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The Crisis of the Psyche and the Future of Germany: The Encounter with Freud in the Weimar Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2013

Anthony D. Kauders
Anthony D. Kauders*
Affiliation:
Keele University/University of Munich
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Extract

Some two decades ago, Peter Fritzsche wrote the first of two influential essays that questioned the then common conviction that Weimar Germany was all about doom and gloom. “What is distinctive about twentieth-century German culture,” he argued, “is not simply ‘crisis’—economic, political, cultural—but the widespread consciousness of crisis and the allied conviction that these emergency conditions could be managed to Germany's advantage.” Recently, Fritzsche's view has been taken up and expanded by a younger generation of German scholars, who have detailed how “crisis” meant different things to different people, often denoting the possibility of favorable change. This insistence on “crisis” as the beginning of something (positively) new is in many ways the most far-reaching application of the anti-teleological turn in Weimar historiography.

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Central European History , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 325 - 345
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Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2013 

Some two decades ago, Peter Fritzsche wrote the first of two influential essays that questioned the then common conviction that Weimar Germany was all about doom and gloom. “What is distinctive about twentieth-century German culture,” he argued, “is not simply ‘crisis’—economic, political, cultural—but the widespread consciousness of crisis and the allied conviction that these emergency conditions could be managed to Germany's advantage.”Footnote 1 Recently, Fritzsche's view has been taken up and expanded by a younger generation of German scholars, who have detailed how “crisis” meant different things to different people, often denoting the possibility of favorable change.Footnote 2 This insistence on “crisis” as the beginning of something (positively) new is in many ways the most far-reaching application of the anti-teleological turn in Weimar historiography.

Three aspects in particular make this approach attractive: first, it allows us to appreciate the hopes, fears, and visions of contemporaries, for whom “crisis” did not necessarily signify the prelude to decline, not least because they had no way of knowing the outcome of the crisis in question. Second, it informs us of the norms and ideals that gave rise to the idea of crisis in the first place. And third, in treating “crisis” as a human construction, it enables us to trace the strategies by which specific constellations were turned into identifiable crises.Footnote 3 As Rüdiger Graf has demonstrated in much detail, the “crises” of the Weimar Republic gave rise to manifold visions of a better future, ranging from the more modest liberal hope for gradual political stability to the radical antirepublican hope for a total spiritual transformation.Footnote 4 These conceptions of the future, Graf also shows, can be examined along ideological, intellectual, and political lines, as well as using structural criteria, such as pessimism/optimism, continuity/discontinuity, and action/inaction.Footnote 5

They can inform wider areas as well, including the emotional history of Weimar Germany. This is especially the case when considering the language involved in many of these debates. Crisis talk may have anticipated positive change, but its discourse often betrayed an existential urgency that demanded dramatic, wholsale change. And if what distinguishes fear from hope is not so much the identity of an object (such as the constitution, the army, or the country as a whole) but the way in which the object is seen, then the fears and the hopes expressed during this time disclosed very strong beliefs about many different objects.Footnote 6 One such object was the psyche.

Prominent psychologists in the Weimar Republic imagined their field to be in a state of crisis. With the publication of Karl Bühler's Die Krise der Psychologie in 1927, this feeling came to a head, manifesting two seemingly distinct but actually related concerns.Footnote 7 On the one hand, many psychologists contended that experimental psychology had reached a dead end, failing to grasp the complexity of human existence. This critique owed much to the growing reception of Wilhelm Dilthey's “Ideen über eine beschreibende und eine zergliedernde Psychologie,” according to which a psychology based on the natural sciences could not grasp the psyche as a holistic phenomenon. On the other hand, the notion of a crisis of psychology went hand in hand with the demand that a “psychology with soul” (Psychologie mit Seele) replace the “psychology without soul” (Psychologie ohne Seele).Footnote 8 The debate, in other words, not only revolved around issues of methodology, but also displayed a normative element that underlay numerous critiques of the time: human beings, many feared, were being threatened by a diminution of the soul, whose creative and unfathomable character needed to be recognized and protected.

The following essay seeks to trace these perceptions of psychology and the psyche using the German reception of psychoanalysis as a case in point. This approach is premised on the observation that reactions to this relatively new school of thought can serve as a helpful projection surface to examine different cultural values associated with the psyche. The encounter with Freud in these years differed fundamentally from earlier responses to his teachings. In the late Wilhelmine period, Germans often rejected psychoanalysis because of its “dubious” methodology and “fixation” with sexuality. A short time later, these emphases on sexuality and methodology were superseded by altogether new concerns, including rationality and the unconscious. Many commentators now believed that the earlier preoccupation with the natural sciences could only be rectified if the quest for quantification was replaced with a turn to subjectivity. These commentators welcomed psychoanalysis at first, in spite of its “shortcomings”: Freud's “discovery” of early childhood sexuality was helpful, his concern for the individual case exemplary, and the movement's emphasis on the unconscious was of fundamental importance. But eventually the same writers argued that psychoanalysis was insufficient to solve the emergency situation, and even stood in the way of doing so. Only briefly at the forefront of ways to overcome this perceived crisis, psychoanalysis soon saw itself being attacked for its antiquated ways. The reception of psychoanalysis between 1918 and 1933, from intial skepticism to qualified endorsement to widespread repudiation, allows us to understand better how a growing number of Germans identified both psychology and the psyche as objects of crisis that required urgent, even revolutionary change. As such, it allows us to observe the creation of an emotional community for whom speaking about the psyche entailed more than just contemplating the merits of competing psychological models.Footnote 9

