Psychotherapy In Germany Research Articles

Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: a research note.

This study seeks to examine and illuminate some aspects of the history of psychotherapy in Germany during the twentieth century. The specific focus encompasses the profession's development between the two world wars and within that time frame centers on the National Socialist era. Psychotherapy existed for a long time on the margins of the academic medical establishment, accused by the holders of the powerful nosological tradition in German psychiatry of romantic and unscientific “dilettantism,” on the one hand, and of a materialistic “dismemberment of the soul,” on the other. The internal chaos of the Nazi state and the precedence taken by mobilization over reform allowed the growth of psychotherapy from the status of a method to that of a profession.