The Repressed Returns

For Wilhelm Reich, it was clear: psychoanalysis and fascism are incompatible. As a politically engaged psychoanalyst, he expressed this conviction in word and deed long before 1933. Having fled into exile, he published his seminal book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, in 1933. Before picking up the new edition of this book, one should know about the historical context in which it was conceived, published, received – and the ongoing controversial interpretations it has sparked decades after its publication. Specifically, this is not only about a text analysing the mass psychological conditions that enabled a ‘leader’ to ‘seize power’ – it is also about the ‘fate’ of psychoanalysis under Hitler, and about attempts, motivated by association politics, to defame the author and his work.

 

To be able to continue dealing with the mysteries of the unconscious undisturbed, and despite what was happening in the National Socialist state, the Freudians met on Swiss soil in 1934. Here, from August 26 to 31, the 13th International Psychoanalytic Congress took place in Lucerne. By this time, anyone who wanted to know knew whose bells had tolled in Germany. In the spring of 1933, the writings of disfavoured authors had been burned, and the first concentration camp had been opened in Dachau. The newspaper Münchner Neueste Nachrichten reported the events on March 21, 1933, as follows: “Here all communist and – if need be – Reichsbanner and Marxist officials who pose a threat to the security of the state will be rounded up.” In other words, the first concentration camp on German soil targeted Hitler’s political opponents, regardless of which ‘racial’ group the National Socialists assigned them to. Three quarters of a year later, on January 4, 1934, the Vienna-based Arbeiter-Zeitung reported details of the atrocities committed in this camp under the headline Fünfzig Ermordete in Dachau (Fifty Murdered in Dachau), such as prisoners being hanged from trees, beaten, or killed while defenceless. Was Freud aware of such reports? We do not know. What is certain, however, is that he knew someone who had narrowly escaped concentration camp imprisonment very well: Wilhelm Reich.

 

Reich’s partner at the time, the dancer Elsa Lindenberg, had her domicile in the Berlin ‘Künstlerkolonie’, an artist colony and a stronghold of resistance against Hitler. Reich was a member of the communist cell there, which included the writer Arthur Koestler, the philosopher Ernst Bloch, and the actor-singer Ernst Busch. Only a few days after the Reichstag fire, a large-scale raid took place, as reported by the Völkischer Beobachter on March 15, 1933: “This morning, the large block on the Südwestkorso in Wilmersdorf, which bears the beautiful name ‘Künstlerkolonie,’ was cordoned off and raided by a detachment of the police force [...]. Since its existence, this building complex housed an elite selection of the very worst sort of intellectuals and commune-living hate preachers, who composed their songs of hate against the awakening Germany in luxurious apartments, protected by iron-clad doors.” By this time, Wilhelm Reich was no longer in Berlin, because he was one of the “Austrian nationals” who, due to “their activity in the communist movement”, were on a list transmitted by the Gestapo to the Federal Police Headquarters in Vienna in May 1933. To avoid arrest, Reich had fled there. Max Eitingon, chairman of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG, German Psychoanalytical Society), who emigrated (to Palestine) in the summer of 1933, was also aware that Reich was in danger. Wilhelm Reich was “informed” that he should “not enter” the Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut (BPI, Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute) “any longer so that if he were to be arrested, this could not happen in our premises”. So says one of the reports prepared by Felix Boehm – who took over as Eitingon’s ‘Aryan’ successor as DPG chairman in November 1933 – for Ernest Jones, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), to keep him informed about the ‘fate’ of psychoanalysis under Hitler.

 

After his escape, Reich gave a lecture in Vienna at the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors in Austria on April 7, 1933, on The Mass Psychology of the National Movement (one of the precursors of the book discussed here). On April 27, Anna Freud wrote to Ernest Jones that Reich had given “political speeches with psychological overtones at communist meetings during his brief stay here”. She added: “Everyone knows what this can mean for the analytical Association in present times [...] My father [...] cannot wait to get rid of Reich as a member. He is offended by the abduction of psychoanalysis into the political realm, where it does not belong.” Three days earlier, on April 24, during a board meeting of the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (WPV, Vienna Psychoanalytic Society), Reich had been asked to refrain from publicly presenting his position – what he termed “sex-economy” in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, based “on the sociological foundation of Marx and the psychological one of Freud” – in reference to psychoanalysis. In Reich's words: “The executive committee of the Society demanded that, in light of the present political situation, I should cease my political work and sociological-scientific publishing activities. [...] I declared that I could not make such a commitment.”

 

 

Incompatibility of psychoanalysis and fascism

As Wilhelm Reich wrote in the Zeitschrift für politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie (Journal for Political Psychology and Sex-Economy), which he edited in exile from May 1934 onward, he was certain about the “incompatibility of psychoanalysis and fascism”. Therefore, he had already called for the self-dissolution of the DPG in the spring of 1933, in order to prevent any possible collaboration between psychoanalysts and the National Socialist regime. Otto Fenichel, who had initially rejected Reich’s demand, later deeply regretted his decision in light of the DPG officials’ policy towards the National Socialist regime. On June 1, 1935, he wrote in one of the Rundbriefe (Circular Letters) to his leftist Freudian allies “that in the interest of analysis [...] it would have been best to dissolve the Institute and the Society [...]”. In the Circular Letter dated April 16, 1939, he again expressed regret over his initial hesitation: “It is of no use, but one must admit that the only possible solution would have been to dissolve the German Psychoanalytical Society as early as spring 1933, a proposal Reich advocated, while [at the time] Edith J.[acobsohn] and I had been against it.”

 

On the one hand, there was the supposedly ‘neutral’ psychoanalysis represented by Freud – on the other hand, there was the supposedly ‘politically biased’ psychoanalysis blamed on Reich: To this day, this contrast continues to shape the ongoing debate about the history of psychoanalysis during the Nazi era. Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be understood as an “impartial instrument”, comparable to the “infinitesimal calculus”, that could be applied in all political circumstances as long as it was not forbidden. In contrast, Reich sought to use psychoanalysis as an instrument of enlightenment, revealing the psychosocial conditions of authoritarian domination (in this case, this meant naming and explaining the conscious and unconscious motives underlying the willingness to construe National Socialist ideology as “salvation”).

 

Wilhelm Reich – alongside his precursor Otto Gross and his contemporary Erich Fromm – was one of the pioneers in the study of the authoritarian personality. However, according to the historiography motivated by the politics of the association, the orchestrated exclusion of Wilhelm Reich from the psychoanalytic organisations in 1933/34 was not due to his achievement, which from today’s perspective would be considered pioneering, but rather because he had become a 'bad' psychoanalyst. Robert Waelder, who had previously undergone training analysis with Anna Freud and had participated in the 1934 Lucerne Congress meeting of the IPV committee that rubber-stamped Reich’s exclusion from the DPG – a decision made in 1933 – expressed a harsh opinion in a review of the exile journal edited by Reich: “To be clear, I would like it said that the ‘scientific’ endeavours here have nothing more to do with psychoanalysis, that no one who follows Reich on his path has the right to refer to psychoanalysis any longer [...].”

 

On April 17, 1933, just ten days after Reich’s lecture on The Mass Psychology of the National Movement in Vienna, Boehm met with Freud to discuss the DPG’s further policy. “The conversation was very cordial”, says a report by Boehm for Jones (from which the following quotations are also taken). As they parted, Freud expressed, among other things, the following “wish”: “Free me from Reich”. Upon learning of this “wish” (presumably from Boehm himself), Eitingon wrote to Freud that should Boehm indeed “[have] received the order to expel Reich, he will do so with the tact that would certainly spoil our joy in the accomplished fact altogether”. He then added: “We should not throw Reich out just yet [...].”

 

Upon returning to Berlin, Boehm promptly took action to fulfil Freud's “wish” in a way that proved Eitingon’s fears right – and paved the way for the self-destruction of psychoanalysis in the National Socialist state. Boehm’s report for Jones states: “Freud's statement remained at the forefront of my mind every step of the way, namely, that every effort should be made to preserve the work of Ps[ycho]-A.[nalysis] in Germany, and that no authority should be given free rein to ban our activities.” If Boehm sought to prevent psychoanalysis from being banned (or better, to ensure the continuing existence of psychoanalytic institutions), he had to unequivocally distance himself from Reich and his writings, in which Reich described the psychosocial preconditions of authoritarian domination with reference to psychoanalysis and Marxism, as exemplified in the 1932 pamphlet Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral. Zur Geschichte der sexuellen Ökonomie (The Invasion of Sexual Morality: A History of Sexual Economics).

 

Boehm was acquainted with an influential figure in Berlin – and sought to leverage this influence: Otto von Kursell, a party comrade and S.A. man, formerly Boehm’s corps brother in Riga, a participant in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and thus a bearer of the ‘Blood Order’, and now an editorial member of the Völkischer Beobachter. “Knowing him as a thoroughly reliable personality, knowing that he held me in high esteem, and considering that he had now become a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and an advisor in the Ministry of Cultire [sic!], I visited him there to find out what the fate of psychoanalysis in Germany might be.” Boehm took great pains to “enlighten” Kursell about the true “essence of psychoanalysis”. This was no easy task, as “K.'s previous view of Ps. A. was that it was Jewish-Marxist filth” (“jüdisch-marxistische Schweinerei”). Obviously, Kursell equated ‘the’ psychoanalysis with the positions Reich had advocated in numerous public speeches and publications up to that point. Boehm's report states: “As is well known, Reich had frequently appeared publicly as a communist and a psychoanalyst, presenting his views as the results of psychoanalysis. In Berlin, countless leaflets had warned against Reich. I had to fight against this prejudice [that ‘the’ psychoanalysis was synonymous with Reich's positions].” A year later (on November 15, 1935), Boehm reiterated Kursell’s view in a letter to Jones, writing “that he was very well informed about psychoanalysis and had come to the conclusion that it was Jewish-Communist filth. You must know that in the spring of 1933, tens of thousands of leaflets were distributed and pasted in public places and streets with the message ‘Protect our youth from Reich's cultural disgrace'!”

