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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.1 (2003) 90-91



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Death of a "Jewish Science"—Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich. By James E. Goggin and Eileen Brockman Goggin (W. Lafayette, Purdue University Press, 2001) 242pp. $32.95

When a book's subject is gruesomely fascinating, as the Nazis somehow always are, one's hunger for gritty details of the crime and its context increases with each page. In Death of a "Jewish Science," the context is the psychoanalytic movement from approximately 1933 until the end of the 1940s. The crime is the Nazi's "aryanization" of psychoanalytic institutions and the disgraceful exile or death of not only Europe's great psychoanalytic figures but also, in many ways, psychoanalysis itself. The book's greatest strength lies in its interdisciplinary details, especially the takeover of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute by Matthias Göring, cousin and protegé of Adolph Hitler's deputy Hermann Göring, and his fascist friends from 1933 through 1936. What the book may lack in scale, it offsets with one of the best accounts to date of Carl Jung's nefarious complicity with the Nazi regime.

The Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and its famous Poliklinik opened in 1920, just two years after Sigmund Freud pressed his colleagues to meet the social obligations of psychoanalysis with "institutions or out-patient clinics ... [where] ... treatment will be free." The Poliklinik's startling innovations included free treatment, time-limited analysis, child analysis, and formal psychoanalytic education. Its staff roster reads like a hall of fame from the pioneers of psychoanalysis: Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Helena Deutsch, Otto Fenichel, Ernst Simmel, Wilhelm Reich, and Annie Reich, among others. Most of them were avowed socialists who upheld a blend of Marxist and Freudian theory. Most of them were also Jews.

By 1933, Freud's works were burned publicly, Simmel was arrested, and Max Eitingon immigrated to Palestine after turning the Institute's leadership over to Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig. That the clinic's services and principles were absorbed into Nazi ideology is an almost perfect illustration of the effect of cultural superstructures (like totalitarianism) on individual freedom of thought (as in psychoanalysis). The change in leadership was not without controversy, however, and the extent to which Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig—and Ernest Jones in London—collaborated with the Nazis to maintain a corrupt facade on the psychoanalytic society seems far-reaching. In complying with Matthias Göring's wishes to replace insight-oriented depth analysis with a new German psychology of resilience and civic fitness, their administration of the clinic was a well-documented disaster. Three months after the 1933 "Enabling Act" gave Hitler full dictatorial powers, Göring promoted Carl Jung as chairman of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. In radio shows, journal articles, lectures, and seminars, Jung broadcast his anti-Semitic and anti-Freudian views of organic mysticism and "racial infection." By 1936, Jung's influence had undermined whatever psychoanalytic autonomy was left. [End Page 90]

The authors' political understanding is unfortunately simple and their title is dubious since, after all, psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy still thrives in the Western world. Nevertheless, they provide well-researched and convincing evidence that the Nazis destroyed the liberationist core of psychoanalysis and left it a diluted, conformist, and presumably terrorized, shell of its former self. On balance, this is a sincere, engaging book that adds a new and useful explanation for the cultural drift of psychoanalysis.

 



Elizabeth Ann Danto
City University of New York

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