Resistance in Therapy and War: Psychoanalysis before and during the Nazi Occupation of Norway 1933-45

On 28 March 1941, a year after the occupation of Norway, Vidkun Quisling of the Norwegian National Socialist Party (NS) gave a speech in Frankfurt on the alleged moral and scientific decay that had prevailed in Norway before the German occupation: “Psychoanalysis, invented by Freud, the Jew, had a great and harmful influence”, the newly installed ‘Minister President’ noted (Quisling, 1943, p. 8). According to Quisling, the country had been “enmeshed in the Jewish spirit”, through German emigre Marxists, British-American liberalists with anti-German sentiments as well as “sexual-pornograhic psychoanalysis”, imported through Wilhelm Reich. Reich, “a Jewish pornographer and quasi-scientist”, in Quisling's words, had “everywhere been greeted as a man with new and fruitful ideas.” He had “ruled” at the University, and his “destructive business among working class youth” had been hailed by “the ‘liberated’ decadent ‘intellectuals’ and protected by the Government Party (Labour)”, in Quisling's words (Quisling, 1943).

This speech shows the use of psychoanalysis as a symbol in Norwegian Nazi rhetoric, both before and during the occupation, indicating the strong currency of psychoanalysis as intellectual capital in Norwegian intellectual discourse, as well as a political point of controversy, epitomized by the presence of Wilhelm Reich during the years 1934-39. Because psychoanalysis was championed by Professor Harald Schjelderup at the University of Oslo, Norway was perhaps the one country where psychoanalysis truly gained academic acceptance at an early stage and was largely regarded as a proper science; yet the debate surrounding it was highly politicized, more so than in many other countries.

Psychoanalysis in Norway before the Nazi occupation was partly a branch of academic psychology, partly a much-debated intellectual and political discourse. Harald Schjelderup had two professional aims related to