 

However, Boehm now informed the Nazi official Kursell that Reich had been “expelled from our society in the summer of 1933”. The letter to Jones continues: “The absolute certainty that there was no one in our circle who could endanger us with their ties to communism was, for me, the essential basis for opening negotiations.” Can the link between Reich's expulsion from the DPG and the attempted ‘rescue’ of psychoanalysis under Hitler be stated any clearer? I have pointed out this connection several times – such as in the essay Psychoanalysis and National Socialism. Banned or Brought into Conformity? Break or Continuity? (International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2003). Mitchell G. Ash, inspired by this contribution, remarked: “Nitzschke 2003 claims [emphasis added by B. N.] that as early as 1933, Felix Boehm mobilised Reich’s expulsion from the International Psychoanalytical Association to avert a ban on psychoanalysis under National Socialism – in order to subsequently surrender the independence of Freudian psychoanalysis step by step. Here, the desire to view psychoanalysis as an emancipatory theory and practice per se is combined with open sympathy for Reich’s critique of capitalism – an attitude that has apparently been upheld since the 1970s to this day” (Materialien zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Wien 1938-1945. Frankfurt/M., 2012). At this point, Giovanni Trapattoni’s famous speech comes to mind: “What allow Strunz?” And then he continued: “I have finish!” And what allow Nitzschke? He still has not finish! Because now I even “claim” that Freudians were allowed to criticise capitalism not only “since the 1970s”, but as early as 1927 – and not with reference to Reich, but to Freud, who wrote at the time: “It goes without saying that a civilisation which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied [...] neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.” And didn’t Freud himself characterise psychoanalysis as an “emancipatory theory and practice per se”? He recommended it in 1933 (!) “on account of the truths it contains” (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse/New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis).

 

 

Psychoanalysis and Weltanschauung

In his effort to ‘save’ psychoanalysis, Boehm acted in constant consultation and agreement with Ernest Jones and Anna Freud (who served as a proxy for her father, who was suffering from palate cancer). In doing so, and to quote Ash again, “step by step” he surrendered the “independence itself of Freudian psychoanalysis”. The first step – Boehm’s conversation with Kursell – was followed by the second step, Kursell’s instruction that Boehm should once again put in writing the arguments he had presented to justify the usefulness of psychoanalysis for the National Socialist state. Boehm passed this instruction on to Carl Müller-Braunschweig, who was well-read in matters of Weltanschauung and became Boehm’s ‘Aryan’ deputy and treasurer of the DPG in November 1933. As such, and with the active support of Jones, he sought to collect the outstanding scholarship debts of Jewish DPG members who had fled Germany.

 

In the memorandum requested by Kursell, Müller-Braunschweig explained psychoanalysis to the Nazi rulers as follows: “As a result of the political events, another change has now occurred in the membership [of the DPG], insofar as a number of members have recently gone abroad [that is: they had to flee from their persecutors – B. N.]. Fortunately, the ‘Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft’ is able to fill the resulting gaps in the Institute’s teaching staff with a new generation eager to work.” Distancing from Wilhelm Reich and his view of psychoanalysis was an important aim of this document. Although he was not explicitly named, it was clear who was being referred to when the text stated that psychoanalysis “is a dangerous instrument in the hands of a destructive spirit [i.e., Wilhelm Reich], and that it is therefore crucial whose hands guide this instrument”. However, the text continued, in the right hands, psychoanalysis was constructive, as it promoted self-control. In Müller-Braunschweig’s words, this meant: “Psychoanalysis endeavours not only [...] to turn sexually incapable people into sexually capable ones, but in general, in all areas of human existence, to turn incapable wimps into people able to cope with life, people with inhibited instincts into instinctive people, fantasists out of touch with life into people who can face up to reality, people who are at the mercy of their impulses into people who are capable to control them, people who are incapable of love and selfish into people who are able to love and to make sacrifices, and those who are uninterested in life as a whole into people who serve it. Therefore, it makes an excellent contribution to education and is able to serve the recent new lines meaningfully.” This passage was aimed at Reich’s book Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend (1932, The Sexual Struggle of Youth), “which addresses the lowest instincts of immature human beings and seeks to undermine the obligation to morality, decency, and self-control in the young person”, as the Völkischer Beobachter wrote on March 2, 1933, one of whose editorial board members was Kursell, who until then had held the opinion that ‘the’ psychoanalysis was “Jewish-Marxist filth” and who now needed to be taught otherwise.

 

Psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method through which “incapable wimps” were to be transformed “into people able to cope with life" and who “serve life as a whole”: this objective even impressed the cousin of Reichsmarschall Heinrich Matthias Göring, who, as the chairman of the Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy) – which moved into the premises of the Berliner Psychoanalytische Institut in 1936 – said at a members’ meeting: “Unfortunately, no one before Freud put the knowledge of the unconscious to practical use. Freud’s achievement is to demonstrate the possibility of such an application. His method has become common property of all psychotherapists. But much more important than the method is the Weltanschauung”. In Göring’s words, this meant: “National Socialism today claims everything for itself, the whole person, and even science [...]. It should not be difficult for us psychotherapists to grasp the importance of the Weltanschauung, since without Weltanschauung, psychotherapy cannot take place.”

 

At a meeting held in The Hague on October 1, 1933, Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig presented the memorandum to the IPV president. After Anna Freud had also been informed of the meeting’s outcome, Müller-Braunschweig published part of the memorandum on October 22, 1933, under the title Psychoanalyse und Weltanschauung (Psychoanalysis and Weltanschauung) in the antisemitic journal Reichswart – Nationalsozialistische Wochenschrift u. Organ des Bundes Völkischer Europäer (pp. 2-3). Wilhelm Reich reprinted this article in the exile journal he edited, with the ironic title ‘Unpolitische’ Wissenschaft (‘Unpolitical’ Science) and commented: The “board member of the German psychoanalytic branch association, Dr. Carl Müller-Braunschweig, accomplished the Gleichschaltung of the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis with the Hitlerian Weltanschauung. The burning of Freud’s books in the ‘Third Reich’ had apparently not demonstrated the incompatibility of psychoanalysis and fascism clearly enough to the aforementioned board member [...].” Decades after the end of the Nazi regime, Michael Schröter, co-editor of a Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse (Journal for the History of Psychoanalysis), came to a very different assessment. Regarding my agreement with Reich’s view, he wrote: “Nitzschke believes [...] the article ‘Psychoanalysis and Weltanschauung’, published by Müller-Braunschweig in 1933, was ‘inspired by the spirit of the National Socialist ‘Weltanschauung’. [...] I cannot understand this judgment. In Müller-Braunschweig’s text, there are a few frequently quoted sentences describing the therapeutic goal in ingratiating language that later entered the ‘Wörterbuch des Unmenschen’ [Dictionary of the Inhuman] [...]; the rest consists of analytical commonplaces. Reducing psychoanalysis to psychotherapy is not a recent concession but rather follows on from an older Berlin line [...]. In short: unlike Reich, politics do not influence the factual substance here; no reason for a banning curse in the IPV” (emphasis added by B. N.).

 

By reprinting the Reichswart article, Wilhelm Reich sought to document the political implications of a supposedly apolitical text. The Mass Psychology of Fascism says the following about a scientist who believes he can continue to work ‘neutrally’ under any political conditions: “His being unpolitical not only contributes to the strength of political reaction but equally plays a part in his own downfall” (see Bernd Nitzschke: Psychoanalyse als “un”-politische Wissenschaft. Die politischen Konsequenzen der “Weltanschauungs”-Debatte vor 1933 für das Verhalten einiger offizieller Repräsentanten der deutschen (DPG) und der internationalen (IPV) Psychoanalyse während der Zeit des “Dritten Reiches”. In Zeitschrift für psychosomatische Medizin und Psychoanalyse, 1991. [Psychoanalysis as an “un”-political science. The political consequences of the “Weltanschauung” debate before 1933 for the behaviour of some official representatives of German (DPG) and international (IPV) psychoanalysis during the time of the “Third Reich”]). After Helmut Dahmer rediscovered the reprint of the – long forgotten – Reichswart article in Reich’s exile journal, he republished it in 1983 in Psyche, where he (still) served as co-editor at the time (a few years later he lost this position – see Bernd Nitzschke: Vom Höhenflug zum Sturzflug. Zum Jahresende ein Skandal: Das Ende der Zeitschrift „Psyche“, DIE ZEIT 1/1992 [From soaring to nosediving. The end-of-year scandal: The end of the journal “Psyche”]). Dahmer added a commentary to the republication of the article, explaining the historical context in which the article was written. This sparked a storm of indignation – which, however, was not directed against Müller-Braunschweig but against Dahmer.

 

 

... true, real, genuine analysts

Prominent representatives of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (DPV, German Psychoanalytical Association) insulted him as the “Simon Wiesenthal of psychoanalysis”, “Marxist McCarthy”, “Nazi hunter”, and the like. At the 34th International Psychoanalytic Congress in Hamburg in 1985, IPV Vice President Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel joined in this chorus. In a pseudo-question subtly introducing an assertion, she claimed that “70%” of the articles in Psyche were “socio-political […], as the editor-in-chief, who is a Marxist sociologist, and who is neither an analyst nor has he ever undergone analysis, frankly confesses”. By referring to the supposedly ‘frank confession’ – which was, in fact, entirely fabricated by Chasseguet-Smirgel – she alluded to accusations against Wilhelm Reich at the time, alleging that he had inadmissibly mixed psychoanalysis with politics. Furthermore, by stating that Dahmer was “neither an analyst nor has he ever undergone analysis”, she obviously sought to question his competence to judge psychoanalysis properly. The Archbishop of Cologne could also argue in this way: A critic, who is neither baptised nor attends Mass on Sundays, lacks the competence to judge sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s reference to the “Marxist sociologist” Dahmer is also piquant for another reason: while Wilhelm Reich had already criticised Stalinism as a paradigm of authoritarian rule during the Moscow Trials in the 1930s, she herself remained a member of the Communist Party of France – loyal to Moscow – until 1956.

