Summarizing the activities of the Sigmund-Freud-Institute (SFI) in Frankfurt am Main in 1969, its director Alexander Mitscherlich painted a bleak picture of recent events. Psychoanalysis had always faced opposition in Germany, he wrote, but of late Freudianism contended with several broadsides simultaneously: critics still maintained that it placed too much emphasis on sexuality; some added that behavioral therapy or sophisticated medication did a better job at treating patients than long-term analysis; yet others argued that Freud's teachings may have been relevant in 1900, but that society no longer resembled turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vienna. On top of all this, Mitscherlich complained, a new generation demanded that psychoanalysis figure as chief witness for an antiauthoritarian education that emphasized indulgence rather than sublimation. “Society” continued to make life difficult for psychoanalysis, then, and it was for this reason that the government needed to assist the SFI in its efforts to train a new generation of analysts in Germany.Footnote ¹

The late 1960s and early 1970s can be described as a liminal period in the history of Freud's reception in Germany. On the one hand, psychoanalysis received official recognition when it was incorporated into the West German health insurance system and when its practitioners began to give expert advice in the courts; on the other, public reactions to Freud often remained hostile and left-wing attacks on his purported bourgeois individualism suggested that Mitscherlich's account was not that far-fetched after all.Footnote ² Reponses to Freud were not simple manifestations of likes and dislikes, however; they also revealed a great deal about how West Germans thought about sexuality and aggression, reason and control, or rationality and irrationality. It is with this premise in mind that I would like to examine the encounter with psychoanalysis at the time: when people commented on central psychoanalytic concepts, they not only partook in scholarly disputes, but also divulged information about their fears, hopes, and visions. A history of the reception of Freud is therefore also a history of these emotional and cultural attachments.

West Germany between 1967 and 1971 is a promising setting to examine such preferences. Because the debates were particularly heated during this period, pitting one camp against the other, we are able to identify better what was at stake in the encounter with psychoanalysis. In the course of this essay I will argue that the clash between members of the student movement and the (psychoanalytic) establishment did not turn on the dichotomy irrational/rational or disorder/order, as has been suggested elsewhere.Footnote ³ Both sides insisted on the rational control of life, but student activists wished to use reason as a means to delimit authority. In particular, the champions of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse spurned rigidity, sternness, and imperiousness in the shape of an overbearing “super-ego.”Footnote ⁴ They did so not out of fear, but in the hope of combining two areas that had been traditionally kept apart: the bürgerlich notion of self-regulation and rational control on the one hand, and the romantic notion of authenticity and self-expression on the other. Their rivals dismissed this project as paradoxical, dangerous, and antithetical to human flourishing and well-being.

Prophets of Liberation: Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse

The student movement's encounter with Freud was in many ways a rerun of the late 1920s and early 1930s. At the time, left-leaning Freudians—Otto Fenichel, Siegfried Bernfeld, Edith Jacobson, and Wilhelm Reich being the most prominent among them—had been intent on finding ways to combine psychoanalysis with socialism. Working at the Berlin Institute, these psychoanalysts became increasingly concerned that the “formalism,” hierarchical structure, and political conservatism they believed to encounter within the psychoanalytic establishment would undermine the larger goal of treating members of the working class.Footnote ⁵ The Freudian Left became isolated in the 1930s, and Reich was formally expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934, one year after most Jewish and socialist psychoanalysts had left Germany for good.

Psychoanalysis survived in muted form among non-Jewish practitioners within Nazi Germany. From 1936 on, the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy (or Goering Institute) in Berlin had amalgamated Freudian, Jungean, and Adlerian perspectives, eliminating the different schools of psychotherapy and later banning psychoanalytic terminology in the drive for theoretical synthesis.Footnote ⁶ This synthetic approach persisted in the early years of the Federal Republic. Indeed, the late 1940s and early 1950s were an interregnum in the development of psychoanalysis, when psychotherapeutic works comprised Jungian, Freudian, and Daseinsanalytical elements simultaneously.Footnote ⁷ Institutionally, this period of eclecticism ended in 1950, when the Freudians under Carl Müller-Braunschweig left the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG) and founded the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (DPV), which endeavored to represent traditional Freudian psychoanalysis in the Federal Republic and which eventually became a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association.Footnote ⁸

In the 1960s, however, not long after his death in 1957, Wilhelm Reich's theories made a spectacular comeback. Together with Herbert Marcuse, he emerged as the exponent of psychoanalysis during the heady days of rebellion, counterculture, and sexual liberation. This celebrity requires explanation, for neither Reich nor Marcuse had been especially prominent figures in the West German academy. On the contrary, at the time of their growing fame, Theodor W. Adorno remained the Übervater of leftist thought, while prominent West German intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas were gradually rediscovering Sigmund Freud.Footnote ⁹ More important, the repeated references to Reich and Marcuse not only bespeak a certain generational reception of psychoanalysis, but they also testify to the emotional and cultural ideals embraced in opposition to what more traditional Freudians as well as the wider public espoused at the time.

