“Psychoanalysis [as] the germ of the dialectical-materialist psychology of the future”

1934

“WE ARE ALL convinced,” Otto Fenichel wrote from Oslo in March of 1934, “that we recognize in Freud’s Psychoanalysis the germ of the dialectical-materialist psychology of the future, and therefore we desperately need to protect and extend this knowledge.”¹ So begins the extraordinary series of 119 letters written between 1934 and 1945 and circulated between and among a core group of activist psychoanalysts who had met at the Berlin Poliklinik in the 1920s, fled the Nazis, and remained close friends and political allies in exile. Otto Fenichel, principal author of the Rundbriefe, or circular letters, embodied that core’s spirit and the Rundbriefe tell the story of the psychoanalysts’ evolution from 1934 to 1945, the activities of its participants, and their larger ideological struggles in Europe and America. When nine-tenths of the psychoanalysts were forced to flee Berlin and Vienna between 1933 and 1938, they took with them a particular humanitarian ideology forged in a curious time. On the one hand, the new nation states had traded monarchy for participatory democracy, the Hapsburg Empire had dissolved, and women had gained the right to vote; on the other hand, there was boundless anti-Semitism, encroaching fascism, and intellectual persecution. Though classified since then as politically left wing, or even radical, a designation Fenichel’s Marxist group would have actually welcomed, they hardly represented a disaffected “left opposition” in psychoanalysis. For one, all psychoanalysts were at the least social democratic. Second, as Fenichel recognized, the exiled group’s ideology stemmed from the same progressive impulse that had guided psychoanalysis after World War I. Third, this group stayed true to Freud, while the IPA and its branch societies, increasingly oppressed and factionalized, had become unhappily rigid and more conservative. The Rundbriefe thus document the actual history of psychoanalysis, as classical in its own way as Fenichel’s major psychoanalytic text, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis.

Of the Rundbriefe’s 119 confidential letters, about half were written from within Europe until 1938; from 1938 until 1945, from the United States. The core group—Edith Jacobson, Otto Fenichel, Annie Reich, Wilhelm Reich, Barbara Lantos, Edyth (Glück) Gyömröi, George Gerö, and Frances Deri—had convened exactly ten years earlier in 1924 at the Poliklinik’s Children’s Seminar. These psychoanalytic “children” of the movement, now mostly scattered into exile around Scandinavia and Europe and eventually the United States, on the whole welcomed Fenichel’s intellectual and political leadership. The Rundbriefe consisted of ideological arguments, organizational reports from branch societies on three continents, psychoanalytic wranglings, a long meticulously theoretical public disagreement with Reich and shorter barbs aimed at the purported neo-Freudians, analyses of scientific meetings, position papers, book and article reviews, political opinions, and gossipy chatter. Over three thousand pages were exchanged, mostly typed on thin white paper, double-spaced, carbon copies or mimeographs, each page hand corrected. Some of the longer letters are really loosely bound packages of information containing facsimiles of letters between analysts outside the Rundbriefe circle, newspaper and journal clippings, programs, some with fragments of earlier circular letters attached. Generally, the letters are long and laboriously detailed, averaging twenty-three pages and ranging from ten pages to eighty pages, carefully numbered and serialized, and written in an inelegant executive style.

Fenichel’s first Rundbrief (figure 35) was dated March 1934 from Oslo; the one-hundredth issue was issued in July 1943; the last letter was dated July 14, 1945, from Los Angeles. To the initial planners the letters may have been secret or clandestine. But as the young Martin Grotjahn, then still in Berlin, later remembered, he somehow knew that his friend Fenichel was writing and organizing them. He “was a prolific writer who put together drafts of very long letters, up to 30 pages, sent the manuscripts to his friends who added their comments, sent the package on, until the letter found its way back to Otto.”² Some of these were shared solely with the core group absorbed in working out the theoretical issues of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Other letters had a far wider readership and were directed toward an outer circle, a secondary group of politically engaged analysts who had not belonged to the Berlin Children’s Seminars. Anything was open to critique. At different times Fenichel critiqued biologism, culturalism, sentimentality, and romantic historicism. The second letter from Oslo is dated April 1934 and is circulated to Erich Fromm, Frances Deri, George Gerö, Edith Glück (Gyömröi), Nic Hoel, Edith Jacobson, Käthe Misch-Frankl, Wilhelm Reich, Annie Reich, Vera Schmidt, and Barbara Schneider-Lantos. Still more members of the outer circle, who received occasional and less urgent letters, were Alice Bálint, Michael Bálint, Therese Benedek, Martin Grotjahn, René Spitz, Abram Kardiner, Angel Garma, and Sándor Radó.

35 Manuscript of Otto Fenichel’s first Rundbriefe, March 10, 1934 (Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

This single-minded writing style of Otto Fenichel, who detested the hypocrisy of preserving some sort of expedient, sanitized version of psychoanalysis when its very existence was under attack, merely held back his political passion. Like Reich and Simmel, he believed in sociological work or social work, where the rightful use of psychoanalysis lay in its practical accomplishments, in giving ordinary people access to the privilege of insight. Throughout the narrative of the Rundbriefe, a dialectical subtext aims to show that abiding by a wholly Marxist sociology is a precondition to practicing psychoanalysis from an equally spotless Freudian point of view. The contributors’ anecdotes, comments, and polemics told the story of a group working out this theoretical struggle while fighting on multiple fronts at once, both within and outside the confines of the psychoanalytic world. In the Rundbriefe the analysts sought to hold onto their original political mission while their own professional association (the IPA) under Ernest Jones’s policy of appeasement was apparently granting concessions to the very people (the Nazis) who had condemned them to exile. To survive as exiles in host or hostile countries with little prospect of returning to Berlin, even those already accustomed to an “outsider” status craved the personal closeness of friends. Of utmost importance, therefore, Fenichel’s plans to gather the group together for a summer 1934 meeting in Oslo developed rapidly. To drive the scattered analysts to attend this caucus, Fenichel described what was happening at their old institute in Berlin: the recently founded German Medical Society for Psychotherapy had given Carl Jung a prominent role in the new society.

