In 1994 a conference entitled ″Psychoanalysis and Power″ held at the New School for Social Research brought together analysts from Germany and New York only one doorway away from what appeared, at first sight, to be the centerpiece of the meeting, the reconstruction of a 1985 exhibit documenting the German history of psychoanalysis before and after 1933. What history was already slow to show in 1985 was first assembled for the International Association′s Hamburg Congress to mark the spot everyone was in during this first return of International Psychoanalysis to postwar Germany. At the Hamburg Congress, it had to be...

In California in the 1970s, the crypt of the missing era was first opened up by Geoffrey Cocks, at the time a history grad student whose open-headedness all over the different sides of the topic′s untenable identification produced a dissertation that was unique in being able to organize the polymorphousness of the contradictory material: he produced a kind of neutrally upbeat history of psychotherapy today, whether in Germany or in California, based on the standards of professional upward mobilization, insurance coverage, and recognition by the military and the medical establishments. The dissertation went out in book form in 1985:Psychotherapy...

1985, the year Cocks′s study went out in book form, the year of the Hamburg Congress, also saw publication of the main German-language history of psychoanalysis in the Third Reich, Regine Lockot’sRemembering and Working-Through: On the History of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in National Socialism, and, same year, same language, Peter Riedesser and Axel Verderber′sMobilization of Souls: Military Psychiatry and Military Psychology in Germany and America. Lockot supplements Cocks′s documentation with greater analytic attention to the in-session dynamics that tend to be overlooked by mainstream spans of historicization. She sees a series of vacuum packings promoting therapy at large...

In the ″Personal Afterword of the Authors″ Riedesser and Verderber share with the reader their struggle for self-control over their raging selves in order to keep the commentary from running off at the mouth. In the Personals section, then, they recall how each time they took a break and returned to the project, they couldn′t help themselves: they had in the meantime ″repressed″ the open horror that the documents they excavated cynically spelled out. (It′s hard to imagine that they didn′t know that the Nazi Germans were thick as war criminals with the party′s public, published agenda.) This afterthought or...

Elisabeth Brainin and Isidor Kaminer see all postwar Germans slipping ahead of themselves at the impasse that idealization and oblivion held up in their relations with psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy. The consequences of National Socialism for the psychoanalytic movement were outright traumatic. ″The ′German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy′ was the dominant psychotherapeutic institution in Germany. Thus the Nazis were the first to permit the practice of ′psychoanalysis′ in a state institution″ (994). Brainin and Kaminer read the upsurge of interest and investment in psychoanalysis in postwar Germany (aided also by the attainment of total insurance coverage in 1967,...

Another idealization of analysis that has been caught harboring resisters begins by taking the Nazis at their word. The Nazi principle ofGleichschaltung(a neologism borrowed from engineering and signifying coordination, harmonizing, or unification with the Nazi agenda) ″required a leveling, an adaptation, to Nazi ideals. It required that every institution regardless of its specific nature follow the prescribed regulations. In the case of Freudian psychoanalysis, any abstract formation beggars the reality of how this was achieved with integrity″ (R. Spiegel et al., 486).Gleichschaltung, which applied itself to both social and lexical units or unities, claimed that different words...

Around 1931 Martin Grotjahn, at the time a young psychiatrist and son of the late Alfred Grotjahn, former dean of the medical faculty at the University of Berlin and professor of social hygiene, applied for psychoanalytic training with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. According to his father′s testimony, father knew best when he ″torpedoed″ the proposal for establishment of a Chair for Psychoanalysis under consideration by the medical faculty in 1918, allegedly on account of that unsavory bit of speculation about the homosexual subtext to early man′s control of fire, in particular of his urge to put the flame out with...

We already know going into this that Nazi research-happiness is legend. It′s Nazi Germany′s equal time share in modernism. The Nazis were engaged in the all-out pursuit of whatever research project was out there, as long as it could be billed as a war effort promotional. But this proviso represents, within any history of modernism, no exceptional or additional restraining order, if, indeed, it offers any constraint at all. Wernher von Braun, for example, is not a stray, projected, single-case overlap covering Weimar, Nazi, and U.S. aerospace projects. In other words, a circuitous, discontinuous ″Dialectic of Enlightenment″ or ″Case of...