Born in Galicia in 1897, Wilhelm Reich moved to Vienna after World War I, where he studied medicine, met Freud, and soon joined the psychoanalytic movement. From 1922 on, he worked as an assistant at the local psychoanalytic Poliklinik, assuming the directorship of the Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy two years later. Reich became increasingly concerned with the political ramifications of his work, an interest that led to the establishment of the Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung (Socialist Society for Sexual Counseling and Sexual Research) in 1928–29. Together with his collaborators in Vienna and Berlin, he hoped to use psychoanalysis as a means to unite sexual reform with radical politics; among other policies, they propagated legal abortion and the right of women to divorce their husbands. Reich's key texts from this period—they were also the ones the student movement would reprint in the 1960s and 1970s—centered on several key concepts, and especially on the notion that all neuroses were “genital” in nature, that capitalism was the primary cause of neurotic characters, and that socialism would replace the “neurotic” with the “genital character.” In the early 1930s, however, Reich's position within the psychoanalytic community became increasingly untenable, not least because Freud insisted that psychoanalysis be treated as a “science” rather than as a purported Marxist Hilfswissenschaft.Footnote ¹⁰

In his first major work, Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927), Reich put forward the premise from which all other ideas would follow: “no neurosis exists without disturbances of the genital function.”Footnote ¹¹ Put differently, every neurosis (in the shape of anxieties, phobias, or obsessive-compulsive tendencies) existed because genital sexuality had been repressed.Footnote ¹² Reich defined a healthy genital function (or “orgastic potency”) as the satisfactory release of libidinal energy, that is, the ability of one's instinctual drives to flow freely. Against Freud, he argued that patients needed more than an understanding of the “secret meaning and purpose” of a symptom to eliminate their neurosis; they required the removal of its true “source of energy.”Footnote ¹³ The recurrence of neurotic symptoms, Reich believed, depended foremost on how much libidinal energy had been held back or how much statis (Stauung) remained.Footnote ¹⁴ This emphasis on the free flow of energy also entailed a theory of aggression. Sexual energy, if repressed, would be transformed into aggression—the cause of violence in individuals was ultimately due to their pent-up sexual energies.Footnote ¹⁵

But neuroses were not simply the responsibility of individuals, he insisted; they stemmed from a “bourgeois morality” that threatened “orgastic potency” by censuring extramarital sexuality as “animalistic (sadistic) and dirty (anal).”Footnote ¹⁶ Using less technical terms: wherever fears and phobias existed, they were not simply due to personal circumstances, but owed much to the fact that middle-class society did not allow individuals to experience sexually fulfilling lives. Six years later, Reich published his two other seminal works, Charakteranalyse and Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, in which he elaborated on the social origins of the specifically neurotic character.

Now Reich argued that Freud, with his introduction of the “death drive,” had relinquished the “sociological truth” inherent in the conflict between “id” and “super-ego.”Footnote ¹⁷ This truth revolved around the idea that the unconscious drive sought pleasure, whereas society sought to contain it. Instead of continuing along the “original” path that had allowed for a critique of societal strictures and of society itself, Freud's new focus on a biological given made social change look much less likely and equally undermined the whole concept of a “pleasure principle” in the first place.Footnote ¹⁸ In fact, Reich held that Freud's “death drive”—with its connotations of war and aggression—owed more to the reigning order in the early twentieth century than to any biological reality.Footnote ¹⁹ Rejecting Freud's idea that civilization required instinctual repression, he maintained that it was only the current form of civilization that made such claims on human libido. More specifically, Reich attributed sexual repression both to the invention of private property and to the subsequent bourgeois focus on economic profit: sexual drives had to be kept in check so as to sustain capitalism, and the best way to do this was to establish monogamy and patriarchy alike.Footnote ²⁰ In short, the repression of libidinal energy, which caused both aggressiveness and neurotic characters, could only be done away with if society reestablished the primacy of (genital) sexuality.

Born in Berlin one year after Reich, Herbert Marcuse studied literature and philosophy in Freiburg, where he commenced with his Habilitation under the supervision of Martin Heidegger in the late 1920s. The Nazi takeover made the completion of this project impossible, forcing Marcuse to seek work at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research and then to emigrate, via Switzerland, to the United States. During World War II he worked for the Office of Stragetic Services but returned to academe soon thereafter. In the 1950s and 1960s Marcuse published his two most influential works: Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964).

