Treating Mind and Body: Essays in the History of Science, Professions and Society Under Extreme Conditions

238 Pages·1998·24.72 MB·English

by  Geoffrey Cocks

TREATING
MIND & BODY

TREATING
MIND & BODY
Essays in the
History of Science,
Professions, and
Society Under
Extreme Conditions
G EO FFR EY COCKS
with a foreword by
Peter J. Loewenberg
First published 1998 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 97-20184
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cocks, Geoffrey, 1948-
Treating mind and body : essays in the history of science, professions,
and society under extreme conditions / Geoffrey Cocks ; with a foreword
by Peter J. Loewenberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56000-310-3 (alk. paper)
1. Psychotherapy-Political aspec~ermany. 2. Psychoanalysis-
Political aspects-Germany. 3. National socialism and medicine-Germany.
4. Social medicine-Germany-History-20th century. 5. Germany-His-
tory-1933-1945. I. Title.
RC450.G3C64 1997
616.89'00943'09043--dc21 97-20184
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-310-6 (hbk)
Contents
Foreword
Peter J. Loewenberg vii
Introduction 1
Part I: Psychotherapy
1. The Professionalization of Psychotherapy in Germany,
1928-1949 31
2. The Nazis and C. G. Jung 57
3. Repressing, Remembering, Working Through:
The Science and History of Memory in
Postwar Germany 65
Part II: Psychoanalysis
4. On Throwing Dishes from a Window in a Dream:
Psychoanalysis in European Society and Politics,
1900-1939 87
5. Developmental Continuities in German Psychoanalysis
and Psychotherapy since 1939 105
6. The Curve of Heinz Kohut’s Life 123
Part III: Medicine
7. Health, Medicine, and Illness in Modem Germany 155
8. Partners and Pariahs: Jews and Medicine in
Modem German Society 173
9. The Old as New: The Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial
and Medicine in Modem Germany 193
Index 215