To clear the static on the direct lines between reunification of the Germanys and the return of German nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, Werner Bohleber tries to make the Germans a ″presence of the past.″ But midway, he proposes a group-level intervention that responds to the worldwide recycling of World War II since the end of the Cold War. The outbreak of stray, projected hostilities in Germany after the fall of the wall were symptomatically in sync with the eternal rerun of total-war phantasms we watched during the Gulf War. From the German response to the opening shot of the war,...

Within media-war contexts that keep coming complete with their own pop-psychological reception of just how to relate to gadgets (namely by following, from trauma to love, the beat of identification), anti-Semitism makes ghost appearances on the season finales of ancient history by taking a spin around the metabolism of modern psychological warfare, a spin cycle with its own recent and primal history. What the U.S. experts were soon referring to, in shorthand, as ″psy war″ was the group-sized legacy of an internalization, technologization, and metabolization of trauma that first stood to analytic attention case by case during the World War...

In the newfound lab space that was World War I, analysis had seen that war trauma alone did not guarantee symptom production. The shell′s direct hit tracked down the dotted line of predisposition all the way to childhood trauma, to problems of dependency or separation anxiety. But it doesn′t really matter whether the psychoanalytic success story was based on actual cure-all. More important is that the healed war neurotic became the most potent myth underlying what I prefer to call ″greater psychoanalysis″ (and by which I mean that widest ranging of Freud′s intrapsychic model through all the departments of therapy...

In session Bohleber sees the psychohistorical continuum that belongs to the institution of greater psychoanalysis (where, like the uncanny in Freud′s wartime essay, it was to be forgotten but was in effect preserved) come out in the watch of the transference, but always at the one narcissistic remove or removal of the most immediate gap of generation. ″In a painful process of remembering, German psychoanalysts had to confess to their own involvement in the Nazi regime. The silence had to be broken, idealizations had to be taken back and the truth recognized, before we are able to deal with the...

The compromise formation that was ArbeitsgruppeAat the Berlin institute is not necessarily the place to look to observe the extent of Freud′s influence, which ranged throughout the Nazi military, psychological, and military-psychological establishments. Freud was there at the outer limits of Nazi research projects and projections, for example, in Paul Metz′s work on the intrapsychic relations between the pilot and the flying machine with which he must merge. Yes, it makes a difference if you can′t, even if it′s only in public, published contexts, use the analytic vocabulary. In his introduction to ″Gift, das du unbewußt eintrinkst...″ Bohleber...

There are continuities and contexts missing from any history of modernism that subsumes, under the category of discontinuity, all tension between its most protected or progressive sources and the aberrations on a mass scale that, via symptomatic or dialectic connection, still belong to modernism, but modernism beside itself. But there are direct hits of continuity, too. What′s missing or not seen is always the side effect of what psychoanalysis calls identification, which originates in trauma. Not to see or to ″Nazi″ is what fills in the missing-continuities-and-contexts report. The histories of these missing entries, which are ultimately always into war,...

There′s a legacy of Goethe′sFaustthat suffuses and distends through high and pop literature, aesthetics, psychology, you name it. Between two bookends of this effect, between Marx and Freud, a conveyor belting out of quotations advances the specter of a failed paternal economy that inDas Kapitalis rereleased, for example, as ″paper money ghosts″ and at the Freudian end sinks its vampiric quotation fangs into the corner of every scene of the superego′s introduction. Certainly by the time of Paul Valéry′s and Thomas Mann′s retakes of Goethe′sFaust, the delegation of direct connections between political projections and their...

The internalization of war over the theory and therapy of war neurosis was syndicated symptomatically in phantasms or projections brought to us by the occult and the technical media, phantasms that colonized or bounced back from relations of long distance that not only keep us in touch but also follow out that inner course of ego libido Freud discovered and charted inside war neurosis. The leaders of the post–World War I media sensurround of German mass culture were (forget about fiction) in fact war neurotics: not only Fritz Lang and Carl Mayer, among others, but Hitler, too. On the...