Herbert Marcuse's main objective in relation to the psyche was to distinguish between “necessary” and “surplus” repression. Following Freud, Marcuse contended that the sublimation of the drives was imperative even in the “freest of all possible societies.” Yet an advanced society did away with repressions that were “no longer required for the protection and amelioration of humanity.”Footnote ²¹ Though writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Marcuse was indebted to Reich in one respect especially, namely that Freud's “reality principle” (or super-ego) took on specific historical forms and that Freud, being a prisoner of his own “bourgeois-individualistic” world, could not appreciate this truth.

Marcuse argued that while many psychoanalytical terms—sublimation, projection, introjection, identification—suggested that the human drives were capable of experiencing change, most psychoanalysts were unwilling to recognize that change came about in a “historical-social world.”Footnote ²² He specifically berated Freud's refusal to recognize that different types of domination had given rise to different types of repression.Footnote ²³ This criticism went hand in hand with a sociological explanation of Freud's “limited” understanding. Because Freud belonged to a certain class, Marcuse opined, he was forced to legitimize the specific repression found in his society. For the same reason, Freud had to describe the struggle between the “pleasure principle” and the “reality principle” (or between the id and the super-ego) as one that would last forever.Footnote ²⁴

Marcuse offered both an alternative reading of the past and a utopian vision for the future. Historically, repression had manifested itself in many ways, but the most recent version was due to the exigencies of the labor market. According to this view, capitalism had led to a world in which the human body had become desexualized, sexuality for the sake of pure gratification had turned into a taboo, and the “performance principle” (Marcuse's term for the present-day, variable “reality principle”) had taken over as the all-consuming logic of social existence. Stunted in this way, sexuality merely survived in the shape of monogamy, or as the reduction of Eros to work. The conversion of sexuality into labor meant that humans no longer desired the former and learned to conform to the latter.Footnote ²⁵ This version of events differed from Reich's in that repression had not been imposed from above (capitalists in this story did not introduce monogamy as a means to suppress the majority population), but emerged as part of the logic of capitalism.

Marcuse's alternative was to replace the “performance principle” with the “pleasure principle.” One means of achieving this transvaluation of values was to promote dreams and perversions. In doing so, the imagination would “defend sexuality as an end in itself,” allowing human beings both to remove libido from the purview of performance and to challenge the very foundations of repressive society. Marcuse insisted that this shift from a supposed “reality principle” to the “pleasure principle” was a rational endeavor that relied heavily on conscious design rather than on unconscious acting out.Footnote ²⁶ His concept of “libidinal rationality,” first introduced in a discussion of Friedrich Schiller, saw reason not as the rival of the senses but as coterminous with them.Footnote ²⁷ The second means of reshaping existence was to reduce the working day to a minimum, thereby allowing libido to overcome the strictures of capitalism (i.e., monogamy) and regress to earlier stages of itself, specifically “pregenital polymorphous sexuality.”Footnote ²⁸ Both paths conjured up a vision whereby “reasonable” gratification would supersede “repressive reason”: in this new world, “reason and happiness would coincide.”Footnote ²⁹

Reich and Marcuse agreed that the “pleasure principle” was a biological given and the “reality principle” historically contingent. Where they differed was in formulating the consequences of a society in which the “pleasure principle” was no longer curtailed by a harsh, capitalist “reality principle.” For Reich, the free flow of libidinal energy culminating in “orgastic potency” was the be-all and end-all of a nonauthoritarian society. Marcuse chose a different course. Within a repressive culture, he warned, “a sudden release of suppressed sexuality might lead to an orgy of sex mania.” Only in a non-repressive society would sexual energy be “channeled into creating eroticized personalities, non-repressive institutions, and an aesthetic-erotic environment.”Footnote ³⁰ In other words, where Reich imagined the ideal of sexual release, Marcuse preferred the ideal of a society in which Eros and art would influence all aspects of life. This divergence owed much to their respective backgrounds: Reich was a psychoanalyst heavily indebted to the (economic) theory of energy flow; Marcuse was a philosopher who embraced Friedrich Schiller's ideal of aesthetic education.Footnote ³¹ Where political radicalism influenced the former, philosophical idealism informed the latter.Footnote ³²

The Student Movement and Freud

As members of the younger generation began to discover both thinkers, they usually failed to discriminate between their respective messages. Historians, too, have generally shied away from analyzing the possible motives for combining Marcuse and Reich in such a way as to harmonize their objectives. We are told, for example, that Reich's “influence on the new Left was unparalleled” and that “no other intellectual inspired the student movement in its early days” the way he did.Footnote ³³ Similarly, Marcuse has been called the “authority,” “star,” and “prophet” of the student movement, whose writings could be found in the recommended reading lists at universities throughout the country and whose ideas inspired such groups as Subversive Aktion.Footnote ³⁴ The ubiquity of both is beyond doubt: the first pirate edition to appear in West Germany was Wilhelm Reich's Massenpsychologie des Faschismus in 1965; many bootleg copies were to follow.Footnote ³⁵ Countless articles in New-Left journals such as Konkret, Das Argument, and Kursbuch made references to Reich and Marcuse alike.