Of Apes and Men

In 1920 the famous German sociologist and economist Johann Plenge, author of the “Ideas of 1914,” published a short tract against Hans Blüher, the equally famous Wandervogel activist and popularizer of psychoanalysis in the prewar period. Blüher's Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen had caused a stir in 1912–13, not least because of its defense of homoeroticism within the youth movement. At the time, Blüher maintained that homoerotic fellowship, especially in the context of youth activism, only rarely involved sexual acts. Instead, the Wandervogel was driven by the sublimation of sexuality, a term he borrowed from psychoanalysis. Whereas heterosexual sexuality culminated in orgasm, homosexuality usually remained within the realm of “contrectation,” in which feelings of tenderness commensurate with sociability took up the space of physical sexuality.Footnote 10 For Blüher this tendency meant that homosexuals could benefit society to a much greater extent than heterosexuals, who were usually lost to the community the moment they founded families.Footnote 11 Several years later, Plenge could still not accept these arguments. The “ape-like” emphasis on sexuality, even in the shape of sublimated sexuality, continued to remind him of Oscar Wilde's “filthy” products.Footnote 12 Blüher simply ignored the fact that humans were more than sexual beings; Plenge noted that they were spiritual as well, and that heterosexual marriage happened to be spirituality in its highest, ethical form.Footnote 13 Plenge also censured Freud. In his “sexual” one-sidedness, the founder of psychoanalysis had not understood that human reason could transform carnal drives into idealistic sentiments. Eros supplanted sexuality, according to this reading, and Geist prevailed over the drives.Footnote 14

At the time he wrote that, Plenge's position was already on the wane.Footnote 15 In fact, the standoff between Plenge and Blüher contained many of the elements characteristic of the early reception of Freud in Germany. Before the war, psychologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists had dismissed the psychoanalytic stress on early childhood sexuality; the “strange” methodology that pretended to be science but looked much more like hermeneutics; and the many “unproven” claims, ranging from the Oedipus complex to the overwhelming significance of repression.

In one of the first reviews of Die Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams), for example, Germany's leading child psychologist William Stern argued that the book's content could not be accepted, as the author had supported his theory merely through interpretations of his own dreams and those of his patients. While the reader initially responded with some interest, Stern maintained, his curiosity was quickly replaced with pangs of doubt and, finally, wholesale rejection. Freud's assertions were assertions only, and left proof by the wayside.Footnote 16

Max Isserlin, at the time an assistant of Emil Kraepelin's in Munich and later founder of the first hospital for child psychiatry in Germany, was equally critical of psychoanalytic methods. Like Stern before him, he acknowledged Freud's importance, the “unusual greatness” of his ideas.Footnote 17 Yet in a detailed analysis of the psychoanalytic literature, Isserlin found little to commend and much to find fault with. The claim that silences or digressions during free association were signs of resistance, for example, was impossible to ascertain. Resistance itself, moreover, could have many grounds, none of which were necessarily linked to the patient's illness. In relying on resistance, he complained, doctors did not have the means to establish the etiology of illnesses.Footnote 18 All along, Isserlin tried to point out that Freud's theories were unscientific—that what were deemed positive effects based on a specific therapeutic technique could have been the result of simple suggestion or a good patient-doctor relationship.Footnote 19

Science was also at stake in a further area of contention. Some of the same scholars who questioned Freud's methodology were incensed by the value he placed on sexuality regarding both human development and the origins of neurosis. In this connection, however, the language was less distant and the emotional attachment more readily discernible. William Stern was initially reserved in his treatment of the matter, speculating that Freud's emphasis on sexuality in the Interpretation of Dreams owed much to the minority of “hysterical cases” that made up the majority of patients discussed in the book.Footnote 20 This line of argument was also adopted by Willy Hellpach. The prominent neurologist and future Weimar politician conceded that Freud's methods might work for (hysterical) women who had repressed their feelings. Yet most of these feelings, based as they were on quite ordinary worries, doubts, or disappointments, remained far removed from the “sexual sphere.”Footnote 21 Psychiatrist Alfred Hoche used stronger words. While the “colossal” and “grotesque” overvaluation of sexuality in psychoanalysis repelled “prudent” neurologists and psychiatrists, it also “cultivated” an “atmosphere of sexuality” in individual patients that could not be tolerated.Footnote 22 Hoche was seconded by Hermann Oppenheim, the famous Berlin neurologist. At the fourth International Conference on Mental Patient Welfare in 1910, he denied that sexuality played any role in the 180 cases of anxiety attacks he had recently examined. Freud's teachings were tantamount to “intellectual rape” (geistige Vergewaltigung), Oppenheim warned, and even worse, a “modern form of torture” that “spelled danger” for patients everywhere.Footnote 23

Plenge's attempt to discredit Freud along the lines of these disputes was certainly not the last of its kind, but such interventions, usually produced in the early 1920s, became less and less relevant to the debate. As had been the case in the Kaiserreich, several authors continued to attack the role of sexuality in psychoanalysis as well as what they perceived to be its flawed methodology. Prominent pychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz, for example, dismissed the notion that anxiety attacks and other neuroses were the result of sexual repression.Footnote 24 Eduard Spranger, one of Germany's leading child psychologists, repudiated Freud's focus on the carnal side of life, which ignored the erotic, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of human sexuality.Footnote 25 This distinction between Eros and sexuality remained important for other scholars as well.Footnote 26 As for Freud's methodology, complaints could still be heard about the lack of scientific proof “typical” of psychoanalytic work. The pedagogue Otto Seeling quoted the most vociferous opponents of Freud in the 1900s, including Isserlin and Stern, in an effort to question the validity of free association, resistance, and repression.Footnote 27 Isserlin himself continued to question the validity of both resistance and repression.Footnote 28 And the journalist Carl Christian Bry, author of the best seller Verkappte Religionen, added psychoanalysis to his list of the “pseudosciences,” all of which were based on deductive systems that sought to explain the world according to one, all-encompassing logic.Footnote 29

