The Intergenerational Taboo of Nazism: A Response and Elaboration of Volker Friedrich’s Paper, “Internalization of Nazism and its Effects on German Psychoanalysts and their Patients”
I’m very glad to participate in this important exchange with German colleagues and to comment and add to the ideas in the valuable, provocative, and evocative paper by Dr. Volker Friedrich. His paper is important to the history of German psychoanalysis and to the theoretical and technical issues imposed by the Holocaust.
It is historically appropriate that this Goethe House Symposium was held at the New School which gathered so many refugee intellectuals and provided a forum for psychoanalysts as a “university in exile” during the Nazi era. The title of the Symposium: “Psychoanalysis and Power” was indicative of the fateful consequences for psychoanalysis in Germany through accommodation to Nazi authority and assimilation of Nazi ideology. The influence of external and internal authoritarian or dictatorial power on psychoanalytic organizations, training, and treatment is a subject of vast importance, but the organizational involvement with Nazism elicited formidable resistance to psychoanalytic investigation.
The taboo of Nazism was to have an influence on clinical work with survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust and their progeny, and on psychoanalytic education and the development of psychoanalysis in Germany and in Austria. These exchanges may be understood as part of an analytic process of working through of unconscious conflicts and identifications, which far transcends the ability to mourn and to remember. One of the greatest problems analysts face has been with a disowned and disavowed horrifying past with which they are identified. Analytic confrontation with previously unimaginable [End Page 281] Nazi atrocities led to massive defensive structures and “The Taboo of Nazism” which Dr. Friedrich has so well and so movingly described. The lifting of this taboo was a developmental “return of the repressed.” It led to very painful confrontation with the conformity and collaboration of psychoanalysts, however motivated and rationalized, with Nazi aims and goals.
Dr. Friedrich’s paper begins with a fascinating clinical vignette. One and one-half years after completing a supervised analysis of a young woman, he had a chance meeting with a patient. As many patients have the “fantasy of doing,” she returned to the place where she had come for analysis for more than two and one-half years with strong feelings about her analytic experience. In this post-analytic encounter and “follow-up interview,” she tells her analyst the equivalent of an affectless nightmare. The analyst is a guard at a gas chamber in a concentration camp, and her analyst is about to shut the door of the chamber tightly behind her. Of course, knowing the analyst’s whereabouts and having an idea of his schedule, she may have hoped and expected to have encountered him so that the ostensibly chance meeting was actually psychologically arranged. The patient apparently experienced termination as expulsion and execution; but we do not know why she manifestly places herself as dying victim and her analyst as perpetrator of Nazi murder. We do know that it had a most powerful effect on Dr. Friedrich; he had a violent, physical reaction to it, and his throat infection seemed to psychologically mirror her inability to speak about it.
His training analyst and Dr. Friedrich agreed that they had been overwhelmed with the destructive rage of the concentration camp. But could the inquiry be carried past the closed door of the gas chamber and that supervisory session? There was apparently an implicit group censorship concerning Nazi atrocities. It had been a taboo to discuss the crimes of the Nazi era in psychoanalytic training and clinical work. If the issues could not be entirely evaded, one could only give lip service or participate in superficial discussion, so that the Nazi period and its atrocities remained a cordoned off taboo territory.
This widespread conspiracy of silence was particularly true [End Page 282] in Germany, but also pervaded much of the analytic world. It took the passage of time to the generation of the grandchildren of the Nazis before there could be adequate self-scrutiny and exploration of the Nazi era and its crimes. The crimes were of a hitherto unimaginable magnitude. The door to the chamber of horrors had to be kept closed, but the closing of the gas chamber door in the dream simultaneously exemplified the atrocities. Family and society, analytic teachers and institutions could be associated and identified with criminal activity and silent collusion. The originally Freudian psychoanalysts who remained in Germany had been a minority that tolerated life under the Nazi regime. They may have been tolerant and compassionate toward individual Jewish patients or other Jews, but were absorbed into the Goring Institute which served the regime and agencies of the military and the SS. The crimes were “unspeakable” and the guilt and shame were unbearable.