So why did the student movement disregard these ideological differences? To begin with, both Reich and Marcuse offered an explanation of the past that was compatible with the attempt to banish National Socialism from West German society. If modern capitalism had come about as a result of sexual repression, if fascism was one form of modern capitalism, if fascism produced even more sexual repression, and if the effects of fascism could still be seen and felt in the country, then it was high time to act. As Dagmar Herzog has shown, the idea that Nazism could be explained with reference to sexual repression—the more sadistic the actions, the more repressed the sexuality—made both thinkers, and especially Reich, particularly appealing. For here was the possibility of combining a critique of the past with the ideal of a socialist future. What is more, in rediscovering Reich and Marcuse, activists saw themselves as rescuing one aspect of the anticapitalist and antifascist struggle that National Socialism had largely destroyed or driven into exile.Footnote ³⁶

Many student activists also preferred psychology as a depersonalized sociology, hoping that psychoanalysis without therapists, patients, and professional discourse could be employed as a weapon to attack the mass media, the nuclear family, and the authoritarian personality.Footnote ³⁷ In extreme cases, members of the student movement saw illness as a symptom of overall repression, and judged individual afflictions to be relevant only insofar as they vindicated the movement's diagnosis of society's malaise.Footnote ³⁸ In this respect, Reich and Marcuse were preferable to Freud, toward whom many student activists had a rather ambivalent approach—for several reasons.

First, questions of gender, early childhood education, and psychotherapy remained secondary to the revolutionary aim of destroying capitalist society itself.Footnote ³⁹ At the Free University of Berlin, for example, activists of the Kritische Universität resorted to Marx's Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie whenever they faced theoretical difficulties in dealing with psychological texts. As they concluded, the (economic) base always needed to precede the (psychological) superstructure.Footnote ⁴⁰ The political group in the Kinderladen Wilmersdorf II held similar views, arguing that while the pedagogical-psychological approach remained important, the main task was to address the implications of West Germany's class structure on the nature of child rearing.Footnote ⁴¹ Second, the reception of Freud rarely centered on the intricacies of his teaching. There were only a few attempts to study the history of psychoanalysis, comprehend its methodology, or appreciate its clinical work.Footnote ⁴² And since many students wished to overcome what they perceived to be their petty-bourgeois upbringing (backgrounds, they surmised, that had caused fascism in the first place), foregrounding sociological determinants as opposed to psychological causes appeared to be more attractive.Footnote ⁴³ Third, where Freud was mentioned, students often distinguished between a good and a bad Freud: the good (revolutionary) one had discovered infantile sexuality, the bad (bourgeois) one had advocated the acceptance of (decadent) cultural norms.Footnote ⁴⁴ Similarly, deference to Freud was intimately linked to his relationship with Marx, for the New Left recognized in the early Freud a kindred soul whose hermeneutics of suspicion relied, they believed, on the central Hegelian (and later Marxist) concept of alienation.Footnote ⁴⁵

By and large, however, it was not the “good” Freud that appealed to the students, but Freud as the progenitor of both Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse.Footnote ⁴⁶ And it is here that I would like to move away from preoccupations with the past (fascism) and examine an element that was compatible with the aims of many students at the time: for in suggesting that (unnecessary) repression could be eliminated, aggressiveness overcome, and society re-sexualized, Reich and Marcuse offered an alternative program that entailed the possibility of changing some but not all emotional and cultural norms within society. Rational planning and “bourgeois” self-restraint could be retained, even used, to create a setting for personal authenticity, self-expression, and sexual liberation. In the next section I shall focus specifically on the Kinderladen movement as an ideal site for exploring how Reich's and Marcuse's ideas were put into practice. The records of the Kinderladen movement are unique in that they allow us to observe how people on the ground contemplated the significance and feasibility of what they had read on the subject of child rearing. It is here that theory and practice came together, and it is here that we can catch a glimpse of the intensity with which theory was debated in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

An Emotional Encounter: Kinderläden and Marxist Psychoanalysis

Like members of the anti-psychiatry movement, Kinderladen activists were preoccupied with the so-called drives and their suppression within advanced civilization.Footnote ⁴⁷ But unlike the opponents of institutionalized psychiatry, the Kinderladen movement was wary of pitting healthy drives against unhealthy reason. Heavily influenced by socialist thought, they refused to privilege the “instincts” and instead attempted to merge rationality with desire.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, the views and actions of Kinderladen members entailed an earnestness that could be found elsewhere in the student movement—an earnestness that was typified by the work that went into reading and reflecting on different issues at the time.Footnote ⁴⁹