If psychoanalytic theory and practice still proved contentious, its fate seemed to take a turn for the better in the course of the Weimar Republic. This was not only true for the development of psychoanalysis itself, which was disseminated through journals and conferences as well as systematized at the newly founded institutes in Berlin and Frankfurt.Footnote 30 In literature and the arts as well, poets, painters, and film directors began to appropriate Freudian ideas, following in the footsteps of the prewar bohemians, anarchists, and expressionists.Footnote 31 But a much more revealing change could be observed elsewhere. Psychologists, educationists, and even theologians came to see psychoanalysis as an ally in the search for a new worldview, one in which positivism was to be challenged if not crushed. Plenge's tract of 1920, directed against making men into apes and insisting that men uphold Geist and Bildung, no longer touched a majority of those who addressed the psychoanalytic challenge.

A New Subjectivity

The beginnings of this transformation can be discerned in the writings of those scholars for whom psychoanalysis remained problematic. Johannes Schultz was one such case. Despite his reservations about Freud's methodology, the medical director of the famous Dr. Lahmanns Sanatorium Weißer Hirsch near Dresden admitted that psychotherapists would benefit greatly from Freud's discovery of slips of the tongue and other “psychopathologies of everyday life,” the nature of which allowed practioners to gain access to the emotional makeup of individual patients. Similar insight was available via examinations of the Oedipus complex.Footnote 32 One of the leading characterologists of the time, Rudolf Allers, combined a critique of psychoanalysis's methodology with a general approval of its work on childhood sexuality.Footnote 33 The latter, he told an audience at the Vienna Verein für angewandte Psychologie und Psychopathologie in April 1920, meant that one could finally explore “individual affects,” an area that had hitherto been the subject of autobiographies and coming-of-age novels (Entwicklungsromane) only.Footnote 34 Professor Hans Henning of the Technical University in Dresden, while spurning the “mechanistic” aspects of Freud's methodology, commended his focus on the “dark powers” inherent in human life.Footnote 35 And even theologians who otherwise spurned psychoanalytic thinking admitted that Freud had offered means and methods whereby clerics could better understand the problems of individuals and thereby improve the religious practice of pastoral care.Footnote 36 Professor Linus Bopp, one of the best-known Catholic commentators on psychoanalysis, admitted as much in front of Innsbruck's Akademischer Verein “Logos” in 1924: for all its “anti-idealism” and “corporeal materialism,” Freud's teachings had demonstrated the reality of the unconscious and the power of repression.Footnote 37

Coming from vocal critics, these expressions of respect spelled a change in the perception of the human psyche. The turn to a new subjectivity in the study of the mind, one that incorporated more than visual perception, sense data, or brain activity, forced groups otherwise skeptical of psychoanalysis to appropriate some of its findings. In the field of psychology, this transformation occasioned a number of works that addressed what was taken to be a widespread crisis of confidence.

In 1927, Karl Bühler published his widely received book on the state of psychology in the German-speaking world. In Die Krise der Psychologie, the famous child psychologist bemoaned the many different approaches to psychology, which reminded him of the confusion of languages in the biblical account of the Tower of Babel.Footnote 38 Bühler tried to make sense of this chaos by distinguishing between two broad types of psychology, the impressionist school on the one hand and everything else on the other. The first variety, embodied by Ernst Mach, Hermann Ebbinghaus, and Wilhelm Wundt, encompassed sensualism and associationism, relied heavily on laboratories and experimentation, and distanced itself from all metaphysical speculation (hypnotism, spiritism, parapsychology) that threatened to undermine the scientific credentials of the new discipline.Footnote 39 The second variety, which comprised among others psychoanalysis, structural psychology, and Gestalt psychology, moved away from sense impressions and reaction times to embrace the soul, the personality, or the character of human beings. Bühler refrained from calling this second group the expressionists, but in many respects it resembled what William Stern had earlier subsumed under the category of “subject psychology” (as opposed to “subjectless psychology”).Footnote 40 Bühler was not alone in his assessment. Some years later, the well-known philosopher and psychologist Richard Müller-Freienfels penned an overview of the field that was somewhat more successful in finding a language for the differences between “impressionism” and “expressionism.” According to Müller-Freienfels, “objectivizing” and “subjectivizing” psychology were fundamentally at odds with each other. Objectifying psychology, he explained, made emotions into the attributes or effects of sensations and perceptions, so that feelings, drives, and the will depended on external stimuli. The inner life was thus secondary to the outside world, mirroring the external environment rather than having an existence of its own.Footnote 41 Subjectifying psychology, by contrast, maintained that there was no such thing as an isolated sensation, feeling, or perception in consciousness. Rather, emotions and perceptions were complex processes based on a unified center. Put differently, the unified ego was always present and operative in every human perception, emotion, and act.Footnote 42

