Assessing the effects of psychoanalysis on Weimar Germany is no small matter. Freud's contemporary detractors either claimed that his “movement” was pathetically insignificant or dangerously influential. Psychoanalysts, too, had difficulties in making up their minds. Sometimes, in moments of doom and gloom, they spoke of their utter isolation; at other times, when a conference went well or patient numbers rose, they spoke of their growing popularity. Today this ambivalence no longer prevails. The common image of German culture in the 1920s is such that, together with Bauhaus architecture, Expressionist cinema, or Epic Theater, psychoanalysis belongs to Weimar modernity. And thanks to this powerful image, it is no longer in doubt that Freud and his disciples played a significant, visible role in society. Veronika Fuechtner adopts this stance in her impressive study on the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI). In fact, she goes even further than that in positing the singularity both of psychoanalysis in the German capital and in the institute's subsequent impact on psychoanalysis in New York, Tel Aviv, and London. The question is whether she is right.

Fuechtner's first claim, namely that Weimar culture was “inseparable from the psychoanalytic discourse on war neurosis, sexuality, and criminality specific to Berlin” (p. 1), is difficult to sustain. The problem here is twofold: equating Berlin with Weimar culture on the one hand, and equating statements by psychoanalysts with the interests of most Germans on the other. Berlin was not Weimar. Freudians such as Siegfried Bernfeld, Max Eitingon, and Karl Abraham may have been instrumental in establishing psychoanalysis as the next big thing in the metropolis, but elsewhere in the country, the “movement” was hardly noticed. Even in such large towns as Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, and Leipzig, let alone Düsseldorf, Hannover, and Nuremberg, Freudian psychoanalysts never managed to set up institutes of their own, if they could be found in these cities at all. Psychoanalysis was not Germany. When Abraham commented in 1919 that the people of Berlin were now “clamouring for psychoanalysis” (p. 9), he engaged in the typical discourse of the time: elation followed by despondency followed by elation. Using Freudian sources to gauge Freudian success is methodologically troubling, to say the least.

The author's second claim, namely that the BPI had a formative influence on Critical Theory, psychoanalytic technical standards, and Freudian institutions worldwide is much more convincing. Many Freudian emigrants to Palestine, for example, were trained in Berlin, and once they had settled in the “Holy Land,” they began to meet regularly and reestablish ties with such famous former patients as the writer Arnold Zweig. Karen Horney, active at the BPI and a vocal critic of psychoanalytic conceptions of femininity, continued her revisionary work in New York, where she challenged Freud's sexism as well as his philosophical pessimism. The former Berlin Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, who changed his name to Charles R. Hulbeck in 1939, became an active member of Horney's American Institute for Psychoanalysis and its Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Later he would embrace Jungian analysis and existential psychoanalysis alike. These passages on the transfer of BPI traditions to distant lands are a stark reminder of how much more political was the psychoanalytic enterprise in Berlin compared to its better-known, but predominantly conservative counterpart in Vienna.

Fuechtner's central chapters on the interaction between Berlin's avant-garde and the BPI offer fascinating glimpses into the city's experimental culture during these years. The section on Alfred Döblin in particular allows us to follow the writer's involvement with Freudian thinking—from his own analysis to his work at the BPI and Schloß Tegel clinic to his support for the Association of Socialist Physicians—and how this experience affected the writing of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The section on the self-declared “wild analyst” Georg Groddeck, moreover, recounts the reception of his extremely successful psychoanalytic novels, including The Soul Searcher. On friendly terms with such principal figures as Horney and Ernst Simmel, Groddeck popularized psychoanalysis with his esoteric interpretations of the unconscious, combining Freudian and Jungian sources in an effort to identify the Christian nature of the “id.”

Fuechtner is especially successful at tracing the complicated transcultural, transregional, and transnational impact of the BPI on diverse fields of study within the wider context of psychoanalytic theory and practice. It is here that she moves well beyond earlier works that have focused either on the socialism of Bernfeld, Simmel, Otto Fenichel, and Wilhelm Reich; the introduction of free psychoanalytic clinics in Berlin and Vienna; the introduction of a specifically psychoanalytic training for both analysts and analysands at the BPI; or the appropriation of Freudian language and imagery within psychoanalytically informed literary circles. In integrating these elements, the author has thus related an extremely absorbing story of “the yet unshaken belief in the revolutionary potential of psychoanalysis” as part of the “excitement of seemingly unlimited possibility of creative experimentation” (p. 179).