Founded in late 1967 (Frankfurt) and early 1968 (Berlin), the alternative child-care centers championed a range of causes, including solidarity, creativity, and dialogue.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet behind these causes lay a more general objective, namely the creation of a nonauthoritarian society. Their primary practical concern, it can be argued, was to do away with repression in society by recognizing the fact and promoting the exercise of childhood sexuality. Kinderladen activists usually based their projects on detailed readings of recommended literature, which sometimes included classic psychoanalytic material (Freud, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, René Spitz, Siegfried Bernfeld), but much more often Reich and Marcuse. This is how the Arbeitskreis Erziehung of the first Charlottenburg Kinderladen began its opening meeting in April 1968: “We agreed to start with Wilhelm Reich [. . .]. Everyone agreed to examine the question of sexuality as well as psychoanalysis as it pertains to society at large. Two readings were suggested: W. Reich's Psychoanalysis and Dialectical Marxism and Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.”Footnote ⁵¹

Upon reading this literature, Kinderläden activists in Stuttgart, Berlin, and Frankfurt summarized what they deemed to be the main lessons of psychoanalysis. To begin with, they acknowledged the Freudian tenet that sexuality played a major role in early childhood. In line with Reich, however, they maintained that this early interest in sexual matters was not only to be tolerated, but also encouraged.Footnote ⁵² Pedagogues associated with the Kinderladen movement were adamant that earlier emphases on cleanliness hindered such a course. In the so-called “anal phase,” for example, “obedience training” (Dressur) would invariably lead to compulsive behavior. It was therefore necessary, one educator wrote, to give “anal eroticism” its due so as to prevent the suppression of sexual and aggressive impulses from producing rigid personalities. Only in a society in which the id and super-ego collaborated without the repressive regime of the latter would true autonomy be realized.Footnote ⁵³ Reich's view that the free flow of sexual energy was necessary to prevent an authoritarian society or, alternatively, that an authoritarian society prevented the free flow of sexual energy lay behind this kind of thinking.

In a second step, Kinderladen activists recommended that children's “libidinal” feelings toward parents be redirected to the children of the respective care center. Again, taking their cue from the notion that the present “reality principle” (or Marcuse's “performance principle”) stifled sexuality and therefore made a non-repressive society impossible, they believed that the “fixation” on mothers and fathers would frustrate children's sexual desires; that this frustration would in turn be doubly damaging, coming as it did from the primary “love objects”; and that if frustration were to arise, child-parent relationships would turn sour. As the authors warned, no one could possibly wish to produce such ambivalence in children, whose independent sexuality required both autoeroticism and object-relations. For this reason, Kinderladen members proffered a dual strategy to ensure that these needs could be met. On the one hand, children would be permitted to masturbate; on the other, they would be supported in exploring their sexuality with the other children of the day-care centers.Footnote ⁵⁴

Both points—the freedom to explore sexuality and the diminution of parental interference—were intimately tied to the goal of self-regulation. As the Kinderladen activist Johannes Ehrhardt wrote, “to solve the problem of bringing together the contents and techniques of early childhood education, we appropriated Reich's concept of self-regulation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Nonauthoritarian society was to create personalities that controlled their own lives, members of the Kinderläden argued. The idea of self-regulation often became the movement's distinguishing mark, its source of identity vis-à-vis society at large. Self-regulation was to affect all areas of life, including drives, relationships, and day-to-day behavior.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the words of Kinderladen Stuttgart, “The central concept of antiauthoritarian education is the self-regulation of individuals and groups.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Activists in Frankfurt noted that intellectual understanding alone would not suffice to overcome dependence on societal strictures. Above all, children required special settings such as care centers to acknowledge the interests of those around them as well as their own needs.Footnote ⁵⁸ The prescription was clear: without rational direction, no satisfaction of desires.

Indeed, Kinderladen literature contained frequent references to the rationality of the project. Regine Dermitzel, a well-known proponent of antiauthoritarian education, reminded followers that the enterprise was contingent on understanding that parents remained the primary love objects for most children—and that therefore the super-ego function had to be performed with as little repression as possible. The goal, Dermitzel averred, was a simple one: to identify freely with parental norms and not because of irrational dread.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Charlottenburg I Kinderladen members agreed with this assessment. Once the children had gained enough distance from their parents, moving through life with greater confidence and freedom, it would become much easier for them to accept “rational arguments in a rational way.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, living in a collective meant establishing a “rational order” in which children learned to appreciate how the satisfaction of their own needs depended on the satisfaction of others’ needs. Kinderladen Charlottenburg I concluded that youngsters would comprehend the limitations to their freedom more readily if they no longer feared parental irrationality.Footnote ⁶¹ The pedagogue Jürgen Zimmer elaborated on this element of antiauthoritarian instruction during a talk held in late April 1968. Instead of feeding children with “normative stimuli,” he advised, parents and teachers ought to explain the “social consequences of alternative forms of behavior.” In doing so, children would acquire a certain amount of independence from established “normative systems,” which would prevent them from “becoming the victims of their own conditioning in later life.”Footnote ⁶² The success of this program, he added, would always depend on the self-reflection of parents and educators alike. Only by ridding themselves of their own ambivalent feelings would parents prevent children from developing feelings of guilt.Footnote ⁶³

