Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond by Veronika Fuechtner (review)

At this book’s conclusion, Veronika Fuechtner states that part of her aim “has been to establish the Berlin Psychoanalytic as another point of reference in discussions on psychoanalysis and modernism” (179). This statement is modest, but the book that precedes it reveals the prismatic power of that choice of reference point. Viewing part of the history of psychoanalysis and modernism within the context of Weimar Berlin makes these movements themselves seem to shift and re-form along a spectrum quite different from the one viewed from Vienna or London. By reconstructing the history of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI) from its opening in March 1920 to the beginning of the Gleichschaltung in early 1933, Fuechtner presents a picture of Weimar Berlin as well as of the seminal psychoanalytic practitioners who inhabited it. By focusing on situating psychoanalysis in these years within the larger movement of cultural modernism, Berlin Psychoanalytic reveals (or reinforces previously known) connections between artists and physicians, authors and scientists. Fuechtner’s study emphasizes psychoanalysis’s multidisciplinary structure, in part by investigating the diverse and not infrequently ambivalent positions of its early Berlin adherents.

While part of Fuechtner’s contribution is to illuminate the pervasiveness of psychoanalysis and the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts or a psychoanalytic mindframe can saturate a culture, an equally significant part is her investigation, through the conversation technique, of specific networks between clinicians and other cultural practitioners and artists. Berlin Psychoanalytic’s chapters are organized in terms of conversations, and they take place in various spaces: Alfred Döblin and Ernst Simmel, Georg Groddeck and Count Hermann von Keyserling (et al.) meet in Berlin, while Arnold Zweig and Max Eitingon converse in a chapter on exiled BPI members in Palestine. The continued work of BPI members in New York from the mid-1930s onward is considered in a chapter that positions Richard Huelsenbeck and Charles Hulbeck in conversation with Karen Horney.

This format of situating members and associates of the BPI in conversation, in which Fuechtner reads their correspondence as well as references to one another’s work, helps highlight the confluence of science and art within psychoanalysis and within individual careers. Döblin’s psychiatric training and work as a military doctor is well known, but his work with Simmel and the BPI, says Fuechtner, shifted his “late-nineteenth-century psychiatric understanding of mental illness to a psychoanalytic conception of the soul. This development changed his medical practice and simultaneously drove his search for radical new forms of narration in his fiction” (18). The soul in Döblin’s fictional psychology is both knowable and unreliable, and operates in a way compatible with Freud’s thinking about memory as involving “the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception” (in “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” 1925). And it was the BPI that, Fuechtner states, “offered Döblin an institutional framework where he could connect his two professions—those of writer and physician” (21).

Berlin Psychoanalytic also offers new readings of the literature and film associated with the BPI and with psychoanalysis more generally. Döblin, as Fuechtner puts it, “described psychoanalytic therapy as a necessary relief of the clogged-up sewer system of Berlin’s collective unconscious,” and “Berlin Alexanderplatz can be read as an unsettling descent into the depths of this psychological canalization” (39). Fuechtner’s close readings of Berlin Alexanderplatz and other texts emphasize the reach of psychoanalytic thinking into other areas of life—into film, art, politics, and also into very eclectic realms. The chapter situating Groddeck in conversation with Count von Keyserling is entitled “Wild Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Race” and provides a truly new way of looking at the margins of psychoanalysis and how they were perhaps only traversable during the highpoint of cultural modernism’s avant-garde movements.

Some of the work Fuechtner examines in the chapter on “Wild...