At first sight, neither the above-mentioned comments by Freud's opponents nor the discussions on the state of psychology seemed to bespeak a serious crisis or a transition toward a new paradigm. After all, appreciating the problems of individual patients better by looking at childhood sexuality, slips of the tongue, or the repression of emotions hardly sounded revolutionary. And the expositions of Bühler and Müller-Freienfels, though clearly biased in favor of a subject-based psychology, did not entail that there was an overwhelming need to overcome a deeply problematic present. Yet if we look a bit closer, several developments suggest that the rejection of positivism and the espousal of holism were more than mere fads or momentary musings. How so? First, the fact that numerous psychologists briefly welcomed the “materialist” Freud in their midst indicated that coalition-building was necessary as a means of transcending old ways. Second, the fact that the same psychologists who allowed psychoanalysis to be part of the subject-centered, expressionist, or holistic alliance came to regret this stance showed how urgent it was to establish ideological purity on the matter. And third, the fact that prominent critics of Freud such as Arthur Kronfeld no longer attacked psychoanalytic methodology for being too unscientific but for being too rationalistic testified to a change in the perception of what psychology was meant to be. In short, while the declining importance of (positivistic) methodology first played into the hands of Freud, the psychoanalytic insistence on rational analysis of both the conscious and unconscious would soon make him into an intellectual outsider.

Holistic Desire

Carl Haeberlin and Hans Prinzhorn were perhaps the most important followers of Ludwig Klages, one of Freud's best-known adversaries in this period. Klages gained a huge following in the Weimar Republic, not only in his capacity as a characterologist and graphologist, but also as a cultural critic of industrialization and modernity. Identifying the intellect (Geist) as the most destructive force of his age, particularly in its tendency to “will” things, to reify nature, and to estrange humans from “life,” Klages wanted people to “experience” (Erleben) the world through a more passive form of apprehension (Wesensschau) within the stream of life (Bilderstrom). He thus pitted quantification, objectivity, and the utilitarian spirit—all forces that had caused a disenchanted world—against aura, life, and the secrets of the soul.Footnote 43 For Klages, Freud belonged to those who ursurped (bemächtigen) the natural environment rather than allowing it to flourish.Footnote 44 Although Haeberlin and Prinzhorn shared many of these views, they at first considered psychoanalysis to be part of the wider revolt against positivism. The move from this favorable if ambivalent outlook to a much more hostile one makes plain how pressing was the desire to triumph over a state of mind that Haeberlin, Prinzhorn, and many others found difficult to countenance. At the same time it exemplifies how, for a brief spell, the movement against scientific objectivism counted Freud as a member in its struggle.

A distingished doctor in the spa town of Bad Nauheim, Haeberlin wrote a number of books that detailed the relationship between characterology and psychoanalysis. In the first such piece, published in 1927 under the title Grundlinien der Psychoanalyse in the renowned Verlag der ärztlichen Rundschau, Haeberlin established a link between Carl Gustav Carus and Sigmund Freud, whom he portrayed as a follower of the romantic physician, artist, and physiognomist.Footnote 45 Indeed, Haeberlin depicted Freud as the first person to have rediscovered the significance of the unconscious, an area of life that was separate from and superior to the realm of consciousness. Carus's work, especially his book Psyche. Zur Entwicklungs-geschichte der Seele of 1846, had been “repressed” as a result of the “materialistic-mechanistic” frame of mind dominant in the natural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 46 Yet on the basis of careful clinical observation, Freud had come to recognize the “incredible significance of the unconscious in the psyche.”Footnote 47 Haeberlin went on to clarify what made the unconscious such a vital factor in human life. Taking his cue from Klages, he argued that while most people behaved rationally in their working lives, “the actual fullness of life [Fülle des Lebens] was lived and experienced irrationally by everyone.” For this reason, depth psychology (Seelentiefenforschung) devoted much of its energy to describing the “mighty influence of the irrational on life.”Footnote 48 While Haeberlin lauded Freud for his work on the unconscious, including the discovery of slips of the tongue, he also reproved the founder of psychoanalysis for his accentuation of “analysis” over “synthesis.”Footnote 49 If psychoanalysis was to have a future, the physician wrote, then it needed to concentrate less on dissecting patients and more on their synthetic treatment: “taming the animal,” in other words, was not enough; it had to be followed by the “cultivation” of the human soul.Footnote 50

One year later, Haeberlin produced a second book, this time on medical psychotherapy. As in the first volume, he praised Freud's “rediscovery” of the unconscious. In fact, Haeberlin surmised that the negative reactions to this rediscovery, specifically in connection with the role of sexuality, had manifested the very power of the unconscious that was being denied.Footnote 51 By “laying bare” (Aufdeckung) the “deep, unconscious stream of life,” which “flowed through each human being in the shape of drives,” psychoanalysis had added to human knowledge in a way that only happened every few centuries or so.Footnote 52 Still, Freud's accomplishments could not disguise his serious faults. These did not only turn on his refusal to take the essential step from analysis to synthesis, but they also more seriously involved the “subjugation” of the unconscious. For in trying to make the unconscious conscious through the use of reason, psychoanalysis was wrongly assuming that one power (the conscious) could heal the other power (the unconscious), even though the former had caused the illness of the latter in the first place.Footnote 53 Because Freud privileged reason, Haeberlin continued, he failed to appreciate the nature of the “id.” Where psychoanalysis was primarily concerned with repression and resistance, both of which had to be “broken” to gain the upper hand over the unconscious, the Klages/Carus/Nietzsche camp advanced a much more holistic conception of the psyche: for them, resistance was just as much part of the organic soul as the need to forget. More specifically, resistance often achieved “equilibrium, restoration, (and) healing,” whereas the psychoanalytic quest to “overpower” this resistance could sometimes destroy the precarious “balance” within neurotic patients.Footnote 54 This reading of psychoanalytic treatment pointed to the underlying objective of the critique, namely to promote the unconscious, to elevate the irrational, and to advance “life.” Haeberlin concluded his exposition on just this note. Rationality removed from life had brought about the rule of machines and the “machine-like will to power.” But there was still hope, given that underneath the “technical and mechanized surface” a new “fervent desire for the soul and Seelenhaftigkeit” sought to “resurrect the life of our present.”Footnote 55