 

Why were there so many disparaging personal attacks against Dahmer? Apparently, the return of a repressed chapter in the association’s history posed a threat: In his commentary on the Reichswart article, Dahmer had exposed the emperor’s new clothes for what they were – and Müller-Braunschweig, the “founding father” of the DPV, as Friedrich-Wilhelm Eickhoff, co-founder of the Archiv zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse, described him, was suddenly laid bare. Eickhoff claimed that in his commentary, Dahmer had wanted to question the “legitimacy of the DPV, and thereby also the laboriously acquired identity of its members” (see https://www.academia.edu/40509717, retrieved October 10, 2020). In 1949, in the Preface by the Editor of a Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse (a journal of which only two issues were published), the “founding father” had portrayed himself and psychoanalysis as victims of National Socialism: “For us, the name of Freud, the very appearance of the founder of modern depth psychology and the work he left behind, constitute an obligation. This obligation presses all the more on us, because – here in Germany – there was a time when his name and work were ostracised. [...] In 1936, the ‘Berliner Psychoanalytische Institut’ [...] had to align with the general German psychotherapeutic organisation of the ‘Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie’.”

 

Not a word about the fact that Müller-Braunschweig had actively supported the now-lamented ‘alignment’ at the time. In 1935, under the title National Socialist Ideas and Psychoanalysis, he wrote: “The German psychoanalysts wish for the National Socialist government to benevolently ensure a fruitful continuation of their scientific and therapeutic work. They wish this all the more because, since the National Socialist regime, conditions have been created to such an extent as to allow the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft to give the Society a truly German face [...]. Above all, we believe we can make valuable contributions toward achieving the goal of a ‘German psychotherapy’.”

 

The publicly acclaimed resurrection of Müller-Braunschweig as the ‘unpolitical’ guardian of Freudian psychoanalysis under Hitler, and the chosen “founding father” of the DPV, took place in 1949 at the 16th International Psychoanalytical Congress in Zurich. Ernest Jones, then still president of the IPV, addressed the congress audience, explaining that it had not been easy to stand by Freud in Germany between 1933 and 1945, but that “some analysts have remained true, real, genuine analysts [...]. Dr. Müller-Braunschweig gave an excellent example of this yesterday.” Jones was alluding to a lecture Müller-Braunschweig had given the previous day. In that lecture, he did not castigate the betrayal of Freudian theory based on the writings he had produced during the Nazi period; instead, he now criticised the positions already held by Harald Schultz-Hencke before 1933, positions that would later be known as neo-Freudianism. It is worth noting that he had a score to settle with Schultz-Hencke. When Müller Braunschweig and Boehm first attempted to replace Eitingon as DPG chairman in May 1933, Schultz-Hencke was one of the few ‘Aryans’ who voted against the two careerists. Käthe Draeger, who had actively participated in the resistance against the Hitler regime, later attested: “According to his political convictions, he was not a National Socialist, and he demonstrated personal courage.” Schultz-Hencke had helped Wilhelm Reich and Lotte Liebeck escape, and he maintained contact with John Rittmeister – who had undergone training analysis with him and was executed for his involvement in the resistance – and with Edith Jacobsohn, who was arrested for high treason.

 

 

Alliance with the workers’ parties

On the one hand, psychoanalysis was adapted to the Nazi regime; on the other hand, there was the incompatibility of psychoanalysis and fascism, a position advocated by Reich not only in Berlin, but already in Vienna. The starting point of his politicisation was a demonstration in front of Vienna’s Palace of Justice in July 1927, during which more than eighty people were shot and hundreds injured. At this time, Wilhelm Reich was already head of the WPV Technical Seminar, and, in this position, had significant influence on the training of younger psychoanalysts. Bruno Bettelheim, who attended Reich’s lectures at the time, later remarked in an interview about Anna Freud’s Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen (1936, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence): “[...] these were trains of thought that had emerged in the seminars in which Willi Reich spoke and in which she participated as a student.” After the demonstration was crushed, Reich joined the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP, Social Democratic Workers’ Party). Shortly thereafter, he became a member of the Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (KPÖ, Communist Party of Austria). From that point on, he was among the Jewish intellectuals whom Arnold Zweig would later describe as having formed an ‘alliance’ with the workers’ parties to defend civilisation. From 1928 onwards, he led the Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung (Socialist Society for Sex Counselling and Research) together with dermatologist Marie Frischauf-Pappenheim. In 1929, a report on The Position of Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union (Die Stellung der Psychoanalyse in der Sowjetunion), based on Reich’s Notes from a Study Tour in Russia (the subtitle; Notizen von einer Studienreise in Rußland), appeared in the journal Die psychoanalytische Bewegung (see Galina Hristeva & Philip W. Benett: Wilhelm Reich in Soviet Russia: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and the Stalinist reaction. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0803706X.2015.1125018, retrieved December 01, 2020). In the same year, he published the article “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis” in the journal Under the Banner of Marxism. In 1930, he gave a foundational speech at the founding congress of the World League for Sexual Reform in Vienna. Drawing on experiences from sex counselling centres, he demonstrated connections between repressive sexual morality, authoritarian education, gender inequality, and social ills. In October 1930, Reich ran as a candidate for the KPÖ in the National Council elections. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Berlin, where he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). From 1931 onward, he lectured at the Marxist Workers’ School (MASCH – Marxistische Arbeiterschule), which was ideologically close to the Communist Party and counted Albert Einstein, Erwin Piscator, Walter Gropius, and Egon Erwin Kisch among its instructors. Lectureships were granted not on the basis of party affiliation, but on opposition to National Socialism. In early 1931, Reich first appeared in Berlin police files used for the surveillance of potential enemies of the state. In May of that year, on behalf of the KPD, he took part in founding the Einheitsverband für proletarische Sexualreform und Mutterschutz (Unified Association for Proletarian Sexual Reform and Maternity Protection), which fought against the criminalisation of abortion. The chairwoman Luise Dornemann – whose husband was murdered by the National Socialists in 1933 – emigrated in 1936.

 

Before moving to Berlin, Reich had met with Freud once again. On October 10, 1930, he received a letter in which Freud assured him the following: “We agreed in our conversation that your temporary move to Berlin should not result in the loss of your positions in Vienna, and I think we should stick to that.” Reich’s political involvement remained unchanged in the following years, but the political situation in Germany did not: In May 1931, the NSDAP became the strongest faction in a German state parliament (Oldenburg) for the first time. In the Reichstag elections of July 1932, it emerged as the dominant party. Six months earlier, Wilhelm Reich had delivered his inaugural lecture at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He spoke on The Sexual Economy of the Masochistic Character. The preface to The Mass Psychology of Fascism later notes that the book builds upon “previous attempts [to] reveal the process of the sexual economy within our social order”. Just as he did in his lecture, Reich contradicted Freud’s views in Mass Psychology. Freud believed that aggressive (sadism) and self-directed aggressive (masochism) impulses stemmed from a biologically rooted death instinct. In contrast, Reich attributed the emergence of sadism and masochism to sociopolitical conditions. He argued that they resulted from a (sexually repressive) upbringing that both exploited and suppressed the child’s need for love.

 

Otto Fenichel, (still) responsible editor of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse (International Journal of Psychoanalysis) at the time (he was soon removed from this position at Freud’s behest), had accepted Reich’s lecture on Masochism for publication. When Freud read this text, he noted in his diary, Kürzeste Chronik (Concise Chronicle), on January 1, 1932: “Prolonged stomach pains – steps against Reich.” A few days later, he wrote to Eitingon that “Reich’s and Fenichel’s attempt to misuse the [psychoanalytic] journals for Bolshevik propaganda” had “appalled” him. Shortly thereafter, he informed Ferenczi that Reich had given a lecture “that culminated in the nonsense that what is considered the death drive is a function of the capitalist system”. Although Reich, as a critic of the existing social order, had once again drawn conclusions for psychoanalytic theory and practice in his lecture, he had not gone beyond the ideas he had advocated previously. Nevertheless, Freud now insisted that the text be published only with an accompanying footnote written by himself, which would read: “Special circumstances compel the editor [Freud] at this point to remind the readers of something otherwise taken for granted. Namely, that this journal [the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse] grants every author who submits an essay to it for publication, within the framework of psychoanalysis, the full right to free expression of opinion and does not relieve anyone of the responsibility for this expression. In the case of Dr. Reich, however, the reader should be informed that the author is a member of the Bolshevik Party.”

 

Here, for the first time, Reich was labelled as a biased author. Although this could not be substantiated by the content of the lecture, it was nonetheless deemed necessary from Freud’s point of view. Upon learning of this, Reich and Fenichel brought together Berlin’s ‘leftist’ psychoanalysts, a circle from which the later recipients of Fenichel’s Circular Letters, written in exile, emerged. They successfully protested against Freud’s intended footnote. It was subsequently omitted, and instead, Reich’s essay Der masochistische Charakter. Eine sexualökonomische Widerlegung des Todestriebes und des Wiederholungszwanges (The Masochistic Character. A Sexual-Economic Refutation of the Death Instinct and of the Repetition-Compulsion) was published alongside a rebuttal commissioned by Freud and written by Siegfried Bernfeld. Bernfeld described Reich as someone merely carrying out Communist Party directives, claiming that Reich’s article consisted of “two independent essay[s] woven into one another; one about the masochistic character, the other about – one doesn’t quite know what. Apparently, the required Communist extra task”. This seemingly paranoid conclusion culminated in the accusation that Reich was responsible for the “savaging and trashing of science”, a claim believed to stem from the demands imposed on him by the politburo: “If this is really the case, then communism and psychoanalysis are irreconcilable opposites”, Bernfeld concluded, thus providing the argument later used to justify Reich's expulsion from the psychoanalytic organisations.

 

 

Fascism has won

Six months after his lecture on Masochism, Reich gave a second lecture at the Berlin Institute. There, on June 28, 1932, he spoke on Mass Psychological Problems in the Economic Crisis. Boehm summarised the content of this lecture in a short paper published in the Korrespondenzblatt of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse (International Journal of Psychoanalysis) as follows: “On the basis of the National Socialist movement, it is shown that the familial situation of the petite bourgeoisie steers its radicalisation in terms of political reaction rather than in terms of revolution. National Socialism channels reactionary content into the rebellion of the middle classes, whose former social and family situation made them particularly predisposed to accept it. The analysis of the actual content of the racial theory shows that ‘racially Nordic’ is equated with purity, i.e., asexuality, while ‘racially alien’ means sensual, lower animality.” Reich would elaborate on these theses in greater detail a year later in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The book, published in 1933 while he was in exile in Denmark, was financed by Reich’s friend Karl von Motesiczky, who died in Auschwitz in 1943.