Counter reactions also developed in the international psychoanalytic community, so that it was also difficult to deal with the issues for non-German analysts. At first only physical and neurological trauma was recognized, and psychological sequellae were denied. It would be years before there would be a systematic investigation of the War and Holocaust trauma, its ramifications and effects on succeeding generations. A time lag was evident in the formation of psychoanalytic study groups, and in the publication of such books and articles as Generations of the Holocaust (Bergmann, Jucovy, & Kestenberg). Did this conspiracy of silence invade the analytic experience between Dr. Friedrich and his patient? Had there been unconscious collusion in Dr. Friedrich’s own analysis to avoid the taboo subject? The situation is more complex in training analysis because there is a tendency in all training analyses to avoid issues which might be linked to negative transference and which would evoke hostile counter transference. Dr. Friedrich “couldn’t do anything about the termination/murder”; he was only a “cog in the wheel,” a candidate. Tendencies to appease and please the training analyst are complicated further by concern for the “care and feeding” of supervisors. The children were not only expected to compensate but to [End Page 283] “cover-up” for the parents. If there is a conspiracy of silence which involves the larger group that comprised the analytic training institution and its faculty, then the defensive and corrosive effects are enormously intensified.
Dr. Friedrich is quite right that we need to do more thinking about the psychodynamics of silence. Silence is a trenchant and poignant topic in any discussion of Nazism and the Holocaust, and it is a subject of great importance in much related analytic discourse, e.g., about child abuse. Tendencies to be submissive, dependent, and docile, given the authoritarian culture, and the authority of the training analyst, were reinforced by unconscious vows of silence. “Sacred taboos” were invoked to avoid and evade Nazi issues in the analytic work.
Dr. Friedrich’s reaction indicates that the patient had opened a wound which could not be healed without much further self-scrutiny and analytic work. Self analytic inquiry probably was in conflict with compliant transference to the institute and off limits to analytic education. Such clinical vignettes may beautifully illustrate Dr. Friedrich’s point about the perpetuation of conflicts and identifications with Nazi teachers and teaching. Moreover, the issues could not be uncovered, subjected to scrutiny, and openly verbalized. The very foundations of the German Psychoanalytic Association were rooted in an attempt to escape guilt and blame, to render themselves as acceptable, not openly to the international psychoanalytic community, but also to themselves. They had labored to save and salvage psychoanalysis while nevertheless adulterating psychoanalytic theory, sacrificing psychoanalytic values, and vicariously participating in the crimes of the Nazis.
After the War and the Holocaust, what made this history particularly difficult to confront was the paradoxical legacy of an attempt to Ayranize psychoanalysis followed by a subsequent attempt to join and identify with what had been devalued as a Jewish science. Freud’s books had been burned by the Nazis. (His books at the “Goring Institute” were locked in a cabinet.) He proved to be wrong when he thought that with the advance of civilization, that only books and not people were being burned. Freud narrowly escaped Nazi arrest and [End Page 284] probable execution (only with the massive help of Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, and the American government). The murder of Freud’s remaining family was representative of the millions of murders and the indescribable suffering of untold, nameless millions more. The burning of Freud’s books and his sisters was experienced as the attempted murder of the corpus of psychoanalysis. The abandonment of psychoanalytic values and medical ethics contributed to the guilt and the silence of the analysts. Silence avoided acknowledging complicity, guilt, and shame, and perpetuated not getting involved. Denial, self deception, and rationalization contributed to the fantasy of being an “innocent bystander.” The responsibility for “going along with things” was hidden, but the silence itself, as Dr. Friedrich notes, had an infiltrating, persecutory quality. Silence represented the concealed crime and feared, evaded punishment. Silence becomes an enormous burden, complicating trauma, and adding to it. Silence prevents the working through of trauma and associated affects such as guilt and grief.
