Editorial: Psychoanalysis in Germany

Psychoanalysis in Germany has a long tradition, but is fraught with conflict. Germany is one of the countries of origin of psychoanalytic thinking. German was the language of Freud and the early psychoanalytic world and science. The International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in Nuremberg in 1910. Besides Vienna, Berlin became, in the twenties, the centre of the psychoanalytic community. The Psychoanalytic Institute of Berlin introduced the traditional training system consisting of personal analysis, theory and supervision. The first psychoanalytic clinic was founded in Berlin, and the first psychoanalytic hospitals were started in Baden-Baden (Georg Groddek) and Heidelberg (Frieda Fromm-Reichmann). Nuremberg, Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden hosted important psychoanalytic congresses. Germans also contributed substantially to psychoanalytic theory and concepts.

More than in other countries, however, psychoanalysis in Germany was involved in the political and social European history, which culminated in the catastrophe of the Nazi terror in World War II. The German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG), founded by Karl Abraham in 1908 and a branch of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), proceeded into a position of conformity and informal co-operation with the Nazi racial politics, while trying to hold on to psychoanalytic loyalties, standards and thinking. Eitingon, Jewish chairman of the society, was persuaded to resign as the President, and Jewish members of the DPG, more than half of the members, left Germany. The remaining Jews were forbidden by law to practice psychoanalysis and were forced to resign from the society (see above).

The non-Jewish psychoanalysts were forced into line in the “Reichsinstitut”, which was a Nazi foundation for “deutsche” psychotherapy. It consisted of different groups of psychotherapists, the analysts forming one of them. In 1936, the DPG was forced to resign from the IPA, that date marking the de facto ending of psychoanalysis