Researching Health and Therapy in Nazi Germany

My introduction to the field of psychohistory began in the spring of 1970 at Occidental College in Los Angeles through a History proseminar, The Irrational and History, taught by Andrew Rolle. A scholar of California and the American West, Rolle was certainly one of the very first historians to teach psychohistory at the undergraduate level (Geoffrey Cocks, “Teaching and Writing Psychohistory,” Clio’s Psyche, December 1997, vol. 3 no. 4). Rolle went on to study at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in 1976 and in 1980 produced a psychobiography of soldier, explorer, and politician John Charles Frémont. Knowing my strong interest in German history, he introduced me to Peter Loewenberg, who was beginning his career as a psychohistorian at UCLA, and I started my studies there in 1970.

Peter was the perfect Doktorvater (“Doctoral father”) for me. He genially applied the non-directive principle of psychoanalytic practice to his relationship with his doctoral students, letting us find our own conscious and unconscious way through the rich material of history he presented. In 1973, I was among several doctoral candidates who presented their research in Peter’s Interdisciplinary Seminar in Psychohistory at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. The seminar opened, memorably, with Peter’s UCLA colleague Fawn Brodie presenting her initial findings on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. It would be many years before Brodie’s insights were fully and finally confirmed by DNA testing. Thanks to Peter, we were there at the very beginning. Similarly, Peter’s seminar on Advanced Historiography met half its class sessions at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute so as to involve the staff there. I remember in particular the enthusiastic and authoritative participation of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Eugene Pumpian-Mindlin.

Loewenberg of course emphasized the importance of personal psychoanalysis in becoming a psychohistorian. I never did undergo psychoanalysis. It was expensive and threatening. These were reasons, but of course they were in fact defenses. I lacked the commitment and the courage to undergo analysis. I almost certainly would have been a better historian, person, husband, and father had I gone through one. My childhood remains a mystery to me and my character enthralled to it in ways unknown to me. My

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parents, of English/Scottish/German heritage, exercised emotional restraint while also providing a stable and comfortable home environment. I have always felt I let Peter as well as myself down in this regard. It is a major reason why I have built a career as a historian of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, health, and illness in Germany and not as a psychohistorian per se. I left behind early ventures into psychobiography: somewhat lazy applications of Erik Erikson to a war memoir, of Otto Rank to Hitler, and a rather narrow Kleinian analysis of A. A. Milne (American Imago, 1978). I was—in part defensively—just not as interested in psychobiography as I was in broader social, political, and institutional subjects.

When it came to the selection of a dissertation topic, Peter encouraged me rather than directed me. The work was to be one of my own choosing, not a pursuit of one of Peter’s own interests or scholarly projects. I don’t remember being anxious about this. Indeed, I was intoxicated by the freedom to pursue my own thoughts and feelings with regard to my first substantial scholarly work. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I wanted to work in the area of my greatest—as well as my most psychologically and morally problematic—historical interest: Nazi Germany. What I mean by problematic is that I have always felt somewhat guilty over my fascination with Hitler and the Nazis. My rationalization—and sublimation—is that my research and teaching have contributed in a modest way to greater understanding of the details of the evil that was Nazism. At UCLA, I was initially determined not to write a dissertation on this subject. But psychoanalytic theory, practice, and method were new to me and I did not and do not have the facility (the objective measure) or patience (the subjective measure) for the deep, sustained thought so essential to intellectual history.

I remember very clearly where and when the idea for a dissertation topic came to me—or, rather, I came to it. Of course it was to be about Nazi Germany. I was in the sixth sub-basement of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and saw from a distance a short lonely line of bound journals at the very end of the last row of shelves. It was the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie (Central Journal for Psychotherapy) for the years 1930 to 1939. The years alone told me that it could not have been published in Germany since everyone knew that the Nazis, in power from 1933, hated “Jewish” psychoanalysis and therefore all psychotherapy. But the journal was in fact published in Leipzig and in the volume for 1939 I saw a photograph of a psychotherapist being honored upon his 60th

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birthday: Matthias Heinrich Göring, a cousin of Nazi leader Hermann Göring. Aha. Peter told me to talk to Martin Grotjahn, one of the psychoanalysts in Los Angeles who had fled Germany in the 1930s. Grotjahn knew of several non-Jewish psychoanalysts who had stayed in Germany after 1933 and were still living there. So I got a fellowship and went to Germany. The rest is history.

