principles and practices long embedded in their culture” (207).

These thoughtful and impressively researched essays enhance our understanding of German history.