Working for the Company: Im Auftrag der Firma. Geschichte und Folgen einer unerwarteten Liaison zwischen Psychoanalyse und militärisch-nachrichtendienstlichen Netzwerken der USA seit 1940 [‘In the Service of the Company’: History and Consequences of an Unexpected Liaison between Psychoanalysis and US Military-Industrial Networks since 1940'], by Knuth Müller, with a foreword by Klaus-Jürgen Bruder (Gießen:  Psychosozial-Verlag, 2017,  1,  157 pp)

‘Psychoanalysis is self-evidently not political’, the psychoanalyst Felix Schottlaender wrote in 1931. ‘It is […] a natural science discipline. Starting already with its choice of research objects, it can enter into the big social issues only as a non-partisan authority that serves the truth.’1

This view was close to Sigmund Freud's, who over time increasingly wished to see the teachings he had founded treated as an objective ‘method of research, an impartial instrument’ (Freud, 1927, p. 36). Shortly before his death, he posed it as a question: ‘Psychology, too, is a natural science. What else can it be?’ (Freud, 1938, p. 282). Nevertheless, he never wanted to reduce his creation to a simple treatment technique. But that is exactly where the journey would arrive. The mainstream of analysts in our own time seem to view psychoanalysis in its essence only as a method of medical treatment, dedicated exclusively to the