Summaries by  Thomas Aichhorn, PhD, Dagmar Herzog, PhD, Roger Frie, PhD, PsyD and Thomas Kohut, PhD 

The Impact of Nazi Germany’s Annexation of Austria on the Psychoanalytic Movement

Thomas Aichhorn, Ph.D

I described first the situation in Vienna in the wake of the events of the spring of 1938 as well as the flight of psychoanalysts from Vienna. Subsequently I provided an overview of psychoanalysis in Vienna from 1938 to 1945 and the reopening of the Society, which took place on the 10th of April, 1946.

Narcissism Post-Nazism

Dagmar Herzog

This paper concerns the reception of the work of Heinz Kohut and his ideas about narcissism in the German-speaking lands (West Germany, Austria, Switzerland) in the 1970s-1980s. It places that reception in multiple contexts. First, there was the difficulty of returning psychoanalysis to post-Nazi West Germany and Austria, lands in which psychoanalysis had been furiously derided as sex-obsessed, “filthy,” and “Jewish.” However, in a painful irony, it was actually an ex-Nazi, the Austrian animal behavior specialist Konrad Lorenz, author of On Aggression (German 1963, English 1966), who, having invoked Freud’s theories of aggression and the death drive on the very first page of his book, jump-started a heated national conversation in West Germany – pitting the insurgent New Left against socially conservative theorists – over whether aggression, in the human animal, was simply natural and inevitable and even a positive (i.e. not a Germanic specialty and nothing Germans or Austrians needed to be particularly ashamed of) and also specifically over what exactly Freud had initially meant when he suggested that aggression might be a drive comparable in strength and form to libido. As a result of the delayed but then intensive engagement with psychoanalysis in postwar culture, developments that had taken a quarter-century in Anglo-American contexts were traversed at warp speed, as Germans and Austrians absorbed ego and self psychology practically contemporaneously – and simultaneously strongly connected their interest in psychoanalysis to social and political concerns.

Secondly, the paper explains how the reception of Kohut’s work could not be separated from broader media discussions of the American critic Christopher Lasch’s bestseller of 1979, The Culture of Narcissism (German, 1980), which argued that modern society was suffering from narcissism as a cultural condition. Lasch relied explicitly on ideas put forward by Kohut as well as Kohut’s main rival, the borderline expert Otto Kernberg. Although reception of Kohut in German-speaking lands was initially enthusiastic, the unexpected entanglement of his reception with popular discussion of Lasch inadvertently turned young analysts against him; Kernberg emerged as the “winner” in the rivalry with Kohut, not least because his ideas seemed more suited to making sense of life in post-Nazi nations and more suited to dealing with especially difficult patients.

Thirdly, though, the paper introduces unexpected marvelous uses to which Kohut’s work was concretely put. For there was one radical Swiss analyst, Fritz Morgenthaler, a major mentor to younger antifascist New Leftists in West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, who was in close empathic-but-critical dialogue with Kohut, and who found Kohut’s ideas about narcissistic disorders clinically highly useful, even as he gave them a sex-radical twist at odds with Kohut’s more sexually conservative approach. Indeed, it was specifically in his engagement with Kohut’s work that Morgenthaler became the first European analyst, since Freud, to declare that homosexuality was not a pathology.

For details and all source references on the Kohut-Morgenthaler friendship, see: Dagmar Herzog, “Die Politisierung des Narzissmus: Kohut mit und durch Morgenthaler lesen”, Luzifer-Amor 29/57 (2016): 67-97. For a fuller discussion and source references for the rest of this paper, see: Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge, UK: ambridge University Press, 2017).

The Presence and Absence of History

Roger Frie

This paper explores how the traumatic effects of the Nazi past and the Holocaust continue to be felt, despite the distance of time. It suggests that history flows through us in ways that are simultaneously conscious and unconscious, known and not known. Our individual “stories” are permeated by the memories and narratives of those who came before us. Even when the past is shrouded in silence, we are confronted with its meanings and consequences. History’s presence can be particularly visible in the lives of those who have inherited a family history of trauma. The Nazi past and the Holocaust cast long shadows and the emotional resonance of historical trauma reaches beyond the victims and survivors to include the descendants.

As psychoanalysts we have become familiar with thinking about the victims of mass crimes and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. But how do we discuss the legacy of the perpetrators? I draw on my own German family to examine what it means to inherit unwanted fragments of a perpetrator history. An unspoken Nazi past in my family was revealed to me after seeing an unfamiliar photograph of my young grandfather in uniform. What lurks in the silences that are passed down between generations? How does our collective response to history’s atrocities shape what we what we know and do not know, see and do not see?

For German and Austrian descendants there can be a powerful wish to be free of history’s burden, to elude the obligations of memory that connect the past with the present. Yet I suggest that is precisely the acknowledgement that one’s own family were participants in the Nazi past that compels us to remember, to see historical injustices not simply as chapters in books to be dutifully read and then forgotten, but as part of the lived reality in which we exist. Knowing and remembering history is rarely straightforward. Powerful emotions, from avoidance and dissociation to shame and inherited guilt, shape how we respond to history.

Each of us has a different understanding of the Nazi period and the Holocaust, depending on our own background. Even if our families were not directly impacted by or implicated in the Holocaust, there is no shortage of mass crimes in recent history. The list of perpetrator nations is long and the unassimilated histories of their crimes even longer. This paper suggests that we are all responsible for understanding our place in history, for recognizing the effects of historical crimes and working to ameliorate them. More than seven decades on, we are confronted with renewed threats of right-wing extremism and fascist thinking, with demagogues and bystander cultures that hark back to the dark past. Given these pressing challenges, the importance of knowing history, of speaking out and not remaining silent, is more relevant than ever.

For details and references, see: Roger Frie, Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) and History Flows Through Us: Germany, the Holocaust and the Importance of Empathy (New York: Routledge, 2018).

Thomas Kohut

In my comments in response to the three presentations, I reflected on the impact of history on human beings psychologically and on psychoanalysis as theory and form of treatment. In response to Thomas Aichhorn’s presentation, I reflected on the impact of the experience of anti-Semitic persecution on the readiness of psychoanalysts to dismiss ideas and individuals which they deemed heretical and a threat to psychoanalysis’ professional standing. In response to Dagmar Herzog’s presentation, I reflected on the impact of the National Socialism, the war, and its devastating loss on the preference in Germany for Kernberg’s over Kohut’s view of narcissism in the 1970s and the inability of psychotherapists and patients alike to confront the traumatic impact of those historical experiences in psychotherapeutic treatment until the 1980s. And, finally, in response to Roger Frie’s presentation, I reflected on the traumatic impact of historical experiences on my father Heinz Kohut, and their influence on my father’s development of his theories, specifically, the importance of the environment in shaping the self, narcissistic injury, and the importance of empathy. In sum, I helped make the case that psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists need to be aware of the profound psychological impact of history on their patients and on them as well.