Psychoanalysis During National Socialism; Present-Day Consequences of a Historical Controversy in the “Case” of Wilhelm Reich: Bernd Nitzschke (translated by Zvi Lothane)

On May 10, 1933, professors and students in German university towns joined hands to make bonfires of books of “un-German character” while intoning “Down with the soul-destroying overvaluation of instinctual life! Long live the nobility of the human soul!” The pyreside speeches were also addressed to the founder of the psychoanalysis, who was the among the authors that were symbolically burned at that time: “I consign to the flames the works of Sigmund Freud” (Neuköllner Tageblatt, May 12, 1933, cited in Wulf, 1989, p. 49). These burnings notwithstanding, no “long years of prohibition” against psychoanalysis in the Nazi state followed, contrary to the assertion of Carl Müller-Braunschweig at the end of the war (1948, p. 7). There never was a “prohibition of psychoanalysis in Germany during the Nazi period,” as maintained by Lockot (1994, p. 119). This had already been demonstrated in 1985, during the 34th International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Hamburg, by the organizers of the exhibit “On the History of Psychoanalysts in Germany”: “No legal steps were taken directly against psychoanalysis nor was there any prohibition of teaching and training in psychoanalysis” (Brecht et al., 1985, p. 88-90). How, then, can one explain this contradiction: On the one hand, the burning of Freud's works, on the other hand, the toleration of psychoanalysis in the Nazi state?