‘Where They Desire They Cannot Love’: Recovering Radical Freudianism in West German Sexology (1960s-1980s)

The development of sexology - both sex research and sex therapy - in 1960s-80s West Germany was fraught with complexity. The conflicts of that era and location, and specifically the efforts to change West German sexual culture in a more liberal direction, were saturated with unusually vehement moral passion. This was anything but an ideologically anodyne context and, moreover, most certainly more than ‘just’ the sexual revolution was at stake. Sexual politics in the West Germany of the 1960s-80s were shot through with a multidimensional intensity that had, above all, much to do with the confusing and contradictory legacies of various national pasts. Among these were the Nazi past of the 1930s-40s, with its peculiar combination of brutal repression and salacious incitements, but also the Third Reich's ambiguous aftermath in the later 1940s and 1950s, which saw both a conservative ‘family values’ backlash against Nazi libertinage and a repressive continuity with other dimensions of Nazi sexual politics - including particularly vicious homophobia and contempt for the disabled. But it also had to do with the misunderstandings about those pasts rampant in the 1960s-70s in particular, as an astonishing number of members of the New Left and the counterculture as well as their supporters in the wider public believed earnestly and ardently that the Third Reich had been in general sexually repressive (rather than grotesquely brutal and sexually inciting by turns) and thus believed that sexual liberation was the best way to prevent another Auschwitz (Herzog, 2005). And to add the complicating layer of yet another, even earlier, past