This book, the account by a historian of what happened to German psychotherapy under the Nazi regime with the collaboration of German psychoanalysts, is not easy for the psychoanalyst to do justice to. This is not only because the analyst is used to other forms of reconstructing the past and is thus not familiar with the rules and difficulties of collecting this kind of data, but also because the history retraced here belongs to him in a very different way and concerns him intimately. For the German psychoanalyst the added complication is that he or she is personally involved and all too aware that the past deeply informs the present.

I have read this book with admiration and also with a strong urge