Before war investments joined his rank vampiric interests, and before their mutation intoAnts, and before they final pulled up short inside the Third Reich (in Hitler Youth shorts) forHorst Wessel, Ewers took his occult straight (with just a twist of androgyny and cross-dressing). At the end ofAlraune: The Story of a Living Creature, Ewers dates its writing 1911. Framed, like Shelley′sFrankenstein, by the correspondence from brother to sister, the central conflict or war inAlrauneis, as used to be the case quite regularly before World War I, between the sexes. Frank Braun, the leading man...

During the formulation of Freud′s second system, the number of claims made on psychoanalysis in Nietzsche′s name were, on all sides, on the rise. Will to Power and amor fati went along for the death drive while the model of the psyche was changing into id and superego inside Superman′s booth. Nietzsche′s inside view of life as self-affirming joy or as suffering that says yes scored big time inside the second system′s alternation of takes on female sexuality, group psychology, and the death and destruction drive (the sadomasochistic distribution of pleasure). Like Nietzsche, like Freud: it′s the experience of women...

Spielrein had, then, already in 1912, diagnosed Nietzsche. His lifelong solitude (especially when it came to libido) was too much for the poet: he created along the group-psychological trajectory the imaginary friend Zarathustra (with whom he identified). ″The yearning for a love object brought about that Nietzsche became in himself man and woman and both of these in the shape of Zarathustra″ (30). The celebration by Nietzsche/Zarathustra of a natural rhythm method of mergers (for example, between the sun and the sea) strikes up an internal depth inhabited ultimately by the mother: ″If the mother is his own depth, then...

If, down these pages, I collapse Nazi and Jung, then this serves as shorthand for the nit-picking and knitting together the middlebrow that indeed can complicate Jung′s case in the spirit of historical understanding. But I am preparing neither a legal brief nor a history. I speak before the court of mourning. And I am tracking Jung′s negative transference on its terms. To understand Jung is to forgive him. That′s not even therapeutic. It is certainly not analytic. We must interpret for the transference. Historical understanding, too, especially when personalized, can be just another mode of not seeing.

Jung′s skipping...

The way Jung back in 1912 suddenly turned to mythology gave Freud advance signs of their break coming soon. The distinction Freud drew up short before mythology between psychoanalytic rereading and Jung′s receptivity also goes for their different takes on psychotic delusions, the occult, technology—on all the contexts, in short, of Freud′s discovery and delegation of the unconscious. ″Consequently I hold that surface versions of myths cannot be used uncritically for comparison with our psychoanalytical findings. We must find our way back to their latent, original forms by a comparative method that eliminates the distortions they have undergone in...

In 1945 Jung′s conception of ″collective guilt″ extended the coverage he had given himself in 1933 when he tried to run down Freud on those unresolved transference tracks that happened to traverse certain externalizable or political effects (the ones Jung in 1945 still chose to disown). He extended coverage even to his fellow collaborators by sharing the blame for the special effects with everyone (else). ″They should realize that the German catastrophe was only one crisis in the general European sickness″ (″After the Catastrophe,″ 214); Germany remains, after all, ″the nerve-center of Europe″ (213). Didn′t it all already start with...

Adler had all along championed in the name of Nietzsche a holistic socialization approach against Freud′s insatiable working of sex and transference. He coupled his therapy with Marxistoid politics and was thereby able to introduce his real-time counseling into schools and other institutions of the everyday. While the Nazi socialists had to strike out against the completely external and recognizable labels of political groups that had competed with them, the assignment was considered complete with the shutdown of left-wing-sponsored programs in Vienna and Berlin. But since Adler′s conversion to Christianity did not, not for the Nazis, tame the brute issue...

In theory, insurance covers funeral arrangements; in practice its coverage extends via catastrophes and wartime mobilization. When Pascal was commissioned around 1654 to figure out the chances of a certain number recurring at roulette, he at the same time introduced the notion of calculable risk, which became the basis of modern insurance (and of the new and improved self-other bond or group psychology that insurance also applies). Thus it was gambling, the first of the modern causes or explanations of out-of-control group behavior, that promoted, in its calculation as risk, the modern mass formations of catastrophe preparedness. Wherever Freud′s second...

