Characterology: Hapsburg Empire to Third Reich

^ Characterology: Hapsburg Empire to Third Reich Katherine Arens At the end of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist when its traditional geographic boundaries were dismantled and its hereditary monarchs, the Hapsburgs, abdicated.1 Yet the Empire's intellectual environment persisted from the time of its political dissolution until the Anschluß of Austria and on into the Third Reich. A notable intellectual legacy was a branch of popular psychology termed characterology . This discipline fell between the medical community and a more popular audience. Beneath this seemingly popular term, a central argument in the biological sciences lay hidden: Is the individual determined through biological inheritance (a variant of Darwinism) or a product of environmental influences (a late permutation of Lamarckianism). This argument represented , respectively, a conservative and a liberal view of human potential. The conservative believed that the place of the individual in society was determined at birth, the liberal, that it could be altered through education and cultural influence, thus improving succeeding generations. In Vienna, the scientific community played out this discussion most visibly within fields related to medicine and therapy, under the auspices of the formidable and pervasive medical school and hospital system.2 Doctors and therapists at the end of the nineteenth century had inherited diagnostic practices focusing on the inherited wellness or frailty of constitutions; newly arising therapies countered by redefining wellness in terms of an individual's ability to function and shape a life history. The general public may not have been educated into all the ramifications of this conflict; however, it could not have avoided such notable "cases," spread through the intellectual circles of the day, as those in Freud's and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria. The scientific community was in the middle of a fundamental redefinition of its terms, addressing questions of individual development, personal wellness, and personality as they correlated to environment.3 Yet characterology stands between the popular and scientific worlds, Literature and Medicine 8 (1989) 128-55 © 1989 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Katherine Arens 129 as a debate that characterized the development of Austria from the turn of the century to its absorption into the racism and pan-Germanism of the Third Reich.4 Uncovering the tensions characteristic of this debate in turn suggests that particular institutional practices continued between the Empire and Reich because they reflected covert, but widely accepted, assumptions about the mental constitution of individuals. Two texts especially represent the scientific tensions of the era. One is by a physician who was also a literary man, the other by a failed philosopher. Physician Arthur Schnitzler's Der Geist im Wort und der Geist in der Tat (The Mind in Words and Actions), first published in 1927, discusses character and human behavior patterns;5 philosopher Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), first published in 1903, is an infamous proto-Nazi discussion of racism.6 Both texts come from intellectuals trained under the Empire; both address a popular audience. Schnitzler, physician and playwright, wrote a "preliminary essay" on character with no pretensions to completeness. Philosopher Weininger sought to join his work in epistemology to questions of psychology and inheritance in an encompassing theory understandable to a generally educated audience. These differences aside, both authors share assumptions common to the dominant biological/psychological debates of the day. The Background: Faculties, Function, Wellness, and Illness The conflict erupts at the beginning of the twentieth century with Freudian psychoanalysis, as a late consequence of the emergence of psychology at the start of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany.7 Psychology did not exist as an independent discipline at the start of the nineteenth century in Germany. Those philosophers interested in education , conceptualization, and moral education did, however, devote time to a part of the field that eventually emerged as independent. Kant, in his work on anthropology in the 1780s, started to link conceptual types with character and morality; after 1800, his disciple, Herbart, expanded these notions of conceptual threshold and learning abilities into a distinct field—educational psychology. Central to these and other expositions of the period is the notion of faculties. Faculties perform individual tasks within the total personality; they include reasoning, emotion...