The Internalization of Nazism and its Effects on German Psychoanalysts and their Patients

The Taboo of Nazism

I would like to begin by telling you about a situation that took place when I first began the practice of psychoanalysis. One-and-a-half years after completing the supervised analysis of a young woman, I ran into this woman in the stairway of the building where I had my consultation room; I happened to have a little time and invited her in. Here she told me that she wanted to see the place again to which she had come regularly for over 21/2 years, because she was still dealing with some of her feelings from that time.

She then said she had a dream about me. In the dream I was one of the guards outside the chamber of a concentration camp. She dreamt that she was entering the bunker, knowing what was about to happen to her, that she would never get out of there alive and that I, looking at her sadly, was about to shut the door of the bunker tightly behind her.

The former patient was not willing to talk about this dream with me because she did not want to take the psychoanalysis any further. It was by chance that she had met me now, and that was what made her think of the dream again. She said the dream did not upset her because she did not have the feeling I had shut the door behind her sadistically, but because there was nothing I could do to change it, since I, too, was just a little cog in the wheel of the machinery of destruction in a concentration camp.

As she was telling me about the dream, I felt a sharp, stinging sensation in my nose, which I know is the sign of a cold coming on. I could not worry about this nagging physical sensation that day; if anything, I gave in to it. The next day I fell ill with a high fever and a severe case of strep throat infection the likes of which I had not had for twenty years.

In my own analysis at the time, my training analyst and I agreed that because my former patient had confronted me so suddenly with the dream while refusing to talk about it, I had been overwhelmed in a ghastly way by the destructive rage of the concentration camp. My violent physical reaction to it was understandable in view of the situation, which had to be “felt through,” as it were, without becoming conscious of my intrapsychic situation.

Those of us who are psychoanalysts in Germany have only recently begun to exchange clinical experiences of this kind. Up to the late 1970s, nothing was ever said about them, as if twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, the Holocaust and the horrors of World War II had not been one of the most incisive historical and political events for the German people. It was as if hearing about the reign of death that had held Germany in sway had to be kept under wraps for decades of psychoanalytic practice and training. Everyone was afraid to awaken the dragon or to acknowledge the presence of this Ego that was armed to the teeth in defense against this world of annihilation. For a long time, it was something of a taboo to include the crimes of the Nazi era in the immediate clinical and training work. As Anita Eckstädt, a colleague, put it: “Even if one had every reason to suspect that someone’s father was a Nazi, to say so in an analytical seminar or to an analysand would have meant violating a taboo. It was not something one could talk about in any direct way” (Eckstaedt 1989, 12).

Some German analysts even claimed they had “never had the child of a Nazi on the couch” (a.a.O.). Even in the late 1980s, one colleague said:

. . . it is difficult for analyst-colleagues to have more than a superficial discussion about it. Everyone is still so much a product of his or her own individual situation that there...