The divisions and doublings (and double crossings) that we have visited inside and around psychoanalysis beginning already before World War I were following the trajectories of new and improved directions, no turning back. But these trajectories also showed the way to eclecticism, which doubled them back onto psychoanalysis under the peer-pressurized command that in a Great War soldiers with incapacitating neurotic-to-psychotic symptoms get a quicker fix. As eclecticism, however, the difference between Freud and Adler, for example, became conceivable as difference within psychoanalysis, back home, home on the wider range of greater psychoanalysis. Eclecticism mixed and matched different methodologies, or...

Analytic engagement with war neurosis began, just for the public record, with the collection of essays that Freud introduced and cosigned. But even this close circle of followers working in the new war neurosis field was styling with eclecticization and improvisation. In large part this diversity began with the inclusion of Simmel, a recent convert to analysis while under pressure to treat shell shock victims. But even if Simmel seems to give analysis only short-term attention, his acceptance by the inner circle yielded PR returns down the corridors of treatment. In the sections that follow from this closed circuit of...

During the war, Ernest Jones had to practice his loyalty to Freud in relative isolation (all the analytic relatives were on the other side of the war). Jones found himself attending all sorts of eclectic contexts of psychotherapy where those interested in Freud had to gather together with Jung and Adler followers, for example. During his isolation, however, Jones found a fellow Freud supporter in W. H. R. Rivers. Rivers was a stutterer whose original condition had been treated and studied by his own father. His sisters were survivors of childhood who exhibited all the symptoms of traumatic neurosis. In...

In 1948 Robert White gives a handbook summary of the all rise of neuroses to medical attention:

Psychiatrists were schooled in the tradition of Kraepelin, trained mostly in mental hospitals, and thus knew relatively little about the neuroses and about the theories growing up around them. When the First World War broke out, the medical services of all countries were forced to recognize the widespread occurrence of neurotic breakdown under the stress of combat. Neuroses were found to be very common among military personnel. (47–48)

It was clear thatwar neuroses did not differ fundamentally from the neuroses of...

The 1921 fourth volume of the compendiumHandbook of Medical Experiences during the World War, 1914–18, which was devoted to ″Mental and Nervous Illnesses,″ documents the wartime changeover of resistance to psychoanalysis that Ferenczi and others had already noted and tagged with the indigestion charge of plagiarism or forced reading. Karl Bonhoeffer, who refers to Ferenczi′s ″self-deception″ in thinking that only the war had shown hysterical criteria to be important, since he himself, after all, had argued as much in 1911 (Handbuch, 29), opens with the surprise of his wartime: fright alone couldn′t be doing the hystericizing if the...

At one point inThe Golem, the narrator′s new cell mate is really a messenger from the outside who has staged his way into prison to hand over a letter and give ″instruction in epilepsy″:

″First you make a lot of saliva″; he blew up his cheeks and moved them back and forth, like someone who′s washing out his mouth—″Then you foam at the mouth, like this. . . . Afterwards you turn your thumbs inside your fists—After that roll out your eyes″—he crossed his eyes horribly—″and then—and this part′s a little difficult—you give...

Among official accountings of psychoanalysis meets war neurosis there′s the one kept by Kurt Eissler, whoseFreud as an Expert Witnesslooks forward and flashes back around the 1920 trial of military-psychological crimes to which Freud was summoned as authority in the treatment of male hysterics. This represented a turning point made twice over: first, against J. Wagner-Jauregg, who was under investigation for wartime malpractice, and who now gave Freud respect at this trial time in both their careers (whereas before Freud had been Wagner-Jauregg′s lowlife); and, second, against the entire neurological, psychiatric—you name it—establishment that had completely...

Down the record of the hearing, Freud can′t stop himself: he shoots his life′s load of watching his work, which was what′s new in treatment, danger-zoned out of the running. Now he can tell the true story:

This we experience over and over again. When new methods are used, the patients mistrust them and say that they are terrible. . . .

When I started my treatment, it was said that it made people crazy, that they got into all sorts of states. Colleagues took pains to spread these ideas, also only because it was something new. (66)

But then...

