Nazi Psychoanalysis: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War

At the Goering institute

"Nazi psychoanalysis": the juxtaposition is surely intended to provoke, offend, outrage. Pairing Hitler's genocidal regime with Freud's science of the psyche violates our most fundamental assumptions about twentieth-century intellectual and political history, for these are antagonistic forces, like barbarism and enlightenment, reaction and progress, anti-Semite and Jew. Indeed, the antipathy between these two movements runs deep in German history. From its beginnings in the 1890s, psychoanalysis was frequently targeted by anti-Semites and cultural reactionaries, reviled as a dangerous pseudo-science foisted on European civilization by Jews. Freud's overt emphasis on sexuality and the conspicuous presence of Jews among his early adherents served to perpetuate images of the over-sexed and degenerate Jew. The Nazis, of course, added their voice to the chorus of condemnations in the 1920s. Their cartoons viciously satirized Freud's science, and the sexually rapacious Jewish analyst became an icon of Nazi propaganda.

Psychoanalysis, like other "Jewish" inventions — Bolshevism, the theory of relativity, the department store — threatened everything sacred to the Nazi world view. The dark, conflicted Freudian psyche was profoundly at odds with Nazi visions of simple, joyful Aryan subjects, cheerfully toiling, breeding, fighting (and dying) for the national community. If psychoanalysis had any value at all, one vituperative German psychiatrist averred, it was for shedding light on the perverse and degenerate mind of the Jew.

And this condemnation was more than mere ideological critique. The opposition to psychoanalysis had severe material consequences after the Nazi assumption of power in January 1933. Freud's books, alongside the works of Marx, Heinrich Heine, Magnus Hirschfeld, and numerous others, were ceremoniously burnt. Psychoanalytic institutes were shut down, clinics were sacked and many of the analysts found themselves abruptly out of work. This finally ended long-standing tensions within the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic communities in Germany. Psychoanalysis there was dead, Freudian thought was taboo and the vacuum was filled by rival schools more consistent with the Nazi world view and less marked by Jewish influences. The Freudians themselves, meanwhile, had little choice but to flee to safer shores. Consequently, psychoanalysis re-established itself and eventually thrived in more hospitable climes such as London, New York, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires. These sites replaced Vienna, Berlin, Budapest and (to some extent) Zurich as the centres of psychoanalytic innovation and growth.

That, anyway, is what historians and psychoanalysts used to think, until the mid-1980s when two books and an international conference complicated this narrative and challenged the view that Freud's science was purely a casualty of the Nazis. Working roughly simultaneously, but independently, Geoffrey Cocks in the United States and Regine Lockot in Germany reached the startling conclusion that the Nazi assumption of power did not spell the absolute end of psychoanalysis in Germany. Rather, under the leadership of Matthias Goering, an Adlerian psychotherapist with an extremely useful surname (he was a cousin of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering), the German Society for Psychotherapy remained cautiously open to psychodynamic, even explicitly Freudian, ideas and methods. In his study of the Berlin "Goering Institute", Cocks stressed professionalization. He emphasized the continuities in the establishment of psychotherapy as a profession before and after 1933, which, in the light of the fate of Jewish analysts, was a rather controversial assertion. Lockot similarly pointed to the persistence of Freudian thought in Nazi German psychotherapy. She claimed that Freudian ideas were indispensable to psychotherapeutic practice and thus, despite its clamorous rejection of Freud, even the Nazi regime could not bar him completely. Also in 1985, the same year in which Cocks's and Lockot's books appeared, the International Psychoanalytic Association held its annual conference in Hamburg. The choice of location was meant to mark the triumphant return of psychoanalysis to Germany fifty years after its banishment by the Nazis. However, several of the speakers asserted that it had never left and forced the assembled analysts to confront evidence that, despite the aforementioned ideological anti- pathy, elements of psychoanalysis remained in Germany throughout the Third Reich.

These interventions, then, evoked a kind of Freudianism without Freud. They stressed that psychoanalytic thinking survived in this most hostile environment because it was too useful — to the Wehrmacht, to the German economy, to certain patients and to opportunistic therapists — to be fully dispensed with. As controversial and groundbreaking as they were, however, these works represented more of a corrective than a deep challenge to prevailing assumptions. They upheld the fundamental antithesis between psychoanalysis and National Socialism, and hence preserved the reputation of psychoanalysis as essentially a target of Nazi persecution.

Such perspectives fit in with a more general tendency in the historiography of the Nazi period. By the 1980s, a number of scholars had begun to probe beneath Nazi ideology and propaganda and to look for sources of continuity -continuities that undermined the view of 1933 (and 1945) as a complete rupture in the fabric of German history. Feminist historians, for example, focused on the persistence of female organization and agency, despite Nazism's misogyny and its rhetoric about returning women to the home. Historians of consumer culture, likewise, pointed to the continued popularity of department stores and the failure of the SA's boycott campaigns against Jewish-owned establishments. Medical historians found surprising similarities between Nazi eugenics and the ideas of socialist medical reformers during the Weimar era (and in the Soviet Union). What emerged from these studies was a more complex picture of life in the Third Reich: a social reality often in tension with the regime's professed ideologies, indeed a leader and regime willing to compromise ideological consistency for the sake of popular support and economic and military efficiency. True ideological rigidity — a physics purged of the contributions of Jewish scientists, for example, or an economy immediately stripped of Jewish-run businesses — would have been too disruptive and ultimately impossible to maintain. When they came into conflict, the needs of the regime nearly always trumped the imperatives of ideology.