 

In the summer of 1934, Reich travelled to Lucerne to attend the 13th International Psychoanalytic Congress. There, he learned that his membership in the DPG (and, according to the statutes in effect at the time, also in the IPV) had already been withdrawn a year earlier. The Mass Psychology of Fascism was no longer permitted to be displayed at the congress in Lucerne. This censorship measure, ordered by the IPV leadership, was aimed at the sole attempt by a psychoanalyst at the time to shed light on the mass approval of the National Socialist Führer cult by drawing on psychoanalytic findings. Decades after the end of the Nazi regime, an association apologist commented on the rejection of Reich’s book in a seemingly matter-of-fact manner, stating: “The point I retain is that the IPV majority, just like Freud, no longer acknowledged the author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism [...] as their equal.” Elsewhere, in a letter to the editor of the Deutsches Ärzteblatt PP (12/2002), this author underlined his competence to judge matters of psychoanalysis under National Socialism with the following self-portrayal: “I, as a historian of psychoanalysis” (Michael Schröter).

 

What was so offensive about Reich’s book that one had to distance oneself from it in 1933? Schröter provides no answer to this question. He is, however, all the more outspoken when it comes to defaming Reich. According to Schröter, Reich was a “troublemaker” who suffered from a “grandiose misjudgement of reality”. Furthermore, he states: “Certainly a man like Reich emphasised the incompatibility of National Socialism and psychoanalysis from very early on [...]. But what appears to be a realistic prognosis at first glance turns out otherwise when one reads [...] that Reich, as a devout communist, also expected ‘a revolutionary reversal in the balance of power in the struggle for a new social form of existence.’” Suffering from a “grandiose misjudgement of reality”, the “devout communist” Wilhelm Reich stated in the Preface to Mass Psychology: “The German working class has suffered a serious defeat[...]. Fascism has triumphed and is, hour by hour, expanding its positions by all available means, primarily by reshaping the youth in a warlike fashion. But the struggle against the resurgence of the Middle Ages, against imperialist predatory politics, brutality, mysticism, and spiritual subjugation, […] for the elimination of this murderous social order, will continue. [...] The ways in which National Socialism seized power taught an indelible lesson to international socialism: that political reaction will not be defeated by mere rhetoric but only by substantial knowledge, not by appeals but only by inciting genuine revolutionary enthusiasm, not by bureaucratic party machinery but only by genuinely democratic [...] workers’ organisations [...]” [emphasis added by B.N.].

 

Such statements were intolerable to Stalinist party officials, who wanted Hitler’s seizure of power to be understood as the ultimate signal for an imminent working-class uprising. To them, The Mass Psychology of Fascism was heresy, as Reich had posed the heretical question – heretical from the perspective of the party officials – of how one could explain “that the proletarianised masses” could surrender to “an arch-reactionary party” (the NSDAP). Reich’s answer was that not only the petite bourgeoisie but also working-class individuals with an authoritarian upbringing yearn for a leader, at least as long as they are unable to free themselves from the obedience to authority that has been instilled in them and later internalised. According to The Mass Psychology, the “oppression of children by their fathers [...] is no less pronounced in the working class than in the petite bourgeoisie, in fact, it is sometimes more brutal”.

 

Reich’s anti-authoritarian position – and therefore inevitably not only anti-fascist but also anti-Stalinist – led to a rupture between Reich and the apparatchiks. In the Danish Arbejderbladet of November 21, 1933, he learned of his expulsion from the party for “publishing a book with counter-revolutionary content” (referring to The Mass Psychology of Fascism). On January 7, 1934, the newspaper Gegen-Angriff stated “that Hitler's temporary [sic!] success swept up all sorts of petits bourgeois individuals who, like Reich, considered themselves communists”. Then, on April 30, 1934, the Deutsche Volkszeitung exposed the ‘devout communist’ (as Schröter still described Wilhelm Reich in 1989!) as a “sex preacher” who, in Mass Psychology, had represented “the position of international Trotskyism” and had obscured the “class character of fascism with an opaque mucous membrane of inhibited sexuality”.

 

The dissenting voices cited here at least granted Reich a political position, albeit a misguided one. Béla Grunberger and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, however, did not. They posed the question: Freud or Reich? (Ullstein, 1979). Their answer was “that it does not seem right to us, and in any case, it seems superficial to want to explain the differences between Freud and Reich through their differing opinions on political questions”. Instead, they argued, one should turn to psychopathology, as it would provide a better distinction between Freud and Reich. Regarding “Reich, we have seen [...] that the difference between him and Freudism is to be understood as a product of his psychosis”. Reich – a psychotic? This is reminiscent of the good old bad days when Freud, after falling out with formerly esteemed colleagues (such as Wilhelm Fliess or Carl Gustav Jung), had to contritely realise that he had once again become involved with a paranoiac. Later, members of the Geheimes Komitee (Secret Committee) followed the same pattern, attributing severe diagnoses to members with whom they disagreed. The mild-mannered Sándor Ferenczi, whom Jones described as having “latent psychotic tendencies”, also suffered from this labelling.

 

The laws of mass psychology apparently do not stop at the doors of associations, at least not when a group of devout followers rallies around a charismatic ‘leader’ whose statements they regard as sacrosanct. This is also true of the ‘psychoanalytic movement’. Max Graf, once a member of the Wednesday Society that gathered around Freud, recalled: “The atmosphere in the room was as if a religion were being founded [...]. Freud’s pupils were his apostles.” Even Wilhelm Stekel, despite being disowned by Freud, still characterised himself as Freud's “apostle” in his posthumously published autobiography (https://literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=17205 – retrieved October 20, 2020). Wilhelm Reich, too, attained guru status among his followers, who were (and still are) willing to follow him into the ‘orgone’ depths of the universe. Initially a sharp critic of all religions (see Mass Psychology, the chapter on Die Kirche als internationale sexualpolitische Organisation des Kapitals [The Church as an International Sexual-Political Organisation of Capital, translated in the 3rd ed. by T. Wolfe as: Organized Mysticism: the International Antisexual Organization]) – he ultimately came to identify with Jesus Christ, a founder of religion whom he glorified as a man of the future (see Petteri Pietikainen, Utopianism in Psychology: The Case of Wilhelm Reich, in: Behavioral Sciences 38/2002).

 

In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich writes: “The moral inhibition of the child’s natural sexuality [...] makes the child afraid, shy, fearful of authority, obedient, ‘good’, and ‘docile’ in the petit-bourgeois sense; it has a crippling effect on man’s rebellious forces because every aggressive impulse is now burdened with severe fear, and since sex is a forbidden subject, thought in general and man’s critical faculty also become inhibited; in short, morality’s aim is to produce acquiescent citizens, who, despite hardship and humiliation, are adjusted to an order based on private property.” In adulthood, religious and/or political leaders become representative figures of the authorities perceived as ‘powerful’ in childhood who provide the subjects, raised to obey authority, with patterns used for identifying the ‘enemies’ of conventions and morality (divine revelation) or of law and order (political programme). In the case of National Socialism, these ‘enemies’ were members of selected minorities, first and foremost, ‘the’ Jews. Racial purity, blood poisoning, mysticism – these are corresponding terms whose propagandistic functions are analysed in the chapter “The Race Theory”. The fantasised entity of the “Volksschädling” (national pest), from which the fantasised entity of the “Volksgenosse” (national comrade) must protect itself by destroying the ‘pests’, in order to prevent its own fantasised destruction: In this way, fears of persecution turned into actual persecution, and murderous rage could be shamelessly acted out with a clear conscience. The blood shed by both the leader and the led only deepened their bond.

 

Finally, in Mass Psychology, Reich sought to answer the question of “why fascism should be seen as a problem of the masses and not solely as a problem of Hitler’s personality or the objective role of the National Socialist party”. Reich argued that a leader is insignificant without the masses – and that without a leader, the led feel as helpless as abandoned children. “The more helpless the ‘mass individual’ has become, owing to his upbringing [...], the more pronounced is his identification with the führer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of feeling at one with the führer.” However, this also means that a leader gains mass approval only when "his ideology or his programme resonates with the average structure of a broad category of mass individuals”.

 

After Hitler’s accession to power, Freud intensified his efforts to have the “dangerous fool Reich”, as he referred to him in a letter to Eitingon, expelled from the DPG. “I want this for scientific reasons, but I have no objection if it is done for political reasons, and I wish him every success if he wants to play the martyr.” This passage sounds like an eerie transcription of a section from Wilhelm Reich’s Leidenschaft der Jugend. Eine Autobiographie 1897-1922 ([Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897-1922], Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994). There it says: “Among my later character traits, a [...] mental masochism stood out, for when I found myself in poor material circumstances after my father’s death, I felt quite comfortable in the role of a martyr [...].”

 

 

I then went to Berlin

After Reich’s exclusion from the DPG, further steps towards Gleichschaltung (or rather the ‘rescue’ of psychoanalysis) followed, of which I will describe one of the most important in more detail here. In order for the DPG to join the Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie, founded in the summer of 1936, it was necessary to persuade the Jews who had remained in the DPG until the end of 1935 to ‘voluntarily’ renounce their membership. The ‘Aryan’ DPG officials Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig were assisted in this endeavour by IPV president Jones, who travelled to Berlin specifically for this purpose. In his Freud biography, published after the war, Jones writes: “I then went to Berlin and presided over a meeting on December 1, 1933 [it should correctly read: on December 1, 1935], during which the few remaining Jews voluntarily resigned in order to save the association from dissolution” [emphasis added by B. N.]. Someone who could not have known that he had ‘voluntarily’ contributed to this ‘rescue’ of psychoanalysis under Hitler was Erich Fromm. He had already emigrated in 1934 but was still a member of the DPG. Upon learning of his expulsion from the DPG, he complained in a letter to Müller-Braunschweig, who replied on March 21, 1936, that it had been “the free decision of all Jewish members” to leave the DPG. “So there can be no question of expulsion.” Four days later, Fromm received a second letter, this time from the IPV chairman in person, whom Müller Braunschweig had meanwhile asked for help in this matter. Jones informed Fromm: “Dr. Müller-Braunschweig forwarded to me your letter of complaint concerning the resignation of the Jewish members. It is not literally true that they have been excluded (you use the word ‘ausgeschlossen’), but after a considerable discussion in Berlin [...], at which I also was present, they subsequently decided it would be in everyone’s interest for them to send in their resignation [...].”

