[Blatant rejection- unexpected appreciation- silent neglect : On the discussion of psychoanalysis in the psychiatric/neurologic literature during the Nazi period]

Abstract

In textbooks of psychiatry and/or neurology which appeared during the Nazi period, psychoanalysis is mostly treated unkindly, although they avoid antisemitic reasoning. Kurt Kolle accords Freud merely a historical role and favors the comprehensive psychotherapy cultivated from 1936 onwards at the "Göring Institute". There is however a remarkable contribution by Josef Reinhold (Jeseník/Czechoslovakia) showing considerable knowledge and demonstrating to which degree psychoanalysis could be acknowledged under the Nazi regime in an academic text written by a non-German author. Oswald Bumke who emerged in the 1920s as the most vehement critic of Freud expressed his rejection of psychoanalysis by completely deleting its discussion in the 1943 edition of his textbook. In a polemic pamphlet of 1938 he extended his fight to Adler and Jung in whom he found still too much Freud, albeit in disguise. His deputy Max Mikorey buttressed this attack by racist arguments. Both statements were part of the ongoing conflict of academic psychiatry with a Nazi psychotherapy increasingly gaining an independent standing. Prior to 1933, the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie had been the major forum of discussing psychoanalysis in psychiatric circles. This discussion petered out in 1934 after the Journal had published the first scholarly paper, which connected the profile of Freud's teachings with their being rooted in the Viennese upper Jewish bourgeoisie. There was a parallel process in the journal Der Nervenarzt.

Keywords: Antisemitism; Oswald Bumke; Psychiatry under the Nazi regime; Psychoanalysis (reception); Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie.