Weimar: a democratic interval for psychoanalysis
The Berlin Institute and the Berlin Polyclinic prospered under the Weimar Republic, which was established following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II – on 9 November 1918 – after four years of a ruthless war in which 1.8 million Germans soldiers had died and more than 4 million had been wounded. Some weeks after the signing of the Armistice, workers’ uprisings took place in Berlin and Munich. An attempted revolution by the Spartacists was brutally repressed by the Reichswehr (the successor to the German imperial army) at the beginning of 1919. Throughout the thirteen years that followed, the Social Democrats remained in power despite constant governmental reshuffles and a catastrophic social and economic situation. It was during this time that the first psychoanalytic institute was developed and became a pole of attraction comparable to Vienna. From its opening, the influx of patients far exceeded its capacity. In its first decade, analysts undertook 1,955 consultations, and 363 analyses were completed. Hundreds of patients – adults, adolescents and children – were treated in the polyclinic founded by Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon and Ernst Simmel in February 1920.
This boom in applied psychoanalysis also served to form a new generation of analysts, after that of Freud and his students. A training institution was attached to the polyclinic, which is why the social extension of psychoanalysis was intrinsically linked to the politics of the IPA’s development. From the moment of its creation in 1910, the IPA realised that the admission of new members would oblige it to guarantee their competence by assuming social responsibility for their practice. The period in which it sufficed to be recognised as an analyst by Freud, and to study the works of psychoanalysis while analysing your own dreams with your colleagues, was over. The institutionalisation of didactic analysis, put in place for the first time in Berlin by Max Eitingon, profoundly modified the existing relationship between analysis and the analyst. One passed imperceptibly from the question of the formation of the analyst to the problem of selecting candidates. The generalisation of didactic psychoanalysis obliged the subject to rethink and reformulate the question of the end of analysis to the point where ‘the usually sufficient mark, that of a lasting distancing from symptoms’1 was no longer sufficient.
The training dispensed by the Berlin Institute rested on three fundamental aspects of the curriculum: didactic analysis, theoretical training and practical formation. Cycles of introductory courses on psychoanalysis were proposed for social workers, teachers, lawyers and psychologists. A particular cycle of studies was aimed more specifically at those people – generally doctors – who wished to become analysts. In 1923, this training was placed under the guardianship of a teaching commission that elaborated directives for teaching activity and for training. These directives were reformulated in 1929 in order to render them more adequate for the orientation of training at an international level. In the first phase, the duration of the training was from one to one and a half years. The obligatory didactic analysis lasted about six months. Theoretical teaching was dispensed in the form of an obligatory course that lasted two semesters. Once judged capable, candidates undertook a practical stage in the polyclinic by taking patients into treatment. Up until 1922, Eitingon selected all the patients who applied to the polyclinic and also supervised the treatments undertaken by new analysts. The regulation of the training, which was progressively put in place at the Berlin Institute, served as the model for the institutes in Vienna, Budapest, London and New York that IPA members went on to create. Without the existence of a polyclinic that made psychoanalysis accessible to a great number of patients, this training policy would hardly have been conceivable.
At the beginning of the 1930s, the Berlin group was quite proud of the work it had done in diffusing the practice invented by Freud throughout the wider culture. At that time, who could have foreseen the persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews that would soon be wiping analysis off the map in Germany? The Weimar democratic interval ended abruptly when Adolf Hitler was designated Chancellor of the Reich by President Paul von Hindenburg on 30 January 1933. The director of the Berlin Institute emigrated to Palestine, and the Nazis took over the institute’s premises in order to install a centre of Aryan psychotherapy directed by Matthias Göring, a cousin of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s Minister of the Interior and a future Reichsmarschall. Some German psychoanalysts trained by the old institute agreed to work there. In 1945, Allied bombing destroyed the premises, which had been fitted out by Freud’s son Ernst. The transition from the old institution, directed by Jews, to the new one, placed under Hermann Göring’s guardianship, has been the subject of several carefully documented studies. The pitiful attempt to safeguard German psychoanalysis led by Ernest Jones, president of the IPA since 1932, has been well known for a long time. Analysts Carl Müller-Braunschweig and Felix Boehm worked with the Nazi administration in order to integrate the German Psychoanalytic Society (Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft, or DPG) and the Berlin Institute into the National Socialist state. (This took place shortly after the public burning of Freud’s books.) Boehm entered into correspondence with Jones; he wrote precise reports regarding the manner in which he had gone about convincing the Nazi administration that it was in the interests of the new regime to preserve psychoanalysis.2 The full extent of the shameless collaboration of certain psychoanalysts with the Hitler regime, along with the painful evidence of the fact that the IPA had not punished them as it should have, only came to light in the decades after the war. The weight accorded to these pathetic events, which took place after 1933, has focused attention on the darkest period of German psychoanalysis. As a consequence of this, questions relating to the Berlin Polyclinic during its thirteen years of effective operation were sidelined.