Foreword
Peter J. Loewenberg
I well remember the Hamburg 34th Congress of the International
Psychoanalytic Association in late July 1985, the first meeting of in­
ternational psychoanalysis in Germany since 1932. Geoffrey Cocks
had just that spring published Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, his
groundbreaking book on the adaptations and compromises of German
psychoanalysts with Nazism.1 Cocks was present in Hamburg and ac­
tive in the formal and informal discussions. A Congress exhibit for the
first time explored the opportunism, complicity, and betrayals of in­
tegrity of “Aryan” psychoanalysts who remained in Germany.2 Klaus
von Dohnanyi, Hamburg’s lord-mayor, addressed the Congress describ­
ing the psychoanalysts’ slippery slope of expedient loss of principle to
a totalitarian regime: “Every step rational and yet in a false direction.
Here a compromise with individuals, there with substance: always in
the vain hope of preserving the whole—which had ceased to exist....
In most cases freedom is lost in tiny steps.”3
Cocks is an American whose specialties are the history of Germany
and Austria, psychohistory, the history of science and of the pro­
fessionalization of medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. His work
has attained multiple translations and wide resonance in Europe. While
researching his dissertation Cocks made a major historical discovery—
that psychotherapeutic clinicians in the Third Reich adapted psychody­
namic theory, clinical technique, and nomenclature to the demands of
Nazism under the aegis of a German Institute for Psychological Research
and Psychotherapy (die Goring Institute) founded in 1936 by Dr. Matthias
Heinrich Goring, a neuropathologist and psychotherapist, and a cousin
of Reich Marshal Hermann Göring. Psychotherapy was termed
Seelenheilkunde and attributed to Völkisch Germanic sources. Cocks’
book was a pathbreaking work of scholarship which won wide acclaim
both in Germany and in the U.S. for its bold re-delineation of the story of
vii
viii Treating Mind and Body
psychotherapy in Nazi Germany. His research also opened an acrimoni­
ous intergenerational discussion about various heritages of compromise
with Nazism among German physicians and psychoanalysts.4
Following Hitler’s seizure of power the major issue in German psy­
choanalysis was whether to close up shop or to try to insure its institu­
tional survival by coercing the Jewish members of the German
Psychoanalytic Society (Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft,
DPG) and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI), in the 1920s and
1930s the world’s premier psychoanalytic training institute, to “volun­
tarily’ resign. The “Aryanization” proceeded in three steps: first, the
exclusion of Jews from the DPG Executive in the fall of 1933; second,
the exclusion of all Jews from membership in the DPG in 1935; third,
the amalgamation of the DPG and the BPI as a division of the Goring
Institute in 1936.
The Jewish members had been the founders, and were a large ma­
jority of the membership of both organizations. In the early 1930s lead­
ing figures in international psychoanalysis, including Franz Alexander,
Therese Benedek, Siegfried Bemfeld, Helene Deutsch, Max Eitingon,
Otto Fenichel, Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Karen Homey,
Edith Jacobson, Sandor Lorand, Sandor Rado, Wilhem Reich, Theodor
Reik, Hanns Sachs, Ernst Simmel, René Spitz, and Edith Weigert were
distinguished graduates of, or teachers of, psychoanalysis in Germany.
By August 1934, twenty-four of the thirty-six full members had al­
ready emigrated from Germany. The teaching staff was reduced from
twelve to two. Attendance at lectures fell from 164 in 1932 to thirty-
four in 1934. A total of seventy-four psychoanalysts fled Germany.5
In May 1933 Oskar Pfister wrote Freud: “Last week I was briefly in
Germany and was so nauseated that it will be a long time until I re­
cover. ... Cowardly towards the outside world, it turns its infantile rage
on defenseless Jews and even plunders the libraries. Good luck to him,
who still has the strength to be a healer of souls, in the face of such
dishonorable idiocy.”6 Freud responded with: “There is little reason to
alter my judgment of human nature, especially the Christian-Aryan
variety.”7
Freud’s position was to maintain the existence of the institutions of
psychoanalysis in the Third Reich, even under its racial laws exclud­
ing Jews. He wrote to Max Eitingon in March 1933:
Let us assume nothing happens to the Institute, but you, as a foreigner, etc. [as a
Russian-born Jew of Polish nationality] are removed from the directorship.... In
this case, I think you cannot close the Institute. True, you founded it and stayed in
Foreword ix
charge the longest, but then you handed it over to the Berlin group to whom it now
belongs. You cannot close it legally, but it is also in the general interest [of psy­
choanalysis] that it remains open, so that it may survive these unfavorable times.
In the interval [until the end of Nazism], someone who is indifferent, such as
Boehm, can lead it.'
Boehm visited Freud in Vienna on April 17, 1933 and reported:
Freud presented his position to me that changing our board would not prevent the
government from banning psychoanalysis in Germany, “they will ban it in any
case.” But if not altering our Board could serve as a handle for the government to
proceed against psychoanalysis in Germany, then we should avoid giving the gov­
ernment this handle, i.e., then we should change the Board in the sense of the
current government [im Sinne der jetzigen Regierung].9
In January 1937 Boehm came to Vienna and described the situation of
psychoanalysis in Germany to the Freud group at great length. Ac­
cording to Jones:
Boehm talked for three hours until Freud’s patience gave out. He broke into the
exposition with the words: “Quite enough! The Jews have suffered for their
convictions for centuries. Now the time has come for our Christian colleagues to
suffer in their turn for theirs. I attach no importance to my name being men­
tioned in Germany so long as my work is presented correctly there.” So saying
he left the room.10
Freud was clearly more interested in preserving the organization and
presence of psychoanalysis in the Third Reich than he was in the dig­
nity and self-esteem of his Jewish colleagues or in the conditions that
are necessary for psychoanalysis to function as a clinical therapy.
The initial response of German psychoanalysts was to refuse to sub­
mit to National Socialist racial legislation. An Extraordinary General
Meeting of the DPG membership on May 6,1933 rejected the propos­
als of Felix Boehm and Carl Miiller-Braunschweig to “Aryanize” the
Board.11 Ernest Jones, then president of the International Psychoana­
lytical Association (IPA), showed a callous insensitivity to the feel­
ings and situation of Jewish colleagues whom he had advised to resign
from the German group. In anticipation of the forthcoming 13th Inter­
national Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne, he wrote to Felix Boehm
in Berlin:
You are not likely to know the strength of the storm of indignation and opposi­
tion which is at present agitating certain circles, especially among the exiles
from Germany. This may easily take the form of a personal vote of censure against
yourself or even a resolution to exclude the German Society from the Interna­
tional Association.