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Karen Brecht's paper offers an important corrective to many of the myths and exaggerations which Alexander Mitscherlich encouraged and promoted concerning the history of psychoanalysis in Germany and his own role in its refounding after 1945. Her paper focuses primarily on Mitscherlich's “legend” of a persecuted profession, and to a lesser extent on his “legacy” for the re-emergence of German psychoanalysis. Mitscherlich, she argues, largely disregarded the contributions of an earlier generation of progressive analysts, obscured the continued presence of the compromised analysts of the pro-Nazi Göring Institute, and cloaked his own lack of formal psychoanalytic education and training (until relatively late) in a rather hazy autobiographical account. As a public figure, Mitscherlich's emphasis on psychoanalysis as an instrument of cultural theory and general enlightenment as opposed to clinical treatment served the corporate interests of psychoanalysis while obstructing the reception of new clinical developments. By perpetuating the “legend” of a persecuted profession, she claims, Mitscherlich endowed German psychoanalysis with the legacy of an immaculate inception. In postwar Germany “the mythical overestimation of Mitscherlich” coincided with a variety of “unconscious collective needs” on the part of both a general public and German analysts.
As far as the legend is concerned, Dr. Brecht's paper, and much of the recent research on psychoanalysis during the Third Reich, demonstrates how self-serving were many of Mitscherlich's autobiographical and public statements (Cocks 1985; Brecht, Friedrich, Hermanns, Kaminer et al. 1985). However, Dr. Brecht goes beyond a historical reconstruction—