But Nazi psychoanalysis? According to Laurence A. Rickels, author of the three-volume work bearing this title, the contributions of Cocks and Lockot and the 1985 speeches barely scratched the surface. For Rickels, Nazism and psychoanalysis shared (and share) a deep affinity. The roots of this affinity stretch back to the First World War, when the wartime shell-shock epidemic led Freud to reformulate psychoanalytic theory and develop his second system. It continued with psychoanalytic collaboration in Nazi approaches to crowd control, homosexuality, propaganda, the media, military intelligence, and flying and aerial bombardment. In his treatments of these various subjects, among many others, Rickels depicts the Nazi regime as thoroughly saturated with a psychoanalytic sensibility. That Freud's and Hitler's portraits faced each other on opposite walls in the Goering Institute's offices is a telling sign of the depth of this relationship.

This is a challenging work, alternately fascinating and infuriating, and it resists being summarized or distilled into one or several essential contributions. That is because Rickels makes no concessions to conventions such as statements of thesis, linear exposition — or, at times, readability. His modus operandi, rather, is to chart various psychoanalytically relevant themes and connections as they appeared in Nazi German culture and beyond. Displaying impressive erudition, he skips freely around two centuries of literary, scientific and popular culture, discoursing at one moment on ant behaviour, at another on Goethe's Werther, and at another on Hedy Lamarr (and the actress's idea for radio-controlled torpedoes), or jumping from Heidegger and Lacan into swimming pools and health crazes in 1990s California. Individual sentences can be extremely hard to follow, in part because Rickels's prose is brimming with wordplay: the "ecstatic cling" of transference, "Jung Frankenstein", "kinder but more gentile", "DSM 3rd Reich" — half amused, half appalled, I stopped recording them early in Volume One when my list had become too long to maintain. His favourite pun, which gets rehearsed over and over again, involves substituting "not see" for "Nazi". This is not gratuitous silliness. This wordplay speaks to Rickels's larger contention that the history of forgetting and repressing "Nazi psychoanalysis" also belongs to this story. In other words, the denial of the collaboration between Nazism and psychoanalysis is part of the continuing dynamic of Nazi psychoanalysis (which, in turn, can only be understood in psychoanalytic terms). To fail to see, and hence to participate in the repression of this history, it seems, is to be implicated in the (fascistic) half truths which sustain our myth-making about our culture and its polarities.

Many readers will take great exception to Rickels's claims and methods. Historians and social scientists will, no doubt, be frustrated by the lack of documentation, by Rickels's failure to present carefully weighed evidence, and his apparent disdain for scholarly conventions and traditional categories of historical analysis. Some will want to know about institutional connections, about the activities and practices of those psychoanalysts who remained in Germany through the Third Reich, the kinds of issues Cocks addressed in his Psychotherapy in the Third Reich. That, for Rickels, is precisely the wrong place to look for Nazi psycho-analysis; his project, as he presents it, is to dig Freud-style, to follow chains of association through the cultural material, wherever they may lead. Nazi Psychoanalysis — part Freud, part Foucault — is an episteme: its relationship to the historical conditions of Nazi Germany and indeed the Nazis' countless atrocities, is beside the point. For these reasons, the results of Rickels's "thousand-page Reich" are difficult to assess. Certain claims do seem indefensible. His view that treating shell-shock in the First World War represented a victory for Freud — the subject of much of Volume One and a pillar of the entire work — strains credulity, given that the overwhelming majority of the German psychiatric profession remained firmly convinced that sexuality played no role whatsoever in the war neuroses and that the German and Austrian States, after a brief, desperate flirtation with an instrumentalized version of Freud's science, lost all interest in psychoanalysis the moment the war ended. Indeed, Rickels's depiction of psychoanalytic influence, his treatment of psychoanalysis as the meta-discourse of modernity, is so disproportionate that it would stun even Freud's most zealous disciples. Furthermore, the claim that American military psychiatry and military intelligence saw the need to go Freudian because of the successes of the psychoanalytically informed Wehrmacht also seems suspect, and ignores the massive immigration of psychoanalysts and Freudian social theorists to the United States and Britain between the wars. Rickels's assertion, in the chapter entitled "Mickey Marx", that Frankfurt School sociology, or, for that matter, any social or group application of Freudian theory, was a form of Nazi psychoanalysis is unsubstantiated and provocative.

But at other moments, Rickels can be compelling and persuasive. He brilliantly traces discourses on the relationship between pilots and their aircraft, spinning out all kinds of associations around men and machines (and fetishes and ghosts and object relations and mourning), treating psychoanalysis as a kind of privileged discourse on the "ongoing technologization of our bodies" that ran through the twentieth century. He tellingly juxtaposes the Nazis' appropriation of homoerotic bonding with their simultaneous attempts to inoculate against homosexuality and war neurosis. Equally fascinating are the discussions in Volume Three of a seemingly repressed body of mid-twentieth-century German science fiction, a literature imbued with Nazi-like visions of racial utopias, which therapeutically addresses the traumas of the lost war and the lost colonies and is (uncannily) full of the psychoanalytic themes of doubling and haunting. Nevertheless, at the risk of sounding like a middlebrow "consumer fascist type" — see the "Achtung" in lieu of a preface to Volume One — I remain unconvinced by Rickels's bold challenge to the organizing principles of our modernity. If being modern is being Freudian is being fascist; if, from the trenches of the First World War to the airfields of the Luftwaffe, to the swimming pools of contemporary California, modernity has presented us with a series of shifting Freudian spaces; if this is the case, then these concepts — modernity, psychoanalysis, Nazism — have been rendered meaningless, and one is in danger of taking a 1,000 pages to say nothing much at all.

Paul Lerner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California and is the author of Hysterical Men: War, psychiatry and the politics of trauma in Germany, 1890-1930.

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