The devil and the details: psychoanalysis in the Third Reich.

Abstract

Freud once observed that there was no such thing as an accident, and on many other occasions he pointed out that human motives and actions were “overdetermined.” In this he was surely right, for history—the story of human lives writ large and small—is the constant convergence of conditions known and unknown, acted upon and not acted upon. Even the contingent— the “accidental”—in history has its specific reasons for being, even if its appearance at a specific time and place is not foreseeable. Structural, institutional, and ideological forces and constraints combine with events and human agency to produce history (Marwick, 1998). The similarities between psychoanalysis and history are themselves not accidental, for Freud’s discovery qua invention was and is the most—or perhaps the only—historical discipline of the sciences of the mind. It is no surprise, therefore, that historians were among the first to apply psychoanalytic theory to their discipline. Psychoanalysis has likewise long been the subject of historical investigation, beginning with the accounts by its defenders and its critics and then, by the end of the Second World War and beyond, by historians, who have attempted to place it in its various contexts of time and place. No other era in the history of psychoanalysis has been more—subsequently or alternately—repressed, investigated, and debated than the history of psychoanalysis in Germany under Hitler. The subject itself once seemed to be an impossible one. Of course there was no psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany. Everybody knew this. The Nazis banned psychoanalysis as another “Jewish science.” Freud’s books were burned by brownshirts in the quadrangles of German universities. Psychoanalysts were