The chief contribution of my 1975 dissertation and 1985 book was a more nuanced understanding of realities within Nazi Germany. Specifically, I showed that even a humane practice such as psychotherapy, and even psychoanalysis, can be mobilized by an inhumane system. A second, revised edition of my book followed in 1997, based on my own ongoing research as well as on the many critical studies in this new field.

Peter guided my dissertation research and writing with a rigorous but gentle and generous hand, urging me to finish rather than polish so as to get a teaching job before the collapsing academic job market got even worse. For the same job market reasons, Peter had also wisely recommended that I take Psychohistory as a subfield to a major field in Modern Europe. For his part, Andy Rolle played an important role in my getting a tenure-track job at Albion College in Michigan. Like Andy, I taught my entire career at a liberal arts college while also being very active as a published scholar. At Albion, I taught a history seminar on psychohistory, a course welcomed not only by my fellow historians but also by the faculty in general as exemplary of interdisciplinary learning.

My job at Albion, however, was never the preparation of students to become psychohistorians. Very few of our students went on to graduate study in history and even fewer to earn a PhD and get a job in academe. But my psychohistory seminar, which sometimes featured psychoanalysts as guests, was also the only course on campus for 40 years to address critically and comparatively the methods of history and the social sciences. This fit perfectly with the mission of a small liberal arts college, in this case to educate students in the depth and breadth of the subjective in psychology and history. Psychoanalysis was at the center of this enterprise, since, in contrast to what Thomas Kohut calls the “simple psychology” of academic psychology, psychoanalysis has as its aim understanding the dynamic contents of the entire individual mind that make up the ongoing intersection of history and personality.

To meet the needs of such a course, Travis Crosby and I

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edited a collection of essays, Psycho/History: Readings in the Method of Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and History (1980). This volume put psychoanalysis and psychohistory at the center of published articles by scholars including, among others, Loewenberg, Hans Eysenck, Hans Meyerhoff, Charles Strozier, Lloyd de Mause, Rudolph Binion, Robert Coles, Joseph Woods, William McKinley Runyan, Bruce Mazlish, Gerald Platt, and John Demos. Issues included the difference between the nomothetic model of science and the idiographic method of history and psychoanalysis, arguments over the character and politics of Woodrow Wilson, and debates on the psychology of groups.

The seminar also studied the various schools of psychoanalysis and considered issues of feminism and psychoanalysis through Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) and Judith Kegan Gardiner’s article from Signs, “Self-Psychology as Feminist Theory” (1987). It often relied on film to explore human psyche and subjectivity in time and place: Axel Corti’s Young Doctor Freud (1976) accompanying Freud’s introductory lectures, Erik Erikson’s “case study” of his eight stages of life in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) in conjunction with William Barrett’s Irrational Man (1958), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) through the lens of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek.

My scholarship continued to focus on the institutional and social history of psychotherapy, psychiatry, and medicine in Nazi Germany. I also edited the correspondence of psychoanalyst and self-psychologist Heinz Kohut. I presented on Kohut at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute as well as giving the Kohut Memorial Lecture at the Annual Conference of the Psychology of the Self in Chicago.

I also developed an expertise in the cinema of Stanley Kubrick. While by no means rising to the level of a psychobiography, my book on Kubrick, The Wolf at the Door (2004), my article, “Indirected by Stanley Kubrick” (Post Script, 2013), and my essay, “Kubrick and the Holocaust” (The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, 2019), attempt to place the unconscious of the person in his life and work. My work on Kubrick has mostly concentrated on the Holocaust’s impact on him, which as a Jew born in 1928 he found impossible to address directly in his films. I argue that, consequently and most significantly, there is a deeply laid subtext on the Holocaust in his horror film The Shining (1980).

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I count among my best work the scholarly discovery of the Göring Institute, my historical insights into Kubrick’s cinema, “Hors de Combat: Mobilization and Immobilization in Total War,” in The Cambridge History of the Second World War (2015), and The State of Health: Illness in Nazi Germany (2011).

There is some connection in my work to Marxism. My parents were Upton Sinclair/Norman Thomas Democrats. I grew up in the 1960s reading I.F. Stone’s Weekly and Ramparts. My study of Freud reinforced my appreciation for the Marx (e.g., Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) I read in graduate school. Both men were interested in the structure of what was really going on behind surface appearances. I was also attracted during grad school by applications of Freudian thought in critical social theory of the day by Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown.

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