I do not agree that silence is the worst crime. It is not the same as murder, torture, and starvation, but silence compounds the crime by avoiding its exposure and understanding, and sometimes by preventing justice and attempts at correction restitution, and reparation. Silence is a form of withholding and concealment so that the dirt does not appear, and a reactive cleanliness and propriety may more readily be instituted. Silence has traditionally been connected with all manner of family secrets, for example, adoption, illegitimacy, and crimes. It inevitably becomes associated with unconscious conflicts which it also expresses. But as Freud (1905) commented, “Betrayal oozes from every pore.” And like the secretions with which the word secret shares in its verbal root, the truth “leaks out.” Analysis requires a willingness to candidly confront the reasons for the secrecy, as well as the contents of the secret.
The incomprehensible catastrophe of the Holocaust is now intensively studied and commemorated while concurrently subjected to every form of dedifferentiation and denial. The horrors of the Holocaust do not disappear into fantasy or [End Page 285] fiction or arbitrary narrative. Unconscious fantasy organizes both outer as well as inner experience. I want to emphasize here that avoidance and denial, and the tenacious taboo of Nazism created an air of well-being, associated with defensive splitting into “good and bad” German analytic societies and both collective and personal myths.
The IPA Congress held in Hamburg, Germany in 1985 was the first international congress held in Germany since Hitler came to power and was a landmark event. Since I had an important role in shaping the Congress, it is worth noting, for the record, that there was initial opposition to any mention of Nazism and the Holocaust. The rationale was that it would be an insult to the host society in Germany, that it would lead to speculative, applied, analysis rather than clinical papers, and that a focus on the Nazi past would shift attention from significant analytic contemporary issues. What was originally proposed for the Congress Program would have amounted to a pact of silence. J. Chasseguet-Smirgel was Chair and I was North American Co-Chair of the Congress. Janine and I were allied in determination to have Nazism and the Holocaust represented in the Congress. I suggested the overarching theme of “Identification.” It had never been the subject of an international congress and was central to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. It was finally accepted and as anticipated, it unified and facilitated the discussion of four major War and Holocaust subthemes: Identification with the Aggressor; Identification with the Victim; Identification with the Paranoid Omnipotent Leader; and The Role of Identification in Superego Corruption and Regression. Despite initial ambivalent tendencies to possibly maintain the old silent collusion and the taboo of Nazism, analytic judgment and ideals prevailed. Discussions of the Holocaust pervaded the Congress. J. Chasseguet-Smirgel gave a stirring presentation on Goethe’s Faust as a metaphor for Nazi Germany. In my final summary, I noted that the Hamburg Congress had been held under the shadow of the Holocaust, and the conflicts elicited among the analysts present, and the analysts who were absent.
The second and third generation of German analysts after the Nazis had begun to question and challenge the role of their parents and grandparents; their own analysts and supervisors [End Page 286] who had entered into an unacknowledged possible collusion with the Nazis and/or with Nazism. Everyone had to ask what they would have done under similar circumstances. (Professional life proceeded encircled in a police state.) Analysts had succumbed to political pressure, intimidation, indoctrination, and adaptive conformity. The younger generation of German analysts courageously undertook their own self-scrutiny and examination of their psychoanalytic history. Amnesia was overcome, and there was a “return of the repressed” into consciousness.
The conflict of the German generations was vividly dramatized when I was invited to meet with a Freud scholar in Germany, some three years after the Hamburg Congress. There was a student protest on the university grounds, jarring the otherwise peaceful setting of the medieval university town. I was informed by my host, with some hesitation, about the cause of the dissension. The medical students had threatened to strike because they had been thwarted in their demands to know the origin of the cadavers and the organs that had been chemically preserved. Were these organs obtained from persons murdered by the Nazis? Questions about the buried Nazi past resurfaced in disguise and reverberated through the university. A faculty mediator recommended open dialogue and documentation of the source of the bodies and body parts. But senior faculty members rejected this recommendation. Instead, replacement of all the bodies and organs was ordered, thus avoiding the unspoken Nazi past. Some students may well have wondered if new bodies could not be produced upon request, as in the past.