All along, then, Kinderladen educators assumed that the so-called “reality principle” was not a permanent device, but that different societies produced different realities. Like Reich and Marcuse, they took the historicity of the super-ego for granted, advancing far-reaching proposals for changing the current state of affairs.Footnote ⁶⁴ Most important, Kinderladen activists called for an end to sexual repression. Repression in the shape of excessive cleanliness in the “anal phase” was to be discouraged, sexual expression in early childhood was to be promoted. Here they adopted the Reichean notion that the repression of “libidinal energy” would create neurotic, rigid personalities. The focus on sexual expression also betrayed Marcuse's influence, however: the free flow of sexual energy was not to be confined to the genital sphere only, but included the experience of “lust” in other spheres of life. Third, the practitioners of alternative education demanded a reduction of parental power. Finding alternative love objects, they suggested, would minimize ambivalence and engender rational children much more accepting of rules and standards.

The most striking feature of this program, I would like to argue, is that it took certain abstract ideas and applied them to what must have seemed a conveniently malleable arena: early childhood education. The project of establishing a society devoid of (“unnecessary”) repression not only relied heavily on difficult theory, but its advocates also assumed the priority of reason as part of their experiments. When many of these failed, the wisdom of their undertaking came into doubt. A member of Schöneberg 1 child-care center, for example, touched on this problem when he recounted the initial steps toward creating a Kinderladen in August 1968. “We expected,” Tilman Kayser began, “that the ‘creative powers’ of the children would suffice to educate and socialize them, if only we learned to contain ourselves.” Adults would only disturb the learning process. But seven months later things looked very different. Now parents had to concede that the group had neither educated nor socialized itself; instead of learning “how lustful it is to ‘understand,’” the children attacked each other and opted for immediate instinctual release as opposed to sublimation. Marcuse's ideal of an “eroticized existence,” where “lust” would be experienced in art, learning, and friendship, had given way to Marcuse's nightmare, where the sudden release of “suppressed sexuality” culminated in ungovernable aggression.Footnote ⁶⁵ Tilman Kayser criticized the naiveté that had infected the Kinderladen movement and exhorted his colleagues to accept that sublimation could only work under the tutelage of adults.Footnote ⁶⁶

A similar assessment appeared in 1970. “Why were the aims of the Kinderläden wrong?,” the report asked, only to answer the question with the same kind of self-assurance that had marked some of the Kinderladen literature itself. The unnamed author summarized the mistake as follows: still trapped in utopian socialism, Kinderladen supporters had opted for an idealistic stance and paid no heed to the “fundamental insights of scientific socialism.” This failure had occurred despite the common understanding that the contradiction between wage labor and capital was responsible for the current plight of the West German educational system. In a leap of faith, the advocates of alternative child rearing had tried to transform that system by changing certain aspects of the superstructure from below. The author concluded that by choosing authoritarianism in the monogamous nuclear family as well as educational institutions as their primary targets, the Kinderladen activists had ignored the dependence of authoritarian education on the socioeconomic situation: “lack of money, catastrophic living conditions, scarce medical and social care.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Although this piece betrayed the same penchant for rational planning as early Kinderladen literature, with the difference that the “base” rather than the “superstructure” was to be purposefully changed, it also manifested the difficulties inherent in exploiting theoretical works for everyday life, especially if the theory comprised Reichean or Marcusian abstractions and everyday life involved the education of children.Footnote ⁶⁸ When the Kinderladen movement emphasized the need to achieve reasonable comportment among its youngsters or when it reflected on what went wrong, it disclosed a preoccupation with rational Machbarkeit. References to “scientific socialism” may sound far removed from the “naiveté” of psycho-Marxist utopianism, but both shared the conviction that society could be altered through human design. And where socialist expertise dominated in the first instance, psychological knowledge prevailed in the second. Here we may qualify a more recent attempt to distinguish the New Left from traditional Social Democracy. When Gabriele Metzler argued that the social-liberal coalition under Willy Brandt distanced itself from the “irrationalism” of the new social movements, she took for granted that such a distinction existed at the time. But as the next section will demonstrate, it was not so much rationalism versus irrationalism that separated people such as Brandt from people such as Kunzelmann; it was their opposing cultural and emotional commitments that made the difference.Footnote ⁶⁹