 

In one of the reports Boehm prepared for Jones, he quotes a statement by Eva Rosenfeld, who emigrated in 1936. She thought “that the colleagues [...] could not resign voluntarily because that would involve too high a degree of masochism, as if one had to execute oneself voluntarily”. Nevertheless, the demanded ‘voluntary’ resignation took place, with consequences that Fenichel described in the Circular Letter dated March 26, 1936, as follows: The “‘Aryan’ members of the DPG now [avoid] any, even the slightest, scientific as well as personal contact with their non-Aryan colleagues; an almost unbelievable example of giving an inch and the devil taking a mile”.

 

In March 1936, Boehm met with Anna Freud again in Brno (Czechoslovakia) to discuss the forthcoming admission of the DPG into the German Institute. After this meeting, she wrote to Jones: “I can understand that he wants to make this attempt. If it fails, analysis will not have lost anything. Then we will have just lost a group that could not have been kept under these conditions. Should he save a small workgroup that carries over into another time, all the better” [emphasis added by B. N.].

 

Decades after the end of the National Socialist regime, an association historian reached the conclusion that the downfall of the “Freudian tradition” in the National Socialist state would have been total –– with its sudden submissiveness to its doom on full display – had the DPG and IPV officials “fought the ‘Gleichschaltung’”, as Wilhelm Reich had suggested. However, Schröter continued, Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig were able to maintain the “polyclinic, association, and institute in the Freudian tradition” in Berlin “as long as higher powers allowed it”. The National Socialists as “higher powers”! One has to come up with such a formulation in the first place! According to Schröter's assessment, the “appeasement policy of the IPV, covered up by Freud”, was therefore “realistic in the short term – and successful in the long term”. To put it plainly: Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig achieved more in Berlin in 1933 than Daladier and Chamberlain did in Munich in 1938. In the process, Ernest Jones and Anna Freud stood by those “who remained here” (i.e., the ‘Aryan’ psychoanalysts practicing in the National Socialist state) “in word and deed”. Thus, a “nucleus” was able to survive (according to Schröter, the “‘saved’ group”), from which “the German psychoanalysis blossomed again after 1945, following the newly established connection with the international Freudian school”. Ludger M. Hermanns, who deserves credit for the history of the association, expressed a similar opinion. He stated that at least some “of the ‘Aryan’ psychoanalysts who had remained in the country” had preserved the Freudian legacy during the Nazi period and were therefore “available as a nucleus for a renaissance of psychoanalysis in the post-Hitler era”.

 

If one equates this “nucleus” with the DPG members who became founding members of the DPV in 1950, then, in addition to Käthe Draeger, who actively participated in the resistance against Hitler, it also included Gerhard Scheunert, who joined the NSDAP in May 1933 – when the works of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich were burned at the stake – and served the regime as a Blockwart (a Block Warden). After the war, he succeeded Müller- Braunschweig as DPV chairman in 1956. Ingeborg Kath was also part of this “nucleus”. During the Nazi era, she assigned diagnoses warranting euthanasia only to those patients at the Buch Psychiatric Hospital who, as she later said in an interview, “would have died soon anyway”. Finally, Müller-Braunschweig belonged to the “nucleus” referred to by Hermanns as the “‘Aryan’ psychoanalysts who had remained in the country” and had stayed loyal to Freud. In 1939, he still envisioned “a future German psychotherapy”, which he praised as a “creative synthesis” of all therapeutic schools. When he published this vision of the future in the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, Müller-Braunschweig had allegedly already been banned from publishing for a year. After the war, he attributed this ban to his support for Freud in 1938, following Austria’s occupation. Müller-Braunschweig’s involvement in Vienna at the time was as follows: He sought to publish a journal of psychoanalysis “on the grounds of the Third Reich” in the confiscated International Psychoanalytic Publishing House. However, Franz Wirz – managing director of the NSDAP’s Higher Education Commission and accountable to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess for ‘purging German higher education of Jewish influence’ – was not receptive to this idea. “Dr. phil. Carl Müller-Braunschweig” therefore had to settle for an interview, which was published on August 22, 1939, in the Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe under the headline Wer ist denn nun hysterisch? (So who is the hysterical one now?).

 

However, psychoanalysis could not be “saved” within the Nazi state, neither as a “nucleus” nor in any other way, as it was completely destroyed, if we are to believe Jones, who stated in his Freud biography, published after the war under the heading “1934”: “This year brought the flight of the remaining analysts from Germany and the ‘liquidation’ of psychoanalysis in the German Reich, one of the few accomplishments that Hitler completely achieved” (emphasis added by B. N.). Jones then describes the process by which this destruction took place, or, in his words, how the “Gleichschaltung [...] took its course”. One of the steps included the aforementioned incorporation of the DPG into the Deutsches Institut in 1936, whose members were committed to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Jones’s biography of Freud states: “It took some time to set up the new organisation” – referring to the incorporation of the DPG into the organisational structure of the Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie – “and on July 19, 1936, I met Göring” – the cousin of the Reichsmarschall and chairman of the Institute – “for a meeting in Basel. [...] I found Goering quite an amiable and approachable person, but as it later turned out, he was not in a position to grant the psychoanalytic group the degree of freedom he had assured me.” Three-quarters of a century later, Schröter commented on this conversation in Basel as follows: “Jones once again went to great lengths to save what could be saved in Germany.” However, there was nothing left to save in 1936, as the “‘liquidation’ of psychoanalysis in the German Reich” (as mentioned by Jones above) had already been completed in 1934. Nevertheless, Schröter remains undeterred, arguing that, at the time, the DPG had participated in a “professional modernisation movement that gripped psychoanalysis not only in Germany but also in other countries during the 1930s”. Today’s German psychoanalysts should therefore, “when reflecting [...] on their historical heritage", finally place "the Göring Institute in a “more objective perspective”. Elsewhere, Schröter also succeeded in discrediting Wilhelm Reich’s fight against Gleichschaltung, blurring the line between “Sein Kampf” (Boehm, sein = his) and Mein Kampf (Hitler, mein = my). Schröter commented on Boehm’s discussions with the National Socialists – aimed at convincing them that the DPG (and Freud) had no connection to the “Jewish-Marxist filth” advocated by Reich – with the following sentence: “His [Boehm's] Kampf against ‘leftist’ psychoanalysis was explicitly directed against Reich’s militant political version.”

 

Whatever Göring may have ‘assured’ Jones in Basel, it could only fall within the framework that Göring outlined at a general meeting of the German Institute: “Whoever lives in the National Socialist state and wants to work for it must recognise that there are opposing races [...]. Our task will therefore be to attempt to divorce the Jewish from the Aryan-Germanic Weltanschauung through speeches, lectures, and courses.” Only then did Göring add: “We were delighted to hear that, at the same time as the German Institute was founded, the Commission for Psychotherapy of the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Psychiatrie [Swiss Society for Psychiatry] sent out invitations for a conference in Basel. The sole topic of negotiation at the conference was: ‘Basic guidelines the different psychotherapeutic schools can agree upon.’ The interest in this topic was so great that [...] the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Jones, [...] and many Germans attended.” A few weeks after the Basel meeting, Jones assured psychoanalysts from around the world – who had gathered at the 14th International Psychoanalytic Congress in Marienbad in 1936 – that the DPG, now integrated into the German Institute, had “preserved its independence with regard to scientific work and teaching activities”.

 

 

…in the interest of our psychoanalytic cause in Germany

Unlike the Jewish DPG members who were willing to ‘voluntarily’ resign, Wilhelm Reich steadfastly refused to renounce his DPG membership ‘voluntarily’. Just before the beginning of the Lucerne Congress in 1934, Müller-Braunschweig informed him that the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (International Psychoanalytic Publishing House) would “publish a calendar with a list of members of the Psychoanalytic Association for the Congress. The current situation makes it urgent that your name not appear in the directory of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft. I would appreciate it if, in the interest of our psychoanalytic cause in Germany, you would show understanding, put aside any personal sensitivities, and agree to this measure” (emphasis added by B. N). The infamous aspect of this letter is that Müller-Braunschweig knew Reich had already been expelled from the DPG in the summer of 1933. Still unaware of this, Reich then wrote to Anna Freud, secretary of the IPV, concerning the intended omission of his name from the congress calendar: “The omission of my name would certainly signal to the world that I have either been expelled or resigned. Since I do not intend to do the latter, and as far as I know, the former does not apply, the chosen path [...] is unlikely to reach its goal [...]. As embarrassing as the circumstances and constraints may be, namely for all parties: I must defend myself against being silently sidelined.” Reich received the following reply from Anna Freud: “I was not in the least aware of the whole matter; I will ask Jones if he knew anything about it.” It is noteworthy that, since April 1933, Jones had known that Anna Freud’s father could not wait to “get rid of" Reich. And Anna Freud equally knew that Reich had already been expelled from the DPG in 1933.

 

At the 16th International Psychoanalytic Congress in Zurich in 1949, Jones delivered the opening address. In his speech, he referred to “lay people” who accused psychoanalysis of neglecting the influence of sociopolitical factors. “Our reply is that the deeper we delve into the mind, the less we can perceive any influence of sociological factors on its most primitive layers, those belonging to the first year or two in life.” Today, no serious psychoanalyst would deny the influence of societal factors on a child’s development during the first years of life, when the foundations of the psychic structure are shaped by physical and emotional interactions with the mother and other figures, as these attachment opportunities do not occur in a vacuum, separate from society. However, even at the time Jones made this assertion, it was nonsense. Fenichel’s standard reference work The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, published three years earlier, states: “Not because primitive instincts are still effective within us do we have wars, misery, and neuroses; rather, because we have not yet learned to avoid wars and misery by a more reasonable and less contradictory regulation of social relations, our instincts are still kept in an unfavourable form.”