This experience indicates how powerful the conflicts concerning Nazism remain and how important it is to continue the analytic research of the last two decades. The new generation of German analysts have been reconstructing the tragic and excruciatingly painful history of German psychoanalysis during and immediately after the Nazi era. This has involved the analysis of adaptation and conformity, collusion and collaboration, seduction and suggestion, ambition and opportunism, fear of recrimination and retaliation, and indoctrination in the myths and madness promulgated by the Nazis. The Mayor of Hamburg, Dohnanyi, called attention to the [End Page 287] absence of silent protest and the insidious effects of silent assent instead of vocal dissent. A compromise of integrity had escalated to institutional and personal submission and collaboration with Nazism.
The forebodings of compromise and collaboration appeared soon after Hitler attained national power. Analytic standards, values, and humanitarian ideals were rapidly and insidiously compromised. In general, medicine and physicians were expected to provide “racial leadership, and these ideological adaptations were rationalized in terms of psychotherapeutic and medical ethics and community interests. Freud wrote to Eitingon on March 21, 1933, concerning the Berlin Institute, “There is no other way to stop (the inner opponents from taking over the institute and making it subject to their intentions) than that the Board of the IPA disqualify and, to a certain extent, expel the so much maligned institute, until it bettered its ways. Naturally there has to be a warning first. A sad discussion.”
This organizational taboo of Nazism early and partially gained an international character. In 1935, when the Jews were presented as having voluntarily resigned from the German Psychoanalytic Society, the IPA joined in the silence with the euphemism of resignation rather than expulsion. This was a purge of their own Jewish friends and colleagues, their own training analysts and supervisors, and it was not publicly noted. As Karen Brecht, V. Friedrich, and others have pointed out, no other option was really considered. This purge was concealed from the IPA, and in degree by the IPA. A search of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis during the years 1935–1939 confirmed the prevalent attitudes of silence and concealment. E. Jones as President of the IPA and Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis favored the facade of resignations, presumably in the service of a viable German Psychoanalytic Society. Helpful to refugee analysts, Jones may have acted with anxiety and hope-against-hope to preserve analysis and protect analysts from persecution. The “resignations” of the German Psychoanalytic Society were recorded without comment, question, or challenge. There was no statement from any of the officers of the IPA which would have [End Page 288] formally alerted international analysts and other societies about the happenings inside Germany or the plight of their expelled colleagues. There was doubtless fear that open discussion might lead to Nazi reprisals. The German-Austrian Psychoanalytic Societies were incorporated into the “Goering Institute” where a portrait of Sigmund Freud faced a portrait of Adolph Hitler. Some “Aryan” analysts thought they could serve two masters, Freud and Hitler!
Loyalty to the Nazi regime, while proclaiming loyalty to psychoanalysis, was a hidden, unspoken part of the German Psychoanalytic legacy. There is much to be mourned by all those involved, including the spiritual as well as the biological descendants of the perpetrators and the victim survivors. However, there can be mourning without knowledge, without understanding, without analytic insight. Mourning for lost ideals, values, and idealized leaders is not the same as the analysis of terror and taboo. I agree that the second generation of German analysts and now the third generation are not “walking in a daze.” To widen our understanding of the most terrible and terrifying aspects of the human condition, to overcome the repressed and suppressed past, Nazism must be exposed and explained, interpreted and reconstructed as new information and integration permits. In this Goethe House Symposium, I would like to conclude with a quotation from a November 11, 1815 letter from Schopenhauer to Goethe. “It is the courage of making a clean breast of it in face of every obstacle that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’ Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our hearts the Jocasta, who begs Oedipus for God’s sake not to enquire further.” In this spirit of Freud, Schopenhauer, and Goethe, we join with Dr. Friedrich and his colleagues in seeking enlightenment and pursuing analytic, unlimited inquiry, and historical reconstruction.
