BOOKS
147
journal
Psyche
recently have maintained that she was more feared
than trusted . Furthermore, both Gorings must have cooperated with
high-level Nazis, I would think, in order to obtain all that informa–
tion on people suspected of subversion - even if they did alert a few
of them to impending trouble. Had she been in the clear, I would
add, there would have been no reason for Felix Boehm or Harold
Schultz-Hencke, two leading postwar Freudians in Berlin , to state
in 1948, that she ought not be admitted to the Deutsche Psycho–
analytische Gesellschaft .
Cocks draws fascinating portraits of the psychotherapists who
navigated a perilous course between the proliferating Nazi Party and
state bureaucracies. And he demonstrates how they were able to ad–
vance their institutional and professional interests. Their claims for
German
Seelenheilkunde
elicited trust from the Hitler Youth, the
League of German Girls, the Reich Criminal Police Office , the SS,
and from individual members of the Nazi hierarchy - some of whom
counted on the therapists to save endangered relatives. But, this did
not happen without a good dose of cooperation with Nazi policies
aimed to "improve" the race . The therapists accepted the slogan "Ein
Yolk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer." And they bridged their Jungian and
Adlerian differences, and consulted Freud's works, in order to fuse
psychological wellbeing with Nazi values and attitudes, and to help
mold the German
Uebermensch .
If
Cocks has been too soft on these German psychotherapists,
this may well be because he was the first person to dig into the
available historical documents and to inspire confidence in the sur–
viving protagonists - and because so many of them have died. In–
deed, he has performed an enormous service: long before this book
was published , his original dissertation inspired a number of Ger–
mans to reexamine the history of psychotherapy during the Nazi
period.
It
was he who turned a taboo subject into a hot topic. Walter
Brautigam, for example, who was analyzed at the Goring Institut
between 1942 and 1943 , recently recalled his experiences. He in–
sisted, contradicting criticisms by Elizabeth Brainin and Isidor
Kaminer, that the psychoanalysts never became tools of the rulers,
but that, instead, they cooperated only by helping to "turn inept weak–
lings into capable individuals" for the sake of the state . Brautigam
recounted how he had been free to choose the Freudian Fritz Rie–
mann as his analyst and, like Cocks, indicated how the war increas–
ingly dominated the institute's activities . Thus he seems to concur,
for the most part, with those who in the debates in
Psyche
are white-