 

In his address to the congress, Jones continued: “The temptation is understandably great to add socio-political factors to those that are our special concern and to re-read our findings in terms of sociology, but it is a temptation which, one is proud to observe, has, with very few exceptions, been stoutly resisted.” Here, Jones once again covertly alluded to Wilhelm Reich, who had repeatedly emphasised the significance of socio-political conditions in child-rearing, gender roles, and family relationships. In The Mass Psychology, he devoted a separate chapter – titled Die sexualpolitischen Voraussetzungen der bürgerlichen Familie (The Sex-Political Presuppositions of the Petit Bourgeois Family, translated by T. Wolfe, 3rd ed., as The Sex- Economic Basis of the Authoritarian Family) – to this topic. There, he depicted the family as the “ideological germ cell” of a society that glorifies women as ‘mothers’ while disempowering them as self-determined sexual beings or denigrating them as ‘prostitutes’. Reich described this patriarchal gender ideology as a fundamental pillar of Nazi ideology. He argued, therefore, that National Socialism should be analysed not only as a political event but also as a psychological phenomenon. Erich Fromm's Fear of Freedom, published in 1942, states: “Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being moulded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds” (see https://pescanik.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/erich-fromm-the-fear-of-freedom-escape-from-freedom.pdf – retrieved October 20, 2020).

 

In his biography of Freud, Jones wrote that in the Nazi state, “psychoanalytic terms were not” allowed “to be used anymore”, the “Oedipus complex” had to “figure under a synonym”, and “training analyses were forbidden”. For decades, these and similar false claims were part of the foundation of the semi-official narrative of the association's history; cracks in this narrative first appeared in the 1980s, with Dahmer’s reprint and commentary on Müller- Braunschweig’s Reichswart article. The image was ultimately shattered by Andreas Peglau’s 2013 book Unpolitische Wissenschaft? Wilhelm Reich und die Psychoanalyse im Nationalsozialismus (see https://literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=18903 – retrieved October 20, 2010).

 

 

The Göring Institute: before and after

As previously described, Dahmer was terribly insulted at the time – he was even accused of intending Müller-Braunschweig’s “posthumous execution”, while Peglau’s historical and scientific research, which drew on a large number of hitherto unknown documents, was consistently well-received – with one exception. In 2017, Wolfgang Bock presented himself as an expert on the history of psychoanalysis during and after the Nazi era. In his book Dialektische Psychologie: Adornos Rezeption der Psychoanalyse, Springer VS 2018 (Dialectical Psychology: Adorno’s Reception of Psychoanalysis), he proclaimed that Peglau “hypostatises [...] the role played by the IPV as a silent sufferer of the adjustments made by German psychoanalysts, and subsequently does not want to blame the German ‘Aryanisers’ but the Jewish psychoanalysts for the entire process.” This is a serious allegation, as it insinuates that Peglau’s account could be based on anti-Semitic resentment. Moreover, the juxtaposition of ‘Aryanisers’ on the one hand and ‘Jewish psychoanalysts’ on the other hand is also highly problematic, as it revives a National Socialist division, whereas the dividing line between supporters and opponents of the DPG/IPV politics of accommodation should be based on political criteria, not on racial attributions – not to mention that not all those affected were willing to accept the racial identities imposed by the National Socialists. For instance, Else Pappenheim, a psychoanalyst who emigrated to the USA, rejected the racial attribution. She and her family would not have accepted the “Jewish identity” that “Hitler wanted to impose on us”. Ernst Federn, the son of Freud’s deputy Paul Federn and a political prisoner who survived Dachau and Buchenwald, also refused to have his identity defined by his opponents. In an interview conducted decades after the end of the National Socialist regime, he said that he had “never considered himself a Jew” (Bernhard Kuschey: Die Ausnahme des Überlebens. Ernst and Hilde Federn, Eine biographische Studie und eine Analyse der Binnenstrukturen des Konzentrationslagers, Gießen 2003).

 

In his book, Bock also deals with the Reichswart article. He characterises it as a way for “the psychologists to ingratiate themselves with the new state” (emphasis added by B. N.). But was it the “psychologists” – or the psychoanalyst Müller-Braunschweig – who recommended psychoanalysis to the Nazi rulers with reference to the services it could render to the new state? Bock notes that Müller-Braunschweig praised “the classical secondary virtues in a boastful, propaganda-like tone”. Yet was Müller-Braunschweig advocating “classical secondary virtues”, or was he promoting the transformation of the human spirit into one of subservience? After all, Müller-Braunschweig had claimed that, with the help of psychoanalysis, “people uninterested in life as a whole could be transformed into servants of the whole”. However, Bock is not concerned with providing a precise account here either; instead, he proceeds with his accusation. Peglau reproduced the Reichswart article in its entirety in his book. Bock comments: “Although he prints the text in the appendix, it takes on the character of something from the cabinet of curiosities.” He then adds: “Peglau refers instead [...] to a very similarly worded ‘memorandum’ from the summer of 1933, requested by Felix Boehm, then chairman of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft, from his colleague Carl Müller-Braunschweig. This paper is said to have been approved by Ernest Jones and the rest of the IPV leadership during a sort of preliminary meeting that is said to have taken place in Holland [...]. In short, the adaptation of psychoanalysis to National Socialism is, in fact, said […] to be attributed to Jones and the politics of the IPV” (emphasis added by B. N.). It remains to be noted that the “rest of the IPV leadership” – at least as far as the secretary of the IPV (Anna Freud) was concerned – was not present at the “sort of preliminary meeting” in Holland and that Felix Boehm did not become chairman of the DPG in the “summer of 1933” or “on December 31, 1933”, as Bock claims elsewhere; rather, he assumed this office on November 18, 1933, and never held “the presidency [...] of the DPV”, as Bock again writes elsewhere. In addition to these inaccuracies, Bock uses rhetorical tricks (a “sort of preliminary meeting” is “said” to have taken place in Holland, etc.) to make Peglau’s account appear unsubstantiated. The accusation aims to substantiate the claim that Peglau presented the historical context in a way that allowed him to “exonerate the National Socialist analysts”. Bock then lays it on by adding: “He [Peglau] [...] passes the buck to the IPV, where it is now to remain permanently.”

 

Bock mentions both the Reichswart article and the “similarly worded ‘memorandum’ from the summer of 1933”. Obviously, Bock is familiar with the memorandum, which bears the heading “September 29, 33”, only second-hand, that is, from secondary literature, from which he also seems to have drawn further nonsense. For instance, he writes: “From 1933 onwards, for the Freudian Jews who initially remained in Germany, such as Therese Benedenk [correct spelling: Benedek], Edith Jacobsohn, or Lotte Lebeck-Kirschner [correct spelling: Lotte Liebeck-Kirschner], the DPG’s policy of adaptation, involving the active and voluntary exclusion of Jews, effectively amounted to a professional ban: they were officially no longer allowed to treat patients [...].” It must be noted that the ‘voluntary’ resignation of Jewish DPG members did not occur in 1933, as Bock claims, but in 1935 – with the active assistance of IPV president Jones, while Therese Benedek and Edith Jacobsohn were still admitted to the DPG’s teaching committee in November 1933 and thus belonged to the DPG’s extended board. Furthermore, if Edith Jacobsohn had been “officially prohibited from treating patients” since 1933, as Bock asserts, how could she have been arrested in 1935 for treating a patient with ties to a resistance group? By treating a ‘political’ patient, Edith Jacobsohn had violated the board’s decision “not to treat such cases”, as Jones wrote to Anna Freud in November 1935. The letter further states that “had it not been for the heroic efforts of Dr. Boehm”, psychoanalysis would have long since been banned in the National Socialist state. However, Edith Jacobsohn had now endangered psychoanalysis, prompting Anna Freud to reproach her: “[...] what we came to understand with Reich, while he was still our member, is true for all similarly minded members [Edith Jacobsohn belonged to the circle around Reich and Fenichel]. Consideration for the association is alien to them.”

 

As an expert on the history of psychoanalysis, Bock states that Freud “allegedly” expressed two wishes to Boehm “in January 1933” (which should correctly read: in April 1933). One of these wishes was: “Free me from Reich.” This statement is correct. This is precisely what is written in one of Boehm’s reports to Jones, although Bock now writes as if Boehm’s account might not be correct: “Whether this version is actually true is debatable, as it fits a little too nicely into the self-portrayal of Boehm and the other alleged ‘saviours of psychoanalysis' during the National Socialist period.” The accuracy of Freud’s wish in Boehm’s report is also conveyed in a letter Anna Freud wrote to Jones shortly after Boehm’s departure, in which she states: “My father [...] can’t wait to get rid of Reich as a member. He is offended by the abduction of psychoanalysis into the political realm, where it does not belong.” As president of the IPV, Jones echoed this attitude a year later in Lucerne, once again emphasising and pointing the finger at psychoanalysts around Reich and Fenichel: “[...] to spread one's own social ideas in the name of psychoanalysis is to falsify its true nature, it is a misunderstanding of psychoanalysis, which I would like to firmly rebuke and reject.”

 

Jones resolutely defended Boehm, having warned him before the Congress began that he would face “difficulties” in Lucerne. In his letter to the DPG chairman, the IPV chairman further writes: “You are probably unaware of the storm of indignation and opposition currently brewing within certain circles, especially among those who have fled from Germany into exile. This can easily [take] the form of a [...] resolution to expel the German Society from the International Association.” Preventing such an outcome was of utmost importance. In the IPV’s Korrespondenzblatt, we can read about Jones’s efforts in Lucerne to defend Boehm. He informed the congress audience that he had been able to convince himself of Boehm’s integrity in “personal meetings” that “I had with him and other colleagues in Holland in October” [1933]. He added that he hoped “that the services Dr. Boehm has rendered to psychoanalysis will outlast any temporary criticism to which he may be subjected”. However, we know more than what Bock reported: not only was a “kind of preliminary discussion” “said” to have taken place in Holland, but as Jones publicly stated, the discussion did, in fact, occur.

