Jung and the Nazis: Some Implications for Psychoanalysis1

The history of psychoanalysis in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s has been relatively well documented in the past 20 years, particularly following the exhibition on the subject put together for the 1985 International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Hamburg (Brecht et al. 1985; Cocks 1997 has provided an extensive account of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis during the Nazi period). This work has shown clearly that, under the leadership of Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig but with the support of Ernest Jones (then President of the International Psychoanalytic Association) and to some extent Sigmund and Anna Freud, the attitude of the German psychoanalysts was to try to preserve the psychoanalytic movement there even if it meant compromising with the Nazis. The ‘appeasement’ policy involved the forced resignation of Jewish analysts from the German Psychoanalytic Society, the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG), in 1935; it also involved an intellectual effort to distance psychoanalytic theory from the Freudian focus on sexuality and the opposition between the unconscious and the social order, replacing it with the project of releasing the potential of the German unconscious in the service of the state. In 1936, the psychoanalysts joined with other psychotherapists under the leadership of Matthias Heinrich Göring to form the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy - known, colloquially and lastingly, as the Göring Institute. By 1938, the DPG had been dissolved, but its members continued as ‘Work Group A' within the Göring Institute, and some of them - including Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig - retained senior positions. Through their involvement with the Göring Institute, which had