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The image of the Nazi state as an ideological and political monolith was shattered some time ago. Postwar archival research has revealed that the political and administrative structure of Nazi Germany was riven by internal conflicts, full of competing, antagonistic, and overlapping jurisdictions. Nazi bigshots, sometimes motivated by a variety of ideological commitments, sometimes just cynically manipulating people and offices, routinely fought among themselves for place and preferment, intent on building up their personal power, establishing their own claims while thwarting the claims of rivals. The administration of Germany under the Nazis was inefficient to say the least.
Still, it seemed unalterably true that the numbing grip of the regime, regardless of its manifest administrative inefficiency, was sufficient to stifle every kind of intellectual, cultural, and scientific endeavor. As it turns out, however, this view of the matter is not entirely accurate and will have to be revised, at least to the extent of accommodating the data and thesis of Professor Cocks's book Psychotherapy in the Third Reich. Cocks argues that quite unexpectedly, anomalously, and contrary to the taken-for-granted view, the practice of psychotherapy, including psychoanalytic psychotherapy-minus, of course, its Jewish practitioners - not only survived in Nazi Germany but, relative to the current conditions, progressed and flourished in an institutional if not in a theoretical sense.
This unexpected development resulted from the confluence of a number of historical and structural conditions, beginning with but not limited to the shortcomings of Nazi governance. For example, it proved possible to bring psychoanalytic and other psychotherapeutic workers and viewpoints together in a single institute under the leadership of Matthias Goring, a highly respected cousin of Hermann Goring. The Goring name alone was sufficient to prevent various kinds of troublesome interference with the work of the p