 

In summary: In the chapter “On the Afterlife of the Göring Institute in German Psychology after 1945”, Bock aims to convey to the readers that it was the ‘Aryanisers’ who orchestrated the alignment of psychoanalysis with the National Socialist regime – whereas Peglau attempted to pass “the buck to the IPV”. However, not only is there the “afterlife” described by Bock, marked by omissions and distortions, but there was also a prior life marked by defamation and falsification. In this regard, Fenichel’s Circular Letter of April 26, 1935, commenting on the report about the Lucerne Congress published in the IPV’s Korrespondenzblatt, states: “The great difficulty posed by the Reich case, the debate on which was the focal point of the Congress, has been evaded by simply not mentioning it at all.” Furthermore: “The way the report now silences and falsifies” events [emphasis added by B.N.] makes it more difficult for him, Fenichel, to engage in a discussion with Reich, with whom he had by then fallen out over the strategy for dealing with the politics of the DPG/IPV officials.

 

 

Association history as half- or quarter-truth

While the names of all emigrants who resigned from their DPG membership after 1933 were published in the Korrespondenzblatt, Reich’s name last appeared on a DPG membership list in the spring of 1933. Based solely on the association’s announcement, Reich would have neither officially resigned nor been expelled – he would have simply vanished without a trace. But as Trude Herr once sang, You never leave completely... (Niemals geht man so ganz …). Reich’s partial disappearance from psychoanalytic organisations began on April 16, 1933, when he learned that the International Psychoanalytic Publishing House would no longer honour a previously concluded contract with him: “Yesterday, the publishing director, Dr. [Martin] Freud, informed me that [...] the contract under which my book ‘Charakteranalyse’ (Character Analysis) was soon to be published by the publishing house would be rescinded. The reason given for this decision was that, due to the current political circumstances, it now seemed inappropriate to officially represent my compromised name.”

 

Already in this letter, Reich warned against such “illusions”: It was, he wrote, “completely irrelevant whether the representatives of ps[ycho]a[nalysis] now adopt this or that protective measure, whether they withdraw from scientific work or adapt it to prevailing conditions. The character of psychoanalysis as it bears on sociological and cultural policy cannot by any means be erased from the world. The nature of its discoveries [...] makes it, in fact, a mortal enemy of political reaction.”

 

Character Analysis (Charakteranalyse. Technik und Grundlagen für Studierende und praktizierende Analytiker, Wien 1933) was published nonetheless – officially by “self-publishers” (as stated on the title page), but unofficially, the book was distributed and invoiced by the International Psychoanalytical Publishing House. In October 1937, Reich contacted the publisher with a request: “We would like a photograph of Freud with a cigar for our archives”, referring, as Peglau writes, to a “print of one of the most famous portraits of Freud to date”. “On October 20, 1937, he was promised that it would be sent to him ‘upon prior transfer of 20.- ö.S. [Austrian Schilling]’. At the same time, he was informed that 65 linen-bound copies of Character Analysis, 27 in paperback, and 230 unbound proofs were still in stock” (https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/keine-vernichtungsaktion-sondern- heimliche-kooperation-reichs-charakteranalyse-und-der-internationale-psychoanalytische-verlag/ – retrieved October10, 2020).

 

In his biography of Freud, published after the end of the National Socialist regime, Ernest Jones once again refers to Wilhelm Reich. Despite knowing otherwise, Jones now claims: “At this congress [in Lucerne in 1934], Wilhelm Reich resigned from the Association.” However, Anna Freud openly stated in a letter she wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé shortly after the congress: “We had to exclude Reich, it wasn’t working with him anymore.” Michael Schröter knew better. He called Jones’s obvious lie a “half-truth or quarter-truth”, by which he meant that Jones was partly right after all. “Did you tell a half-truth? They say that if you tell the other half of the truth, you are lying twice.” This observation by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado can also be applied to “half-truth or quarter-truth”, potentially leading not only to lying twice, but thrice. Thus, Volker Friedrich, a historian of psychoanalysis and member of the Psychoanalytische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Hamburg (DPV), decided in his commentary on Tim N. Gidal’s photo book Die Freudianer auf dem 13. Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Kongress 1934 in Luzern, München 1990 (The Freudians at the 13th International Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne in 1934) to present three variations of the same lie propagated by Jones, namely (1) that it remains “an open question” whether Reich “was expelled or resigned himself”, or (2) that Reich “voluntarily [sic!] renounced membership” in the IPV in Lucerne, or (3) that, “as far as we currently know, [...] Wilhelm Reich was not expelled”, but rather he “himself declared his resignation”.

 

Had Friedrich consulted the book “Hier geht das Leben auf eine sehr merkwürdige Weise weiter...” – Zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Deutschland, published five years before his commentary on Gidal’s photo volume and co-edited by Friedrich himself, he would have read, on page 38 of this catalogue for an exhibition on the history of psychoanalysis in Germany on the occasion of the 34th Congress of the IPV in Hamburg, that Wilhelm Reich’s “de facto expulsion” took place in Lucerne in 1934. Moreover, the reports I have quoted, which Boehm prepared for Jones, are reproduced in facsimile in this book, where the reasons for Reich’s exclusion are presented in full detail. And how can we succinctly explain the defence mechanism of denial? In this process, “certain aspects of reality that are obvious to others are not acknowledged. For example, an individual may evidently exhibit aggression toward another person yet refuse to admit it to themselves, thereby denying its existence" (Differentielle Psychologie und Personlichkeitspsychologie kompakt, Weinheim, 2010).

 

In a review for DIE ZEIT of the aforementioned book of photographs, I sharply criticised Friedrich’s handling of historical facts. Three years later, Nachum T. Gidal, a “historian and photographer”, contributed to the catalogue of an exhibition featuring his pictures taken in Lucerne. In his article, he commented, among other things, on Wilhelm Reich, stating that in 1934, Reich “resigned from the International Association”. Gidal then continued: “A lecturer” – by which he meant a “reviewer”, as I had reviewed the book rather than lectured on it – “of my book The Freudians in the journal Die Zeit (October 5, 1990), in an attack on the psychoanalyst Volker Friedrich, who had meticulously compiled the documentation of this 13th Congress of Psychoanalysts, claims that Reich had been excluded in 1934 because of his vociferous anti-fascist statements. To speak with Reich [sic!], this is vulgar Marxist terminology, an indecent assertion.” A brief biography of Wilhelm Reich included in the catalogue explicitly reiterates: “Resignation from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934.”

 

Given the historical misrepresentation propagated by Jones in the early 1950s and reiterated over decades, it was necessary to meticulously reconstruct the events leading to Wilhelm Reich’s exclusion from the psychoanalytic organisations. This was achieved in an article published in 1997, marking the 100th anniversary of Wilhelm Reich’s birth and the 40th anniversary of his death: Bernd Nitzschke, “Ich muss mich dagegen wehren, still kaltgestellt zu werden.” Voraussetzungen, Umstände und Konsequenzen des Ausschlusses Wilhelm Reichs aus der DPG/IPV in den Jahren 1933/34 (in: Karl Fallend & Bernd Nitzschke [eds.], Der ‘Fall’ Wilhelm Reich. Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Psychoanalyse und Politik. Suhrkamp 1997; revised new edition: Psychosozial-Verlag 2002. [“I must defend myself against being silently sidelined.” Preconditions, Circumstances, and Consequences of Wilhelm Reich’s Expulsion from the DPG/IPV in 1933/34]). I had submitted this text for advance publication in the journal Psyche, but it was rejected. A member of the editorial team, who clearly distanced himself from the majority decision, regretfully wrote me at the time that my text had been deemed “tendentious”. This was an obvious endorsement of a solicited 'expert' opinion on the "half-truths and quarter-truths" of the association's history, arguing that my portrayal of Jones was harsher than he deserved. Furthermore, my characterisation of Reich’s exclusion from the DPG and IPV as a “perfect illustration of the policy of adaptation with the National Socialist regime”, as I had argued, was met with doubt. After all, Reich had been “a difficult person and colleague”, but I had “openly sided with Reich”. Incidentally, it was claimed that my contribution contained nothing new, since “in principle, everything was known”. To ensure that “in principle” none of this would remain obscured but instead become widely known, Berthold Rothschild published the text, rejected by the journal Psyche, in 1996 under the title “Selbstmystifizierung der Psychoanalyse” (Self-mystification of Psychoanalysis) in Psychoanalytische Blätter, Volume 5. Following Andreas Peglau’s challenge to Jones’s claim and his presentation of historical facts in his book Unpolitische Wissenschaft? Wilhelm Reich und die Psychoanalyse im Nationalsozialismus (2013; Unpolitical Science? Wilhelm Reich and Psychoanalysis under National Socialism), the lie that Wilhelm Reich “resigned” from the DPG/IPV – perhaps even “voluntarily” – has, to my knowledge, not been repeated.

 

 

From outer exile to inner exile

In a 1997 petition, Hilarion Petzold, a psychology professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, asked whether Reich’s expulsion from the DPG/IPV could be revoked “on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Wilhelm Reich's birth”. The addressed representatives of a scientific discipline, who should understand the benefits of remembering and working through, responded with silence. Summarising the outcome of his inquiry, Petzold remarked: “My ‘Open Letter’ to all major psychoanalytic associations and journals [...] requesting its reprint and the revocation of Reich’s exclusion [...] remained unanswered (except for one confirmation of receipt from the ‘Forum Psychoanalyse’).” Behind the scenes, however, not everyone remained silent – at least not within the DPG. Günther Schmidt, chairman of a DPG working group on psychoanalysis and culture, commented on a possible reinstatement of Wilhelm Reich in an internal document as follows: “In summary, it can be said that Reich’s exclusion was, pro forma [sic!], an injustice. This injustice cannot be redressed [...]. Neither endorsing nor supporting Prof. Petzold’s petition can undo [...] what has happened. Therefore, the recommendation to the DPG Board should be to not support the proposed petition to the International Psychoanalytic Association.” Schmidt then reiterated: “One cannot right past wrongs.” Who would dispute this statement? The same applies to Wilhelm Reich’s expatriation, decreed by the National Socialist regime on December 19, 1939 (see Philip B. Bennet & A. Peglau: The Nazi Denaturalisation of German Emigrants: The Case of Wilhelm Reich. In: German Studies Review 37, 2014, 41-60). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265867835_The_Nazi_Denaturalization_of_German_Emigrants_The_Case_of_Wilhelm_Reich – retrieved December 21, 2020). However, one can apologise for inflicted injustices – and restore both revoked citizenship and revoked association membership.

