The self has both bestrode and stumbled through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Celebrated by the Enlightenment and the French and Industrial Revolutions, the modern individual self became the “measure of man” in the west during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The self and its powers were at the center of the European liberal master narrative that met its eventually fatal own master in the trenches of World War I. The actuality and imago of European men, already suffering from the incipient individual irrelevance as shapers of their own and anybody else's destiny brought about by modern industry and bureaucracy, were reduced to hysterical helplessness by industrialized warfare between 1914 and 1918. Then, at least half of the “great men” of World War II were brutal dictators who regarded “lesser” human beings as unworthy of individual or collective identity, dignity, or existence. The kulaks for Stalin and the Jews for Hitler were proof not of the success of the enlightened master narrative of the modern western era but of noisome impediments to power and barriers to racial purity, respectively. The restless ethic of questioning spawned by modernism itself eventually informed a postmodernism that questioned the self itself, reducing it to a function and fiction of power and discourse.

And yet the very withering attention paid to the modern self by dictators and deconstructionists only confirmed the self as a major constituent of the modern era. Indeed, postmodern thought has itself evolved—partially—into consideration of and for the active autonomy and agency of the individual—now both male and female, among others—within social, economic, and scientific contexts and constraints. This is the context into which the collection of essays edited by Maik Tändler and Uffa Jensen fits. The focus of Das Selbst zwischen Anpassung und Befreiung is on the intersection of psychological knowledge and politics as a history of “the political in the twentieth century” (p. 9). The editors' introduction begins with the words of “wild psychoanalyst” Otto Gross on the psychology of the unconscious being the philosophy of a revolution that would bring about a new age of freedom for individuals previously enslaved to their unconscious. More than fifty years later, Tändler and Jensen point out, the student movement in the Federal Republic of Germany would embrace this same sort of indulgence in experiments of self-knowledge as one—though hardly uncontested—means toward social liberation. One of the important lessons the historians in this book wish to teach is that there is no firm boundary between scientific and popular knowledge. Gross, as featured in David Cronenberg's recent film, A Dangerous Method (2011), crossed all boundaries as a matter of principle and practice. But starving to death after World War I, he did not witness the failure, indeed obliteration, of his predictions of radical human liberation as a new form of politics (a project examined in Jensen's essay, “Die Utopie der Authentizät und ihre Grenzen”) in the actual disastrous politics that developed on both the left and the right between the two world wars.

Virginia Woolf famously predicted that the twentieth century would usher in the age of psychology. This was certainly the case in Germany, the geographical locus of this book. There Wilhelm Wundt and others pioneered academic psychology, from Vienna into Germany and the world came Freud's psychoanalysis, and German psychiatry moved from the universities into government and military. All of these new disciplines represented services science could render society, but each to varying degrees also conformed to a pattern that represented regulation and even oppression. Psychologists, the subject of Katja Patzel-Mattern's essay on industrial psychology in the Weimar Republic, would help business and the armed forces measure, channel, and enhance human resources for commerce and war. Psychoanalysis would trend toward theory and practice that emphasized integration of the individual into society for the sake of happiness and productivity. Psychiatry would serve the German military during World War I as a medical means of punishing “war hysterics” back to health. After 1918 many psychiatrists trended rightward in their politics, mistrusting and fearing the working classes and ending up in enthusiastic service to Nazi sterilization and mass murder of the mentally ill. All of these trends would call forth strong social, political, and cultural opposition such as “anti-psychiatry” beginning in the 1960s.

Each of the essays in this volume traces the scientific and popular path of the modern self in Germany from the social engineering, scientific management, and behaviorist movements that dominated the early and middle years of the twentieth century to subsequent regulation of behavior through individual search for “authenticity” and “self-realization.” Three major themes are “the relationship between the ‘private’ and the ‘political’” (p. 20); mental illness and social norms; and the “psychologizing,” for both good and ill, of sexuality. Only one essay, Christine Leuenberger's “Remaking Neurosis,” concerns the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). An additional limiting though also useful emphasis rests on the “revolutionary” year 1968 in West Germany. Jens Elberfeld offers a study of “couples' therapy” after 1968 as an instance of ongoing critique of the patriarchal model of marriage. Similarly, Miriam Gebhardt shows that the “68ers” moved child care from the model of control and denial of affect that reigned continuously in bourgeois Germany before and after 1933 to a new model that emphasized the emotions and the development of personality. Pascal Eitel discusses the contemporaneous and complementary commitment to “New Age” holism, yoga, and biofeedback. Tändler charts “democratization, emancipation, and Emotionalisierung” (p. 141) during the so-called “Gruppenboom” of the 1970s, which had institutional and intellectual links with the involvement of psychoanalysts and psychologists in the West German peace movement of the 1980s (Claudia Kemper, “Psychologische Abrüstung”). Anthony Kauders likewise investigates the political dynamics of West German psychoanalysts in debates over psychodynamics of the student movement and psychoanalytic collaboration with National Socialism.

This volume has a relatively narrow focus on the psychologies of the self in twentieth-century Germany. But the importance of this particular subject is underlined by the broader and deeper context—unmentioned here—of what Eric Hobsbawm has labeled “the crisis of the liberal state” that is traceable here in the triumphs and travails of the modern material self in its social, political, and scientific contexts.