The history of this institution, from its creation to its confiscation by the Nazis, has largely been viewed as the internal business of the IPA. Only a few authors – such as Moustapha Safouan – have been interested in the origins of didactic analysis and have used the institute’s training data. In general, the Berlin Polyclinic has been of little interest to analytic movements outside the IPA’s sphere of influence.3 The interest that has been taken relates to the training curriculum invented in Berlin. Little interest has been taken in the clinical practice.
The American sociologist Elizabeth Ann Danto, whose Freud’s Free Clinics was published in 2005, has focused on the first IPA institutions, Alfred Adler’s centres for child rearing and Wilhelm Reich’s Sex-Pol project. But psychoanalysis itself and the discourse that it supports are missing. In Danto’s work, this demanding and complex discipline appears frozen in a portrait marked by nostalgia for a bygone epoch. In her vision, the world’s first psychoanalytic institution was directed by enthusiastic souls carried away by the whirlwind that was Berlin during the Roaring Twenties. The analysts, she says, didn’t worry about their time – they strove to give free care, and they were all militant socialists. Concern for the general wellbeing was stronger than egotistical sentiments. Everything was placed under the benediction of a highly optimistic Freud immersed in the effervescence of Red Vienna. This heroic portrait of a community of analysts seduced by progressive ideals remains intriguing. Even if it’s true that some analysts who worked in Berlin – such as Otto Fenichel, Ernst Simmel and Siegfried Bernfeld – were socialists, and if others, like Wilhelm Reich, were convinced communists, to argue that a single momentum swept the analytical community along in a desire for social transformation remains a wild generalisation. After the tragic events of 1933, the secret community of leftist Freudians in exile on American soil were unable to stop the transformation of American psychoanalysis into a medical speciality. But who would say that they failed in the USA, having once succeeded in Europe? Truly, tensions did exist in the Berlin group for the simple reason that these psychoanalysts were not all politically engaged in the exact same way. The vision proposed by Danto tends to separate the Berlin experiment from its historical, political and clinical roots even though she believes that she is putting those factors in the foreground. All the spiritual and social complexity of Germany, as well as that of Central Europe, disappears in Danto’s fusion of behaviours, along with the tensions, violence, paradoxes and extraordinary creativity that were in evidence before the disaster that befell Germany in 1933. For Danto, all good intentions will triumph in a happy ending as long as men are able to help one another. Even though she tells us how many chairs there were in the waiting room of the polyclinic, we end up wondering where analysis itself may have gone.
Ultimately, Danto’s version of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the 1920s is simply a critique of the contemporary healthcare system in North America. It is a denunciation of managed care, in which only the rich can access proper care. This is undoubtedly the reason why she describes the emphasis on the provision of free care by the Freudian institutes in Berlin as the ne plus ultra of psychoanalysis. But this does not correspond to the state of mind of the analysts of the era, who adapted themselves as best they could to the economic conditions of an epoch characterised by a general impoverishment of the population. To pretend otherwise would be to pass a bit too quickly over some interesting questions. The founders of the Berlin Institute specifically refused to offer totally free treatments – which, of course, ran counter to the vision put forward by Freud in Budapest. To ask the patient himself to assess the price that he thought he could pay for his treatment at the polyclinic effectively adapted the analytic tool to the economic conditions of this period of crisis but did not give up on the principle of a clinical and subjective reference point. One must also keep in mind the fact that the first of the free clinics rejected the possibility of free analysis for all. For clinical and diagnostic reasons it was not made into a universal principle. Free psychoanalysis was not an end in itself. If one wanted psychoanalysis to last, if one hoped to form psychoanalysts, it was necessary to make sacrifices, and the founders of the Berlin Polyclinic were in agreement on this pragmatic point of view. It was a necessity, not an ideal.