Freudians and the Student Movement

One way of juxtaposing these values is to examine the reactions of the psychoanalytic establishment to student activism. As we shall see, traditional psychoanalysts often faced a dilemma in that they welcomed the social concerns of the younger generation, but refused to countenance its preference for Marcuse and Reich. The main figure in this dispute was Alexander Mitscherlich, the editor of West Germany's premier journal of psychoanalysis, Psyche; the director of the Sigmund-Freud-Institute in Frankfurt; and the recipient in 1969 of the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade).

The prominent psychoanalyst initially showed sympathy for the students. As society's dictates became ever more demanding, Mitscherlich wrote in 1968, young men and women felt the need to change the norms they believed were stifling human freedom. The “concentration of power and money,” the growing “dependence on large-scale organizations,” and the “conformism” found in the public and private sphere had caused the younger generation to revolt. Mitscherlich went so far as to combine Freud with Marx in his analysis of the situation: the conditions of work had prevented individuals from discovering themselves in their products; and this form of “alienation” had become especially problematic for adolescents from the upper echelons of society, whose “narcissism” could not stomach the transition from intense care in early childhood to widespread anonymity at university and in the workplace.Footnote ⁷⁰ This was not his only defense of student activism. During a lecture at the Hiltrup Police Academy, Mitscherlich and his colleague Klaus Horn sharply criticized the public for ignoring the causes of recent demonstrations and protests.Footnote ⁷¹ The students had been refused an ear in the past, they complained, and the “public” continued to show little understanding. In fact, ninety-nine percent of the population lived in a state of stupor, preferring “unhistorical, animalistic satisfaction” to political and intellectual engagement. So while the “students were blind to reality” in the West German state, the psychoanalysts explained, their isolation owed a great deal to the “indigenous aggressive climate in our country,” where violent fathers displayed pity for animals but brutality toward their sons.Footnote ⁷²

This defense notwithstanding, the majority of comments on the student movement proved to be much less sympathetic. At the beginning of his 1968 manuscript, Mitscherlich still tried to analyze student behavior as dispassionately as possible, acknowledging that the students had wished to retain the “vitality” and “incorruptibility” upon which their political goals rested. Yet in the course of their protests, many “active student rebels” had given in to their wounded “narcissism,” thereby denying empathy toward others and rejecting the necessary “repression of lust.” At this stage, he continued, it was not clear whether their actions stood for “infantile conduct” or whether such behavior was a “technical prerequisite for implementing new controversial ideas.”Footnote ⁷³ West Germany's leading psychoanalyst now criticized student activists on account of their inability to make the transition from the “pleasure principle” (“narcissism,” “infantile conduct”) to the “reality principle” (“repression of lust”).

Mitscherlich explained this behavior by referring to the student's “unresolved dependencies on their parents”: because many activists had remained locked in “infantile fixations,” they had failed to mature properly. This immaturity, in turn, meant that they could not understand that revolutions required the “rational working through of social reality.” Mitscherlich contrasted two forms of resistance to the established order: the first he called “altruistic,” which included an awareness of the consequences of social action; the second he described as “acting out” castration anxiety, which included “counterphobic” conduct. According to this reading, the male student activists, fearing punishment by the fathers, preempted this form of disciplining by attacking the fathers (society) first.Footnote ⁷⁴

In April 1969, the Sigmund-Freud-Institute organized a discussion on the student movement, the findings of which were to be used at a future event dedicated to the subject.Footnote ⁷⁵ Echoing Mitscherlich's earlier critique, the assembled psychoanalysts maintained that the students were prisoners of their hidden desires; this time around, however, the hidden desires did not involve “counterphobic” action, but the unconscious wish to restore the image of the strong father, who after a period of postwar de-idealization had to be reinstated. This new interpretation, which Mitscherlich endorsed as well, suggested that the assaults on society's institutions represented a rejection of the mother, who had been unable to protect the younger generation and who embodied the institutional authority that one currently derided. Whether the students feared their father's wrath or blamed their mothers for the sad state of the country, Mitscherlich and his colleagues believed that student activists betrayed an unresolved dependence on parental authority: they remained fixated, infantile, and narcissistic.Footnote ⁷⁶