Haeberlin's growing estrangement from “reason” as well as his growing attachment to “life” meant that in his final statements on the subject, the psychoanalytic corpus no longer figured as a reference point for future work in the field of psychotherapy. To be sure, Freud's contributions to the areas of early childhood, dream work, and the etiology of neuroses remained impressive, but Freud himelf clearly belonged to the “intellectual,” “rational,” “mechanical-atomistic,” and “logocentric” world of yesteryear.Footnote 56 In this respect, the evolution of Haeberlin's thought resembled that of many other commentators in the field, most notably perhaps Hans Prinzhorn.

Based in Frankfurt and later Munich, the eclectic thinker penned numerous books and dozens of articles on psychology, psychopathology, art, politics, and aesthetics. In the year of his untimely death in 1933, his fame throughout Germany and beyond was such that the Brockhaus encyclopedia devoted more lines to his name than to those of Ludwig Klages or Martin Heidegger.Footnote 57 Prinzhorn, too, initially sympathized with Freud's project, assigning him to the antipositivist bloc within psychology. This view was particularly apparent in one of the best-known critical volumes to appear on psychoanalysis in the Weimar Republic. Krisis der Psychoanalyse, edited by Prinzhorn and Kuno Mittenzwey in 1928, contained numerous articles on the role of Freudian psychology in German cultural life, two of which Prinzhorn wrote himself. In his introductory piece, he offered a wide-ranging overview of Freud's intellectual background, including references to Plato, Spinoza, and the Enlightenment. Several longer passages dealt with the affinity between psychoanalysis and romanticism. Here the author maintained that Freud's was a system of thought that corroborated earlier findings on the “surges” (das Wogende) in human existence, that is, on “the creative and destructive growth in the depths of elementary being” (schöpferischen und verderbenbringenden Wuchern in der Tiefe des elementaren Geschehens).Footnote 58 And although psychoanalysis owed much to the “debilitating” rationalism of both scholasticism and the Enlightenment, the 1920s were witnessing a fundamental change in Freudian theory. With the introduction of the “id,” including the accompanying “death wish,” Freud had decided to “make amends,” to “derationalize [Entrationalisierung] the unconscious,” and to join the tradition of “Goethe-Carus-Nietzsche.”Footnote 59 For in allowing for a force such as the death wish, Prinzhorn explained, psychoanalysis was doing two things simultaenously: abandoning the “extreme” emphasis on sexuality; and positing a force that was inscrutable, beyond rational explanation, and thus in line with existence itself.

Prinzhorn immediately qualified these statements, however. In fact, he made unmistakably clear that all these advances could not conceal the fact that psychoanalysis was no longer required. True, in 1890 Freud's intervention had been necessary at a time when society was still repressing the “physical, pagan, and natural drives of life.” Back then, it emerged as an instrument to rid culture of its false prudishness and to expose the lies of a hypocritical age. But forty years later, matters had changed beyond recognition. Now Germany's youth was open-minded in all areas of life, whether pertaining to the body, to sexuality, or to art. Now repression ceased to cause psychic problems and had lost its raison d'être.Footnote 60

More importantly, Prinzhorn could not help but chide Freud's dependence on “rationalism.” Even if psychoanalysis promoted “honesty,” “fostered courage,” and “destroyed delusions,” it remained wedded to an “Enlightenment system” that subsumed these aims under the larger objective of science and progress. In doing so, psychoanalytic theory brought about “the danger of a chronic nihilism underlying the pathos of exact scientific knowledge.” “Insofar as psychoanalysis imposes rational interpretations in the name of pure empiricism,” he wrote, “it is the final example of an enlightenment system that is directed against the whole stock of culture [Kulturbestand] by exposing it as something inauthentic, as a mask and a façade that hides the actual force, the drive, which in turn is described—and this is perhaps the even more dangerous adventure in enlightenment—as a rationalized purposeful will.”Footnote 61

Although Prinzhorn repeated elsewhere that psychoanalysis belonged to the anti-positivistic tradition initiated by Carus and consummated by Klages, this readiness to include Freud soon wore off.Footnote 62 Both Haeberlin and Prinzhorn, but also like-minded psychologists such as Rudolf Allers, eventually came to believe that it was time to create distinct boundaries between the old and the new psychologies, the narrow rational ways and the broad holistic approach, the analytic mind-set and the synthetic worldview.Footnote 63 The urgency with which the past was to be exchanged for the future can be best described by recounting how the critics of psychoanalysis moved away from methodological issues to ideological matters. Whereas the rivalry between competing psychological schools had influenced the debates of the early to mid-1920s, more far-reaching questions were at stake in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These questions demanded an emotional commitment that had not existed before.