The analytic tradition gives Otto Fenichel credit for summarizing and synthesizing the theories of traumatic and war neurosis that followed Freud′s lead. By Fenichel′s 1945 accounting, the model for the breakdown is still machinic, but less endopsychic and more egoic:

The traumatic neuroses offer a unique opportunity to study the fact that the ego is an apparatus developed for the purpose of overcoming past traumata and for avoiding future traumata; traumatic neuroses represent an insufficiency of this basic function of the ego. (The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, 128)

In Fenichel′s account of traumatic neurosis, which puts more of an emphasis...

Projecting an East-West axis onto the automatism of change let roll in Eastern Europe, Robert M. Gates had seen the future. It was a primal that made it into the headlines: ″CIA Nominee Says Mysteries Upstage Secrets.″ Gates urged the Senate Intelligence Committee members to face two problems out there, one solvable, the other one unresolvable. But the big problem was that the number of unresolvables was growing ″geometrically″ while the number of solvables was declining at the same rapid rate. ″Secrets are things that are ultimately knowable, stealable—you can find them out, they exist, you can target them,...

The Russo-Japanese War was one of those head starts, like the U.S. Civil War and the Boer War, that physicians were given to prepare for World War I. Cases of battle stress with resulting psychiatric breakdown were diagnosed and treated in the Russian army. The attending physicians looked out for the secondary gain, the flight into illness, and what they referred to as the ″evacuation syndrome″—all of which led their treatment (you saw it first with the Russians) to cultivate relations of proximity to battle out of principle and in practice. This hands-on head start fell between the disconnections...

Invitation to and intelligence of the other are not military (or vampiric) externals and exclusives. Metapsychological fact of life in the mass lane: You only know what the other thinks you know. This twist (and warning shout) is so true of all information gathered at, and filling up to, the group-psychological or total war level. Thus the plainest text around—a true emergency shortcut—is Ladislas Farago′s 1941 Survey and BibliographyGerman Psychological Warfare, which the U.S. Committee for National Morale commissioned and issued as the manual and warning label to the second coming of world war. Without index or...

Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Nazi German enslavement and mass murder in concentration camps, had his memoirs to thank for his formulation of the ″third Viennese school of psychotherapy,″ logotherapy, which (according to the 1964 cover ofMan′s Search for Meaning) was developed during his persecution both as and in addition to ″the crystallization of his theories as a result of those hellish experiences.″Man′s Search for Meaningat the same time belongs to a Holocaust genre documenting the practice of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy among inmates in the death camps. Frankl: ″The tender beginnings of a psychotherapy or psychohygiene...

The Nazis were paranoids: real good at interrogating the other′s unconscious but at the same time totally unable to get into their own from both sides now. The not-seeing that is Nazism could not admit the seeing-through, the seeing through to the end in sight: that is, the resolution of the transference. That′s why the Nazis could never completely exclude Freud′s science, but in no time insisted that the first or training therapy could not be with a psychoanalyst. During the war, son of Göring (the son, that is, of the politician′s cousin, the Adlerian in charge, right down to...

Poppelreuter was ready with his treatiseHitler, the Political Psychologistright in time for 1933: a first version, a series of lectures prepared in 1932 already, had been prohibited by the administration because it was felt their delivery would invite all kinds of volatility in from the streets into the corridors of the university. Now Poppelreuter is free to point out that Hitler′s political psychology, which comes complete with the course manualMein Kampf, has the proof to show of a successful ″scientific experiment″ (6). The only precedents to be found forMein Kampf: Le Bon′s crowd psychology and more...

George Hartmann looks forward ″Toward a Reasonable Peace,″ which requires of psychologists, however, that they leave the war setting and conditioning behind them. But Hartmann knows they will need their backs covered:

We thus behold the sorry spectacle of Anglo-American and Russian psychologists, on one side, and German and Japanese practitioners, on the other, mutually canceling each others′ energies as technologists. (200)

But as soon as he begins to dabble in affairs of state (as moralebuilder, propaganda analyst, psychological warfarer, and other evolving functions) there is a real danger that he will succumb tomassthinking, in both senses of...

