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According to American psychologists James and Eileen Goggin, Death of a ‘Jewish Science’: Psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany, Hitler's Third Reich destroyed the psychoanalytic movement begun by Freud and which had by 1933 developed into a prominent and effective institutional presence in Berlin and Vienna and, indeed, across Europe. This was certainly the case in the terms in which the Goggins put it, but their analysis is limited by its very focus on the ideas and ideals themselves of the psychoanalytic movement. By 1933 psychoanalysis was more—or less—than just a set of ideals held and practised by predominantly Jewish practitioners. The history of psychoanalysis was not seen this way, however, until the early 1970s. Psychoanalysts themselves were busy with building their science, particularly in the heady period of post-war growth due in large measure to nations’ mobilization of psychiatric services during the Second World War. What history psychoanalysts wrote was largely of the Whiggish variety, chronicling the progress of theory and practice in their field. Disputes over theory and practice took up much of the rest of the synthetic accounts of the discipline as a whole during the post-war era. Professional historians did no better, since it was only in the early 1970s as well that the traditional emphasis upon political, military and diplomatic history was significantly challenged. Moreover, psychoanalysis was largely ignored by historians, save for those few who embraced its method as a mean of ‘psychohistorical’ inquiry and some historians in the specialized domain of the history of ideas. Greater interest in the history of society and culture and growing application of various methods of the social sciences to history, however, brought the fields of medicine and psychiatry to the attention of historians under such rubrics as the social history of medicine and the sociology of knowledge.
At around the same time, the first accounts of the practice of psychoanalysi