Made in Berlin
The Berlin-style training had been developed so that it could be exported elsewhere, and principles had been challenged – a radically different conception had come to the fore, one that diverged from the idea of analysts being produced on the basis of their own analysis. This is incontestable. However, it’s also safe to say that a decisive step was taken when a handful of analysts began to receive patients at the Berlin Institute in the 1920s. This initial project, which supported the action of psychoanalysis in a world marked by catastrophe, went unexamined; it is as if the study of this inaugural experiment was left to those who claimed to be Freud’s direct heirs. By the time the Berlin Polyclinic opened, Freud was tendering his thoughts on the death drive. The negative therapeutic resistance he had highlighted in 1920 was at the heart of his new conceptualisation, and its unmistakeable character was not unrelated to the experience of the war and its consequences. The dualism of the drive was not only the expression of Freud’s legendary pessimism. He had discovered that man does not desire his own good and that the satisfaction of the drive is what draws him to his own destruction, as the war had amply proved. There were no limits to Thanatos in the horror of the trenches, in the criminal blindness of the governments on both sides that sent men to be slaughtered. Each day that the war lasted – and it lasted 1,500 days – another 6,000 men perished. Some had hoped that, with the arrival of peace, the efforts devoted to reconstruction would prove that Freud’s hypothesis of the death drive was wrong, and that it could simply be ascribed to the influence of circumstances and to his well-known pessimism or supposed depression. However, the climate of social and political insecurity in postwar Germany, along with growing demonstrations of anti-Semitism and the fact that attacks by the extreme right went unpunished, was proof of Freud’s sagacity.
Psychoanalysis places itself on the side of life – it verifies empirically, in the treatment of each patient, the influence of what lies beyond the pleasure principle. From this statement, we can draw its efficacity and its value. What Freud had the courage to unveil was that the analyst reports every day the existence of the subject’s strange resistance to wanting his own good and to being healed. The psychoanalyst knows that the jouissance of the subject is not an illusion. He aims at the opaque side of this enjoyment outside meaning. Ernst Simmel was not exaggerating when he confided that it was this dark force, which he encountered when he was a military doctor, that had convinced him of the need to open a psychoanalytic hospital. The aggressivity of the superego revealed itself to him as something without limits, and psychoanalysis presented itself as the only way to treat it effectively. In 1920, in the aftermath of defeat, the alternative was simple: either the psychoanalysts would manage to innovate, or they would leave the field in order to retrench in private practice, accessible only to those who had the means to pay. The general impoverishment of the population singularly restricted psychoanalysis’s field of action, particularly in Germany. If psychoanalysts wanted to become more involved in society, they would have to invent a clinical instrument adapted to the postwar situation. The Berliners committed themselves resolutely to this path. They believed in the social mission of psychoanalysis. The creation of a place that offered free analysis seemed to them the best solution possible. So it is no coincidence that the first psychoanalytic institution in history established itself in the capital of a ruined country that was struggling against internal destructive forces that would eventually win the day.
In a nutshell, all the standard principles later adopted by the IPA – such as the length of the sessions, the training analysis and the practice of supervision – were devised in Berlin. In the 1930s, all analytical societies had to declare their conformity to the IPA. The IPA was based in Berlin and held supreme authority in everything concerning the teaching of psychoanalysis throughout the world. This hegemony can be dated to the IPA congress of September 1925, where it was considered necessary to create an International Training Commission (ITC) that would be charged with ‘[correlating] as much as possible the methods and standards of training candidates for psychoanalysis in the various Societies, and to provide opportunities for the common discussion of the technical problems concerned’.4 This standardisation of procedures was based on what was practised in Germany. ‘Made in Berlin’ became the guarantee of excellence in matters of analytical training as well as a guarantee of the immutability of psychoanalytic practice.
Berlin was truly the place where one had to go when one wanted to become a psychoanalyst. Fra...
