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Paul Roazen's contributions to the historiography of psychoanalysis are well known, characterized as they are by meticulous documentary research and a willingness to confront where necessary the shadow side of Freud's ‘movement’. The present paper is a case in point for, the dry title notwithstanding, Roazen has here pieced together an overview of the machiavellian machinations - no milder words are appropriate - that swirled around the German psychoanalytic community at the time of the Nazi rise to power and during the immediate post-war years. Erich Fromm's post-war misadventures with the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) are thus a device for opening a window into a complex and disturbing pattern of manipulation which, beginning with Freud himself and carried on by Ernest Jones and others, used the rise of the Nazis to pursue vendettas and purges within the still largely Jewish psychoanalytic movement.
Needless to say, familiarity with the relationships established between the psychoanalytic movement and the National Socialists has important consequences for our understanding of the period generally, but also for the ways in which we think about Jung's engagement with Nazism. While the famous photograph of Jung standing beside Dr. Matthias H. Göring, who had been put in charge of German psychology by the Nazis, is often cited by Jung's critics as a touchstone of his ‘collaboration’ with the Nazi tyranny, we now have Jones writing to Anna Freud, in July of 1936, that ‘It was easy to get on excellent terms with Göring, who is a very sympathetic personality. We can easily bend him our way, but unfortunately so can other people’ (p. 19).
After the war, Jung argued that his association with the Nazis was in the interest of protecting psychology and psychoanalysis from the Nazi threat. His major claim in this regard was his introduction of a form of general membership in the International General Medical Society of Psychotherapy, which allowed Jewish therapi