Truth and Method

One of the most detailed discussions of psychoanalysis to be published in the prewar years emanated from the Heidelberg psychologist Arthur Kronfeld, the author of a one-hundred-page-plus overview of Freud's theories in the preeminent Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie.Footnote 64 Like most commentators before him, Kronfeld praised Freud's considerable efforts, in this case for “intuiting” the “psychic depths” of his patients.Footnote 65 But like most critics of the time, he voiced a number of reservations regarding the merits of psychoanalytic theory, reservations that would be quoted on several occasions in the years to come.Footnote 66

According to Kronfeld, Freud's modus operandi included so many objectionable elements that no serious psychologist could ever use psychoanalytic methods. Three problems were particularly glaring. First, patient statements and interpretations were not simply recollections and spontaneous expositions; they were already presented in the light of Freud's own theories and preconceptions. The “clinical fact” of the slip of the tongue, for example, became a fact because of the theory that made it so.Footnote 67 The way the statements and interpretations were processed, Kronfeld argued, already assumed the validity of psychoanalytic theory.Footnote 68 Second, Freud not only failed to demonstrate that breaks in free associations stemmed from repression, but he also failed to demonstrate that repression necessarily occasioned breaks in the flow of free association. While these breaks surely existed, there was no way to prove that they were caused by repression.Footnote 69 And third, psychoanalytic interpretations of dreams were unreliable. No evidence was forthcoming, Kronfeld remarked, as to where Freud had gained the knowledge with which he determined the meaning of dreams, a weakness that was especially troubling for someone who claimed that the formation of symbols was always individual in nature and that the reasons for producing symbols were not readily available to the conscious eye. Freud also did not spell out which parts of a dream should be interpreted, where the interpretation should begin and end, and how much interpretation was necessary for which types of dream.Footnote 70

Kronfeld was much less concerned with Freud's methodology after the war, however. In 1919, he cofounded the Berlin Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, where he continued to work until it was destroyed in 1933. Besides researching and teaching alongside Magnus Hirschfeld, Kronfeld lectured at the Charité in the field of psychotherapy.Footnote 71 Although his later critique of Freud was also of a practical kind, namely to evaluate the psychoanalytic theory of neuroses, he examined the intellectual bases of Freud's ideas in some detail. Kronfeld's initial concern in this respect was to adumbrate the Weltanschauung of “Occidental man,” which allowed the reader to grasp the “unbridgeable opposition between psychoanalysis and the principle of Bildung typical of the entire spiritual stance discernible since (the beginnings of) Christianity, since Augustine and Descartes.” In western culture, he averred, consciousness, spirit, and belief made up the “divine” element in human beings.Footnote 72 Kronfeld conceded that Freud had been instrumental in understanding the importance of the irrational in human beings, compelling them to deepen their appreciation of the self and providing them with a means that gave voice to forces as yet little known.Footnote 73 Even so, Freud could not resist “reinstalling rationality and consciousness . . . in the role of the decisive authority,” despite the fact that both needed to be “exposed and overcome.” Indeed, the founder of psychoanalysis had given “rationality the choice” on whether to integrate findings regarding the unconscious. As Kronfeld wrote, “For the irrational is made accessible and conquered phenomenologically until it can be interpreted in a meaningful manner—meaningful for whom? For precisely that rationality which ought to have been questioned with the disclosure of the unconscious.”Footnote 74 If psychoanalysis resorted to the enlightenment methods of the past, that was bad enough. But if Freud believed it was possible to comprehend every known “origin” of human “stirrings” without recognizing what made human beings human (that they were intrinsically different from other persons “in their selfness and through their selfness”), then Freud had missed his calling. Here psychoanalysis replaced the “personal nature of human beings with their destiny,” thereby turning them into “the product of coincidence” based on “milieu-like determinants” (milieuhafter Determinanten).Footnote 75

Prinzhorn, Haeberlin, Allers, and Kronfeld rejected the notion that rationality should resolve issues relating to the unconscious, lest the revolutionary discovery of the irrational be eroded. They were not alone in this respect. Various contributions to the leading journal for psychotherapy, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete, advanced similar views, among them the four consecutive articles published by the prominent student of Ludwig Klages, Hans Kunz.Footnote 76 There he ridiculed the psychoanalytic image of the unconscious as a “calculator [Rechenmaschine] or an intelligence that functions and calculates in a terribly cunning and sly manner,” rather than as a flood of life and vitality. Kunz was particularly incensed in this regard, for in depicting the “dark, unconscious, archaic phenomena” in terms of a “spiritual, deliberate, rational consummation (only without the quality of consciousness),” Freud had advanced, he believed, the purest form of rationalism, “that is, the intellectual, intentional falsification of the innermost phenomena.”Footnote 77 In the same volume of the Zentralblatt, the neurologist and editor of the medical journal Medizinische Welt, Clemens Ernst Benda, repeated much the same. With all the “blindness of a monomaniac,” he wrote, Freud had taken what was new (the unconscious) and assimilated it to his own familiar system of thought. But this move was not only methodologically problematic. Instead of recognizing the unconscious for what it was and giving himself over to its radical alterity, the founder of psychoanalysis had preferred to “subdue and rape” the unconscious, so that it lost its “original” character.Footnote 78