 

There was also a second response to Petzold's Open Letter. Rosemarie Eckes-Lapp, who had been asked by the DPG board to provide a statement, ultimately reached the following conclusion: “Wilhelm Reich's expulsion at the time, [in] 1933/34, was politically motivated and an injustice concerning his psychoanalytic competence at the time.” However, the author then qualified: “Designating W. Reich as a psychoanalyst today and posthumously reinstating him is not possible because of his later theoretical development. This would neither align with his various ideas and activities nor correspond to the psychoanalytic profile of today’s DPG.” Reich’s “later theoretical development” refers to the path he took after being expelled from both the psychoanalytic organisations and the Communist Party. His trajectory led from the orgasm and genital theory to sex economy, then to electrophysiological experiments and bodily, psychological, and bioenergetic explorations, and finally to bions, which he conceived as the origin of all living matter, ultimately postulating the existence of a cosmic orgone energy. For hardcore Reichians, this constitutes a consistent continuation of scientific research; for Reich’s critics, however, it is seen as a sign of a worsening mental illness.

 

When considering Reich’s and Freud’s fundamental scientific assumptions regarding their search for the origin of life, a paradoxical picture emerges. Freud assumed that there was an original traumatic event from which he derived the death instinct: “The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. […] The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state” (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920 [Beyond the Pleasure Principle]). And Reich? He pursued the unity of (apparent) opposites, which, however, was not achieved through organic matter reverting to inorganic matter; instead, he saw it as a unity of energy existing 'naturally' from the beginning in both the animate and inanimate (cosmos).

 

While Freud considered cancer a somatic disease – he himself was diagnosed with cancer in 1923 and hoped that a Steinach operation (ligating both vas deferens) would bring about ‘rejuvenation’ to halt the disease’s progression – Reich attributed cancer and other “biopathies” to social (dis)order: “These disorders are [...] socially conditioned [...]. The fight against biopathies will be one of the most difficult tasks ever faced by humankind and society. [...] The solution to this task will require [...] the greatest revolution in thought and action that humankind has ever had to undertake. [...] We are only at the beginning of the first insights into the immense misfortune to which humankind [...] is at risk of succumbing” (Der Krebs, Köln 1974). However, Freud’s cultural theory and Reich’s social theory also have something in common: in both cases, trauma and drive serve as the starting point, although they stand in contradiction to each other. “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”. This opening sentence in Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) was contradicted by Freud. For him, the chains – the shackles of the drives – existed from the very beginning, and civilisation allows human beings to break free to some extent. Therefore, for Freud, the history of civilisation begins with the primal patricide, which leads to the domestication of drives (development of the superego, renunciation of archaic drive satisfaction = murder and incest). Reich, in contrast, saw ‘natural’ human freedom as disrupted by repressive 'culture' (trauma), transforming the free-born human into one at the mercy of perverted drives (masochism and sadism).

 

Finally, considering that Freud, following Ferenczi’s scientifically and phylogenetically based Versuch einer Genitaltheorie (1924; Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality), entertained the possibility of a future bioanalysis, and that Bernfeld and Feitelberg began exploring a biological energetic economy of the death drive in 1930, one can argue for mitigating circumstances when judging Reich’s ‘orgone physics’ – even if one finds it abstruse – in light of the scientific mysticism of the time.

 

Reich’s late immersion in the cosmic realm should be evaluated in the context of a life marked by numerous experiences of loss and trauma (see Bernd Nitzschke: Familiäre und gesellschaftliche Gewalt und Verfolgung im Leben Wilhelm Reichs. In Schriften der Erich-Mühsam-Gesellschaft, issue 42, 2017; Family and social violence and persecution in Wilhelm Reich's life). In the early 1960s, a psychoanalytic journal published an article titled: “The murder of how many of one's children must a person be able to endure without symptoms in order to have a normal constitution?” This pointed and polemical wording arose from the question of whether a survivor’s mental disorder, resulting from National Socialist violence and persecution, should be recognised as a trauma-related disorder or viewed as predispositional. In the latter case, claims for ‘reparations’ could be rejected. Under the subheading “Trauma and Psychosis”, Kurt R. Eissler, the article’s author, wrote that in every individual, “resistance to psychotic illness can be strengthened or weakened by the environment”. In Wilhelm Reich’s case, this means that any assessment of his late work must consider not only the early traumas in his life but also those he endured after fleeing Germany.

 

After emigrating – shortly before the outbreak of World War II in August 1939 – Wilhelm Reich was once again placed under surveillance by the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and faced exclusion by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the United States. In the early 1950s, his ‘orgone’ medicine was condemned as quackery, and his writings were burned for the second time (see Philip B. Bennet: The persecution of Dr. Wilhelm Reich by the government of the United States. In International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2009). Ultimately, he was sent to Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania for contempt of court, where he died – lonely and abandoned – shortly before his sixtieth birthday, on November 3, 1957, of heart failure, or rather, a broken heart.

 

Reich had sought refuge in what appeared to be a better world, one he conjured in his ‘orgone’ writings, while increasingly losing sight of the bad world where he faced persecution, expulsion, defamation, and condemnation. In a 1951 ORANUR experiment (ORgone Against NUclear Radiation), he literally blew up the world around him. Introducing radium into an ‘orgone’ accumulator triggered an explosion that injured Reich’s staff, his daughter Eva (from his first marriage), and his second wife, Ilse Ollendorff, who divorced him shortly afterward (1954). His attempt to neutralise DOR (Deadly Orgon = radioactive radiation) with healing ‘orgone’ energy had failed. In a letter to Alexander Neill, Reich described the catastrophe in these words: “It was a terrible and, at the same time, exhilarating experience, as if I had touched the bottom of the universe.”

 

Rejected and ostracised, Wilhelm Reich was soon forgotten after his death. A decade later, however, the rebels of 1968 rediscovered him, as some of his book titles sounded as if he had written them specifically for them: The Function of the Orgasm (1927), The Sexual Revolution (1966). In West Germany, interest in Reich was further fuelled by the fact that sons and daughters were confronting their parents’ past – parents who either could not or would not explain why, in 1933, they had bowed to a dictatorship or even welcomed it enthusiastically. The 1968 generation was therefore not only interested in Marx and Freud, but also in a Marxist psychoanalyst who, as an exiled opponent of National Socialism, had published a book titled The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933).

 

However, this led to misunderstandings, as Reich did not mean sexual activity in an expansive sense; rather, he argued that the internalised fixations and inhibitions instilled by “the compulsory family as educational apparatus” – the title of chapter 5 in Reich's The Sexual Revolution – had to be eliminated so that intense experiences within voluntary (i.e., not legally prescribed) psychosexual attachments could become possible again. In an interview conducted by Kurt R. Eissler, Reich paraphrased his idea of sexual revolution, or his concept of liberation, as follows: “It’s not just [...], you understand, [...] not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self.”

 

 

History in the present: a new edition

Until now, anyone seeking to understand Wilhelm Reich’s 1933 analysis of real fascism or the beliefs of supporters and proponents of authoritarian rule (whether ecclesiastical, political, or from other groups) had to resort to one of the ‘pirated editions' of The Mass Psychology, published after Reich was rediscovered by the 1968 movement, or to a revised version in which Reich had extensively incorporated the ‘orgone’ theory. To this day, authors oblivious to history and who wanted to criticise Reich continued to cite later versions of The Mass Psychology, without acknowledging the differences from the original, let alone specifying the edition they were referencing.

 

Now, however, The Mass Psychology of Fascism is presented by Andreas Peglau in a new edition: Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus. Der Originaltext von 1933 (Giessen 2020), supplemented by the epilogue from the 1934 second edition, a chronological table featuring key dates and events in Wilhelm Reich’s life and work, as well as a biographical and historical outline that provides an excellent explanation of the work’s context. This new German edition is recommended to all readers seeking to understand how a Jewish and Marxist psychoanalyst dealt with the looming disaster of National Socialist politics of power and violence in a publication written in exile in 1933. While some of Wilhelm Reich’s answers from that period may no longer apply, the questions he raised remain highly relevant today (see https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/2020-11/Decker-Braehler-2020-Autoritaere-Dynamiken-Leipziger-Autoritarismus-Studie.pdf – retrieved December 1, 2020). The sleep of reason that produces monsters is the precondition for the power of the Barons of Lies in Washington (Donald Trump) and London (Boris Johnson), of the national and religious demagogues in Jerusalem (Benjamin Netanyahu), Delhi (Narendra Modi), and Ankara (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), of the murderous presidents in Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro) and the Philippines (Rodrigo Duterte), of the minor autocrats in Poland (Jaroslaw Kaczyński) and Hungary (Viktor Orbán), and of the major tyrants in Moscow (Vladimir Putin) and Beijing (Xi Jinping). Instilling fear and directing anger at others: this is the strategy of power that Reich described, and it remains unchanged to this day.

 

 

Translated by Joëlle Murray

 

Translator’s Note: The original German title Die Wiederkehr eines Verdrängten literally means "the return of a repressed". In this context, "a repressed" refers to a person who has been excluded from consciousness. This aspect is lost in the English translation.

The original German text: https://literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=27469 – retrieved May 11, 2025).

An English translation of the 1933 first edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism is currently being prepared.

 

About the Author

Bernd Nitzschke is a German psychoanalyst, historian of psychoanalysis, and science publicist. He studied psychology, philosophy, sociology, and political science at the universities of Erlangen, Munich, and Marburg. He earned his MA in psychology in 1976 and completed his PhD in 1979 at the University of Bremen, focusing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schopenhauer. Nitzschke is known for his extensive writings on Freud, masculinity, and the relationship between psychoanalysis and society. He is also a co-founder of Luzifer-Amor, a journal dedicated to the history of psychoanalysis.