A Non-Jewish Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Whilst the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft was stumbling towards self-destruction, a parallel development in the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy became the context for another lively piece of controversy, the role of C.G. Jung as a Nazi spokesman. The General Medical Society had been founded in 1926 supposedly to bring together the disparate psychotherapeutic schools to be found in Germany at that time. Its failure to do so is described by Cocks (1997, p. 30):

Although it was the aim of the General Medical Society to unify the various schools of thought among psychotherapists, there were inevitable factions: Adlerians (including Adler), Jungians (including Jung), Stekelians (including Stekel), and Freudians such as Groddeck, Horney, Wilhelm Reich, and Sando Rado (though not including Freud). The great majority of psychoanalysts who were members of the General Medical Society were revisionists like the neo-Freudian Horney, the almost indefinable Groddeck, the free-love communist Reich, and the intensely intellectual rebel Schultz-Hencke. For its part, the German Psychoanalytic Society did not recognise the General Medical Society and increasingly the two organizations found themselves moving further apart rather than closer together.