From Crisis to Future

These developments did not go unnoticed. Writing in 1930, the psychoanalyst and socialist activist Siegfried Bernfeld described this move from methodology to ideology in the following terms: “Then [in the 1900s] it [psychoanalysis] was considered unscientific; today it is attacked as scientistic. In the olden days it was accused of being inexact; today it is associated with a rigid method. Hitherto one complained about analysts too reliant on subjective ideas, today's psychology is based on intuition (and) charisma, on imponderables; it interprets, but not slip, symptom, dream, it interprets the meaning and end of life, of character (and) fate, it interprets peoples, eras, and cultures.”Footnote 79 Put differently, prominent psychologists had become much less interested in the methodological foundations of psychoanalysis (or any other form of psychotherapy and psychology, for that matter) and much more concerned with the truths psychology would communicate on the subject of the psyche. This development—from the search for a new subjectivity to the growing disenchantment with positivistic psychology to a return to holism—thus entailed more than belonging to a specific school of thought. If Kronfeld the sexologist and Kunz the characterologist had little in common otherwise, they could both agree on one overwhelming “truth,” namely that the unconscious was radically different from the conscious. This agreement was not only based on rather broad principles, but it also distinguished between powers that were “subduing,” “usurping,” “subjugating,” “calculating,” and “raping,” and powers that were “surging,” “flooding,” “healing,” “creating,” and “mysterious.” The language used in this conflict implied that one side stood for a nihilistic past, while the other stood for a dynamic future. The Weimar debate on the nature of the psyche, albeit vague as to how to bring about tangible change, showed a compelling need to create a more plentiful and less encumbered future. The vagueness regarding the path to be taken was part of the appeal: everything smacking of procedure, technique, and method seemed to inhibit the cause.

In juxtaposing two emotional communities, one in which reason would be held in check, the other in which reason was the final arbiter, the above protagonists were hardly unique during this period. The movement toward greater Sachlichkeit, to take a well-known case, pitted its “culture of distance” against a sentimentality they believed was out of place in postwar Germany.Footnote 80 Here, especially in the works of various artists and writers, “cold” artificiality (Künstlichkeit) was to replace “hot” authenticity, whereby human beings would increasingly resemble machines, with feelings approximating motorized gestures and faces resembling masks.Footnote 81 According to some historians, this cool conduct characterized a whole generation of men who would later make up, most ominously, elite members of the SS (particularly in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt). For these right-wing ideologues, antisemitism was to be put into practice “rationally,” “cooly,” and “methodically”; indeed, fighting the Jews (and other enemies of the Volk) dispassionately would be a sign of temperance and reason, distinguishing this modern form of emnity from earlier versions of emotional Radauantisemitismus.Footnote 82

The men who embodied these distinct emotional styles, envisioning either psyches less restricted by rationality or envisioning psyches hardened against all kinds of sensibilities, had one thing in common: the expectation of a better future, one that transcended the divisions of the present and accommodated its “surplus of idealism.”Footnote 83 Both the view that the unconscious had to be protected from the exactions of the conscious (particularly in the shape of a [psycho]analysis that divided the psyche into distinct component parts) and the view that a culture of distance was necessary to be immunized against too much emotion, appealed to a future that would leave the crises of the past behind. In the first case, crisis was identified as an excess of scientism, in the second, as an excess of (emotional) discord. The “secret consensus” between these two distinct camps, however, was that the immediate future would overcome these limitations.Footnote 84

National Socialism offered both camps this future. Haeberlin and Prinzhorn welcomed the advent of the Third Reich, as did Ludwig Klages.Footnote 85 But it soon emerged that this new future, as much as it promised the prospect of less rationality and more mystery, clearly did not engender the victory of the unconscious over the conscious or the soul over the intellect. Reviews and discussions of Klages's work, for example, reveal that the repudiation of the intellect (Geist) was usually dismissed, even if some commentators welcomed his struggle against quantification and utilitarianism.Footnote 86 In the end, it was Hitler's “chief ideologue” Alfred Rosenberg who determined that Klages's central tenets simply contradicted the preeminence of Tat and Wille, both of which, Rosenberg insisted, expressed the essence of National Socialism.Footnote 87 As much as Klages had contributed to the critique of modernity's “Entseelung,” he underestimated Germany's “hard will” to uphold a specifically German Geist.Footnote 88 Here we can detect a parallel with the fate of psychoanalysis in the Third Reich. While Jewish and socialist analysts were either driven out of the country or murdered, Freudianism did not disappear entirely after 1933. Rather, in a gesture of the pragmatic politics of Tat, the newly founded Göring Institute in Berlin (Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy) took over central psychoanalytical ideas and techniques as part of an eclectic blend of Jungian, Adlerian, and Freudian thought. When it came in handy, National Socialism could thus harness “dubious” psychological expertise—all the more so when this expertise would assist in the selection of military personnel.Footnote 89

Once the Third Reich became the future, then, National Socialism was forced to make choices that transformed it from the catchall party of the past to the state party of the present. Where it had previously appealed to all those who wished to overcome Weimar's many crises, it now took sides in the debate on which of these crises needed special attention. And since controlling the state required a politics of Tat and Wille, the idea that the psyche had to be protected from the dominance of instrumental reason—as advanced in one form or another by Kunz, Allers, Haeberlin, Prinzhorn, Kronfeld, Bühler, Müller-Freienfels, and Klages—never assumed great importance.

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55 Ibid., 180–181.

56 Haeberlin, Carl, “Über das vital Unbewusste, Bewusstsein und Charakter mit Bemerkungen über die deutsche Seelenkunde von Goethe und Carus,” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete 8 (1935): 279–95Google Scholar, here 290, and 289–290, where for the first time Haeberlin used antisemitic language to distinguish between a Jewish and an Aryan psychotherapy; Haeberlin, Carl, “Die Bedeutung von Ludwig Klages und Hans Prinzhorn für die deutsche Psychotherapie,” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete 7 (1934): 38–51Google Scholar, here 39, 43; Haeberlin, Carl, Einführung in die Forschungsergebnisse von Ludwig Klages (Kampen: Niels Kampmann Verlag, 1934), 12–13, 82–83Google Scholar.