The essay everyone forgot to reread in plenty of time for World War II, all Anglo-Americans agree, is Thomas Salmon′s 1917 ″Recommendations for the Treatment of Mental and Nervous Diseases in the United States Army,″ which was based on the experiences of the British army. The essay is plumbed or full with stray references to submarine attacks that represented for those disabled to return home by sea the return of the war front. Submarine pressure thus brought treatment even of the chronic and nonrecoverable cases closer to the front. In England the outpatient population of shell-shocked soldiers created a new...

In his 1916 monographPsychological Aspects of War, Magnus Hirschfeld shows Germany′s empty hand, especially if we redeal the names in the title as ″psychological warfare.″ His concluding hope is that the war of the present will make the war of the future impossible. And he cites Romain Rolland (and thus already shows he has the spirit), who could see the European community coming together soon out of this blood baptism (31–32). The world war is the downside of all the other ″world″ events and combos the age has been producing on fast forward: world congresses, world trade, world...

The 31 December 1995 issue of theNew York Times Magazinerang out the old with a news story entitled ″Edward L. Bernays and Henry C. Rodgers: The Fathers of P.R.″ There′s really only one paternal lineage here: it was at a later date that Rodgers applied PR as a local aesthetic in Hollywood. By feeding the gossip columnists with choice releases about his clients, the columns had no choice but to close ranks and feed the info back through and to the mass-media public as the latest news about the stars that were thus born. Bernays, however, was “the...

For the first preface toThe Group Mindin 1920, William McDougall organizes a protest that his work was projected and in preparation for fifteen years now. But first he had to publishIntroduction to Social Psychology(1908) to provide the necessary foundation, an acceptable account of the constitution of human nature:

But group psychology is itself one of the fields in which such testing and verification must be sought. And I have decided to delay no longer in attempting to bring my scheme to this test. I am also impelled to venture on what may appear to be premature...

The testament of the French response to World War I neuroses,The Psychoneuroses of War, by G. Roussy and J. Lhermitte, advocates turn-on of electric current to get to the breakthrough of mastery. It fulfills the wartime requirement of speed:

It really depends on producing a kind of ″crisis,″ . . . until the patient is finally ″mastered.″ . . . The cure of a psycho-neuropath really consists of a mental contest, resulting in the victory of the physician. This, in conclusion, is the secret of psychotherapy. (168, 171)

The French couple manipulates the crisis of the epidemic because they...

Arthur Conan Doyle, both author of the Sherlock Holmes detection stories and the leading expert in the field of Spiritualism, was strung high and fine-tuned on top of cases of melancholia. Thus he maintained a splitting economy between secrets and mystery. His artist father already composed one self-portrait with hemlock; even in the Holmes, then, there was, mysteriously, surely a hemlock of suicidal impulsivity. His greatest publicity came his way when he defended mediums who were being investigatively reported as frauds. In 1923,The Case for Spirit Photography, Doyle comes to the defense of individuals but also, in the first...

Trotter tries to conclude—all the while at the same time updating—his study of mass psychology in time for World War I. Because he had already sketched out much of the outline prewar, when the herd instinct and the types of gregariousness available to the psychological or sociological study of the bios entered the test lab of world war, Trotter was there, measuring his results and forecasting returns. That was in 1915. The 1919 edition, then, supplies a final series of follow-up reservations and confirmations.

The general purpose of this book is to suggest that, especially when studied in...

In 1925, along the sidelines of his at once occultist and psy-war series of novels, Ewers recorded his lifelong obsessional study of ants and then in 1943 reissued it, really paying for his authorship of books likeVampirwhen he recants in the new edition′s preface the ″shading and glitter of that period of decadence,″ which he couldn′t separate from the book as it stands (to our suddenly increased span of attention), short, of course, of writing a completely new one. It′s the short stop of denial that gets his study of ants, which virtually newsreels with Nazi compatibilities and...

Only since 1932 has the completeGerman Ideologybeen available near you, everywhere, and now. With the release, ″the gnawing criticism of the mice″ (Pascal, xv) that Marx had detected scurrying through his underworld tract could at last be admitted—into the Marxian system. They sayThe German Ideologyis ″the first full statement of Marxism″ (Pascal, ix). But it promotes itself as another ″how to″ book on ghost busting.

The phantoms of their brains have gained the mastery over them. (Marx and Engels, 1)

The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process,...