You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Fritz Fraenckel was a German socialist psychiatrist who lived through some of the most turbulent years of the 20th century. He was closely involved with the revolutionary Spartacists in the years after the First World War, he took part in the Spanish Civil War and he died in exile in Mexico in 1943.
We publish this short feature as a tribute to a man who should be rescued from obscurity and who ought to take his place alongside better-known figures in the history of socially committed psychology.
Although his friend, the revolutionary activist and writer, Victor Serge, refers to him as a psychoanalyst — as does Bill Marshall in his fine book Victor Serge. The Uses of Dissent (, 1992) — Fraenckel was not formally a psychoanalyst. He had no formal psychoanalytic training and was not a member of the German psychoanalytic organization. He was nevertheless clearly influenced by psychoanalysis, as the tributes published here show, while his paper on the psychology of National Socialism, written with Herbert Lennhoff and published here for the first time in English, is clear evidence of an attempt to understand Nazism from a perspective informed by psychoanalysis. (While perhaps lacking theoretical sophistication from the standpoint of nearly 60 years later, this paper nevertheless seeks to cast light on what was at the time a relatively neglected aspect of this destructive phenomenon.)
I am particularly grateful to John Manson for his inspiration and for his considerable help in putting together this feature and to Eileen Holly and Ursula Ott for their translation of the article by Fraenckel and Lennhoff. I should be interested to hear from any readers with more information about this remarkable man.