BOOKS
COLLECTIVE AMNESIA
PSYCHOTHERAPY IN THE THIRD REICH: THE GORING INSTITUTE.
By Geoffrey Cocks.
Oxford Un iversity Press. $24.95.
In September 1940, Matthias Heinrich Goring, Adlerian
psychoanalyst and director of the German Institute for Psychogenic
Research and Psychotherapy, wrote to Adolf Hitler:
Deeply impressed by the stupendous events of this year, the Ger–
man Medical Association for Psychotherapy is holding its third
meeting under the theme "Psyche and Performance." We assure
you, my Fuehrer, that we , too, will summon all our expertise to
increase militancy and valiancy, by strengthening the will and
pleasure of work.
Ten years later, the psychoanalyst Werner Schwidder, report–
ing on psychotherapy between 1933 and 1945, stated that the mem–
bers of this institute had been engaged in "therapeutic and scientific
work [and] had not been influenced by the political aims of those
days."
Did Goring playa double game, and if he did, how could he do
so while being financed by such agencies as the German Labor
Front, the Luftwaffe, the Reichs R esearch Council, and by the SS–
Lebensborn (charged with improving the German race)? Or, did
Schwidder suffer from amnesia? And if so, why did no one step forth
to challenge his story? In other words, what were the circumstances
that led to this wholesale
stillschweigen,
to this collusion?
Geoffrey Cocks, in
Psychotherapy in the Third Reich,
supplies
many of the answers, by describing how professionalism was bent to
ideology. This focus allows him a certain amount of objectivity –
which has led reviewers to remind us that survival between the
cracks of an evil regime is bound to contaminate the survivors. Still,
why did it take so long to publish this fascinating 1975 Ph.D. disser–
tation about the institutionalization of psychotherapy? And why did
we not know for nearly forty years that the Nazis co-opted Freud's
ideas after they ousted all the Jewish psychoanalysts and publicly
burned their books? Who was being protected and from what?
Propaganda by the Nazis before the Second World War had
cast Hitler as the historical personification of the nation and of every