Many years later, one of West Germany's leading psychoanalysts would disown these assessments of the situation, which reminded him of the way in which “mainstream” psychoanalysts before 1933 had ousted nonorthodox leftists from their ranks.Footnote ⁷⁷ And indeed, one way of interpreting Freudian reactions to the student movement would be to compare the situation in the late 1960s with that in the early 1930s: at the time, Freud and others had been concerned that the status of psychoanalysis as a “serious” science was at risk because left-wing analysts were purportedly making it into a “socialist” discipline. The popularity of Reich and Marcuse in the late 1960s may have similarly alarmed Mitscherlich and his associates, who did not wish to lose the “official” recognition they had recently gained.Footnote ⁷⁸ The reactions from within the psychoanalytic establishment would support such an explanation: not only did they contradict each other (“castration anxiety” versus “revenge on the mother,” for example), but they also made it difficult to evaluate specific aims by blaming student behavior on “unconscious acting out” or “unresolved unconscious conflicts.” Yet if we look at these reactions more closely, an alternative conclusion can be reached: like many other West Germans at the time, the psychoanalytic establishment rejected the emotional values associated with the student movement.

Self-Regulation in a New Key

To be sure, the Freudian community agreed with many student activists in condemning “parental despotism,” “alienation” in the workplace, and “illiberal” university traditions. In this respect, both Freudians and students supported the popular call for more transparency and participation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Mitscherlich and his colleagues also defended the notion of self-regulation, echoing as it did the very premise of psychoanalysis, to wit, that the enlightened ego curtail the power of the unruly id.Footnote ⁸⁰ In a similar vein, neither Kinderladen activists nor Freudians appealed to the holistic tradition within German psychology, a tradition that highlighted the creative side of the unconscious and repudiated attempts to control or manipulate the unconscious by privileging reason.Footnote ⁸¹ For student activists and Freudians alike, the “rationality” of their respective positions was beyond doubt.

Even so, when West Germany's Freudians chastised members of the student movement for failing to “repress their lust,” they were doing two things: invoking the debates of the late Weimar Republic and upholding specific cultural standards. In the first instance, the conflict between Freud the “pessimist” and Reich the “optimist” regarding the necessity of “instinctual repression” was reenacted in very similar terms. While student activists, and in particular members of the Kinderladen movement, agreed with Reich and Marcuse that the “reality principle” as it existed in bourgeois society could be replaced with a “reality principle” much more accommodating of sexual drives, Mitscherlich and his supporters sided with Freud's view that the “pleasure principle” had to be kept on a tight rein to safeguard “civilization.”

In the second case, members of the psychoanalytic establishment dissociated themselves from both the methods and the goals of the student movement, dismissing the idea that human beings could rationally orchestrate social change in such a sweeping fashion and doubting that radical personal autonomy in the shape of sexual freedom could ever be achieved. The students, by contrast, had high hopes that they could do both. They wanted, in the words of Rudi Dutschke and Dieter Kunzelmann, to overcome the contradiction between “gigantic theory in the brain and dwarfish practice at university, on the street, within the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), and in one's own life.”Footnote ⁸² The Kinderladen experiments were telling examples of this widespread wish to transform theory into practice. Because action was so important, student and Kinderladen activists embraced the “politicians” Reich and Marcuse and rejected the therapist Freud. It was this preference that raised the particular ire of Adorno, who claimed that the various attempts at fusing theory with practice were proof that the students belonged every bit as much to the “technocratic-positivistic” world as the West German public at large.Footnote ⁸³ While Adorno confirmed that many leading members of the student movement were far removed from advocating “irrationalism,” he was less interested in spelling out where they differed from “mainstream” society.

The conviction that Machbarkeit could extend well beyond liberal democratic compromise or therapeutic understanding, that rationality could be merged with desire, was one of the key areas in which student and Kinderladen activists were at odds with Freudian psychoanalysts and those who otherwise sympathized with the student aims of participatory democracy and educational reform. In many respects this was an attempt to combine two areas that had been traditionally kept apart: the bürgerlich notion of self-regulation and emotional control on the one hand, and the romantic notion of authenticity and self-expression on the other.Footnote ⁸⁴ The former was evident in the means by which change was to be realized—introspection and rational planning; the latter was visible in the objectives that were to be reached—sexual liberation and individual self-realization. This endeavor to create rationally a new emotional order was short-lived, not only because the means and the ends were particularly exacting, but also because a majority of West Germans did not envision transforming society in such a dramatic and wholesale manner. The dispute, however, did not end in the “victory” of the (psychoanalytic) “establishment” over the students. Rather, it can be argued that the ideal of mixing self-regulation with greater self-expression survived in less dramatic forms elsewhere, such as in the way parents in the 1970s began to reflect both on their own needs and those of their infants rather than following the advice advanced by the experts, or, more speculatively, in the way advertising and advice literature have come to suggest that authenticity and self-expression can be rationally planned.Footnote ⁸⁵ The afterlife of the dispute, in other words, is still with us today, albeit without the extreme emotional undercurrents informing the controversies of the day.