The struggle for a psychoanalytic research institute: The evolution of Frankfurt’s Sigmund Freud Institute

Abstract

ABSTRACTAfter the foundation of psychoanalytic institutes in Berlin (1920), Vienna (1922), and London (1925), the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (1929–1933) was among the first European institutes. Its closure in 1933 at the hands of the National Socialists, along with the transformation of the Berlin Institute into a state-governed psychotherapeutic institute, obliterated for a long time all memory of psychoanalysis in Germany. In West Germany, Alexander Mitscherlich was able to found a new “Institute and Training Centre for Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatic Medicine” in Frankfurt in 1960, which was renamed the “Sigmund-Freud-Institute” (SFI) in 1964. The German Federal State of Hessen financed this foundation as an act of reparation for psychoanalysis. From 1995 onwards, the institute mainly focused on research and the training branch was given to the newly founded Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (FPI). The SFI was now defined as a purely psychoanalytic research institute and remains the only state-supported institute devoted solely to psychoanalytic research up to the present. Due to the changes in the scientific world, it had to be structured in new ways over the last 15 years. The SFI is now an internationally and interdisciplinary well-known and productive psychoanalytic research institute.