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74 Ibid., 46. See also Prinzhorn's critique of the “rationalized unconscious” in Prinzhorn, Hans, Gespräch über Psychoanalyse zwischen Frau, Dichter und Arzt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981 [1st ed. 1926]), 32–33Google Scholar. For a contemporary stance that welcomes this “mechanistic view of the self” because it “lets us describe all the various parts of the soul, conscious and unconscious alike, in homogeneous terms: as equally plausible candidates for the ‘true self,’” see Rorty, Richard, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” in Rorty, Richard, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 152Google Scholar.

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76 The Swiss psychologist Hans Kunz would later cofound, alongside Alexander Mitscherlich and Felix Schottlaender, the West German journal Psyche. His collected articles on Freud appeared in Grundfragen der psychoanalytischen Anthropologie. Ausgewählte Abhandlungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1975)Google Scholar.

77 Kunz, Hans, “Die Psychoanalyse als Symptom einer Wandlung im Selbstverständnis der Menschen. I.,” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete 4 (1931): 280–302Google Scholar, here 300–301 note 1. See also pages 298 and 300–301. The other parts appeared in the same volume, 366–379, 408–425, and 481–512.

78 Benda, Clemens Ernst, “Das Unbewusste und der Aufbau der geistigen Welt,” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete 4 (1931): 7–19Google Scholar, here 9.

79 Siegfried Bernfeld, “‘Neuer Geist’ contra ‘Nihilismus.’ Die Psychologie und ihr Publikum,” Die psychoanalytische Bewegung 2, no. 2 (March/April 1930): 107, 116–117. Bernfeld wrote the text in response to Prinzhorn and Mittenzwey's Krisis der Psychoanalyse. Critics of psychoanalysis later prevented Bernfeld from receiving a teaching position (Lehrauftrag) at the University of Berlin. One prominent opponent, the Munich psychiatrist Oswald Bumke, relied on Hans Kunz's verdict on the subject. Tenorth, Heinz-Elmar, “‘Unnötig’ und ‘unerwünscht’—Siegfried Bernfeld und die Universitätswissenschaft,” in Jugend, Erziehung und Psychoanalyse. Zur Sozialpädagogik Siegfried Bernfelds, ed. Hörster, Reinhard and Müller, Burkhard (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1992) 23–40Google Scholar, here 30. See also Tenorth, Heinz-Elmar, “Sigmund Freud über Siegfried Bernfeld. Ein ‘Lehrauftrag für psychoanalytische Pädagogik’ an der Universität Berlin,” Jahrbuch für Bildungsforschung 5 (1999): 300–309Google Scholar.

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84 Ibid., 25; Graf, Die Zukunft, 26.

85 Haeberlin, Carl, “Die Bedeutung von Ludwig Klages und Hans Prinzhorn für die Deutsche Psychotherapie,” in Deutsche Seelenheilkunde. Zehn Aufsätze zu den seelenärztlichen Aufgaben unserer Zeit, ed. Göring, Martin H. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1934), 38–51Google Scholar; Hans Prinzhorn, “Der Kampf um Ludwig Klages. Ein Beitrag zur geistigen Situation unserer Zeit,” Deutsche Rundschau 59 (May 1933): 103–111. Klages to Carl Haeberlin, August 25, 1933, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, A: Klages.

86 See, for example, Günther, Hans, “Seele und Geist bei Ludwig Klages,” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Bildung 9 (June 1933): 289–296Google Scholar; Ernst Weber, “Der Geist als Widersacher des Seele,” Bayerische Lehrerzeitung, Dec. 6, 1934; W. Steinbeck, “‘Seele und Geist.’ Rückblick auf die Tagung der Deutschen Philosophischen Gesellschaft,” Völkischer Beobachter, Sept. 26, 1936; Bense, Max, Anti-Klages oder von der Würde des Menschen (Berlin: Widerstands-Verlag Anna Niekisch, 1937)Google Scholar; Heinrich Härtle, “Der Widersacher des Geistes. Zum heutigen Geburtstag von Ludwig Klages,” Völkischer Beobachter, Dec. 10, 1942.

87 Piper, Ernst, Alfred Rosenberg. Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Blessing, 2005)Google Scholar. Rosenberg reached this authoritative conclusion in a speech at the University of Halle in April 1938. See Rosenberg, Alfred, Gestalt und Leben (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1938)Google Scholar. See also Schneider, Tobias, “Ideologische Grabenkämpfe. Der Philosoph Ludwig Klages und der Nationalsozialismus 1933–1938,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 49 (2001): 275–294Google Scholar; and Schneider, Tobias, “Sektierer oder Kampfgenossen? Der Klages-Kreis im Spannungsfeld der NS-Kultur-Politik,” in Völkische Bewegung-Konservative Revolution-Nationalsozialismus. Aspekte einer politisierten Kultur, ed. Schmitz, Walter and Vollnhals, Clemens (Dresden: Thelem, 2005), 299–323Google Scholar.

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89 The Göring Institute commenced its work in 1936. See especially Cocks, Geoffrey, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Geuter, Ulfried, Die Professionalisierung der deutschen Psychologie im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988)Google Scholar. For this pragmatism in other areas, see, for instance, Proctor, Robert N., The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Szöllösi-Janze, Margit, ed., Science in the Third Reich (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001)Google Scholar.