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

Those of us with a passion for the history and culture of psychoanalysis have been waiting - perhaps unconsciously - for Berlin Psychoanalytic, a book that attends to a noticeable gap in intellectual history. When we think of psychoanalysis, we think of Vienna, not Berlin. The intensely interior world of the psyche is perfectly suited to Vienna, while Berlin, especially during its edgy, violent Weimar Republic days, is dominated by the logic of the exterior. But the scholarly and cultural amnesia around Berlin and psychoanalysis is also linked to the close ties between psychoanalysis and the Jewish bourgeoisie, the traces of which are now very faint. In the face of the awkward silence around this history, Berlin Psychoanalytic is a welcome new voice.

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written book, Veronika Fuechtner connects important dots between the theoretical distinctiveness of psychoanalytic thought in Berlin and the cultural and artistic expressions that emerged from this discourse but also expanded, complicated, and challenged its assumptions. With sharp skills in both literary and historical analysis, in Berlin Psychoanalytic Fuechtner brings into conversation artists and intellectuals associated with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI) from the end of the First World War to the rise of the Third Reich, extending to its exile in Palestine and the USA. The book's main claim is that "Weimar Republic culture is inseparable from the psychoanalytic discourse on war neurosis, sexuality, and criminality specific to Berlin" (1), and it demonstrates this point by investigating the profound connections between ideas and art. But it is not the argument per se which is so stunning in this book. Rather, its genius lies in the way Fuechtner unpacks detailed (and potentially dusty) archival research to reveal inspiring characters and dialogues.

Each chapter pairs two important thinkers and dramatizes the exchange of their work to highlight the ways in which psychoanalysis is shaped and transformed in a particular milieu. Chapter 1 begins with a young Alfred Döblin, eager to connect psychoanalysis to new fields and new audiences, speaking to Ernst Simmel. Through this fruitful collaboration (like a "talking cure"?), Döblin, a practising psychiatrist and a writer, brings his socialist politics and his theories of war trauma into expression through experimental narrative forms. Unlike Freud, who was at pains to align psychoanalysis with scientific methods, Döblin felt that psychoanalytic practitioners ought to concern themselves more with literature. Literature would influence psychoanalysis and would constitute a medium with which to popularize psychoanalysis for the proletariat.

In chapter 2, we find Georg Groddeck talking with Hermann von Keyserling (and others who interrupt their dialogue). A self-declared "wild analyst," Groddeck's thought was both deeply influenced by and quite at odds with Freud's theories. Both Keyserling and Groddeck merged psychoanalysis with Christian mysticism and eugenic (and potentially fascist) theories of sexuality and race. Groddeck's so-called psychoanalytic novels are a mouthpiece for his views on the bisexuality of organs and physiological mechanisms. While their religious theories led dangerously close to eugenics, Groddeck and Keyserling did influence Karen Horney and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, both of whom rejected Freud's biological understanding of femininity and sought more positive psychic models for women.

The last two chapters treat new iterations of the BPI in exile. The first is a rather tragic story of Arnold Zweig's devotion to psychoanalysis and his failure to adapt to life in Palestine, despite his close friendship with Max Eitingon. Zweig, who had published several pieces on the rise of anti-Semitism after the First World War, left Germany immediately after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, settling in Haifa, where Eitingon, formerly the director of the BPI, joined him less than a year later. Like Döblin and Groddeck, Zweig read psychoanalysis in conjunction with literature, but he also coined the term eye camera, which he described to Freud as the experience of seeing disturbing images of...