Introduction: Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychoanalysis in The Third Reich

In this special issue we present a rainbow of reflections on riveting histories in our time: psychoanalysis and psychiatry, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. This linkage was forged before, during, and after World War II, or up to and after the event that dramatically changed world history: Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. Before I introduce the contributions, let me tell how the issue came about. I lived my childhood during those times, as a refugee from Hitler in Russia, and later as psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the United States. After surviving the war I emigrated to Israel where, in my medical school days, I was getting my first exposure to psychoanalysis and Freud by avidly reading Wilhelm Reich's books, The Function of the Orgasm (, 1942) and Character Analysis (1949).

During the 1996 meeting of the International Association of the History of Psychoanalysis in Paris, in which I participated with a presentation on Sabina Spielrein, I met Drs. Eileen and James Goggin, who told me about their work and later sent me a thick manuscript: “From the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute to the Göring Institute: The Metamorphosis of Psychoanalysis During the Third Reich and Beyond.” Their book has recently been published as Death of Jewish Science: Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich (2001). My involvement with the subject simmered on the back burner for a while. It began to bubble in 1997, when Bernd Nitzschke, a German psychoanalyst from Düsseldorf and a fellow researcher of Schreber and Spielrein, sent me the just-published book he coedited with the Austrian psychoanalyst and historian Karl Fallend, Der “Fall” [case] Wilhelm Reich, with the subtitle “Contributions to the Relation Between Psychoanalysis