Carl Jung’s name had sounded alarms for Freudian analysts ever since Jung’s official break with the IPA just before the onset of the First World War. Character and relationships aside, Freud and Jung’s differing worldviews appeared in stark contrast after 1918. While Freud was elaborating his firmly secular social democratic platform and exploring the unconscious permutations of human sexuality, his old friend and bitter rival was forging a spiritually linked system of psychological archetypes. Desexualizing human motivation and behavior had always angered Freud—it had caused his break with Adler and Stekel—who had constructed psychoanalysis precisely to undo individual damage cause by society’s repression of unacceptable sexuality. Freud had also long suspected Jung of anti-Semitism. And, indeed, in February of 1933 Jung had accepted Heinrich Mathias Göring’s invitation to participate in the direction of the Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie, the new society of psychiatrists and psychotherapists working out of the Wichmanstrasse headquarters of the former Poliklinik. Göring made his clinic’s mission clear. In his closing speech to the General Medical Congress for Psychotherapy, he exhorted his audience to abide by Hitler’s Mein Kampf and, in this official capacity, referred to Carl Jung as interpreter of the Hitlerian ideal.

We National Socialist doctors, National Socialist academics, stand up absolutely for our idea, for love of our people…. I take it for granted that all members of the Society have worked through this book in all scientific seriousness and recognize it as the basis for their thought. I require all of you to study in detail Adolf Hitler’s book and speeches. Whoever reads the Führer’s book and speeches and studies his essential nature will observe that he has something which most of us lack: Jung calls it intuition. Heil Hitler!³

Suddenly the ideological quarrels between inner circle members, especially Fenichel and Reich, seemed less important. Quoting Lenin’s famous “What is to be done?” (Simmel’s motto as well), Edith Glück suggested forging a compromise between Fenichel’s wish to bring about organizational change from within the IPA and Reich’s insistence on producing an entirely new theoretical platform. The Rundbriefe group agreed to stay united, to tolerate their colleagues’ increasingly reactionary attitudes, and to argue for tolerance and constitutional reforms at the forthcoming eighteenth IPA Congress in Lucerne. They would abide by the IPA’s “bourgeois-liberal ideology,” though they found the organization undemocratic and hoped to mobilize it toward more committed antifascist political action. “All the reasons that Ferenczi originally gave for founding the I. P. A. still exist today, it seems to us, in concentrated form,” Fenichel wrote to reassure his friends. “For though Psychoanalysis thoroughly permeates the public sphere, in psychiatric and educational theory, this does not inevitably mean, as Freud has emphasized, the triumph of Psychoanalysis. If [Psychoanalysis] must constantly abandon its autonomy, change its language and moderate itself time and again in order to receive universal approval, this only strikes a keener death knell.”⁴ Thus emboldened, the Rundbriefe group arrived at the Lucerne meetings only to confront, to their dismay, the behavior of their post-1933 colleagues. Those who could still remain in Austria and Germany (twenty-four of the thirty-six Berlin analysts had fled), as well as the traveling Americans, had started to remake Freudian theory into bland counterrevolutionary dogma. And according to Anna Freud, even Teresa Benedek and the few still left in Berlin found “their ‘paradise’ in the last year not quite as ideal as Boehm described it.”⁵ Ernest Jones’s role as president of the IPA was far too ambiguous, they thought, given his insistence on achieving a settlement with the Nazis, on the one hand, and, at the same time, his tremendous efforts to physically rescue analysts from the Nazi grip in Berlin. Ultimately, Reich’s contention that the IPA was actively stifling dissent proved true: in a plan that Anna Freud and Jones had been hatching for a year, Reich was expelled from membership in the IPA in August, just at the end of the Thirteenth International Psychoanalytic Congress held in Lucerne. And it turned out that Jones’s strategy for rescuing his colleagues expelled from the Berlin society masked his continued collusion with Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig. But, unlike Jones and many of his IPA colleagues, Reich could never sidestep inquiry nor put distance between himself and either the more conservative or the more Marxist psychoanalysts. Anna Freud blamed Reich’s insistence on locating socialist potential within psychoanalytic theory, and starting a concurrent movement and a journal, above his allegiance to her father or to the Communist Party. Reich, on the other hand, claimed to have been victimized for his highly visible anti-Nazi mobilization just when Jones, Anna Freud, and Freud were negotiating to maintain more or less viable psychoanalytic activity in Germany under Hitler. In truth, Anna Freud was quite skilled when the nature of her work had more to do with clinical evaluation than with raw politics. In perhaps the most perceptive assessment of Reich to date, Anna Freud described his personality to Jones. “I have quite a long Reich experience behind me and I could always get along with him a little longer than the others,” she wrote to Jones,

because I tried to treat him well instead of offending him. It helps a little way and would help more if he were a sane person which he is not…. There is a wall somewhere where he stops to understand the other person’s point of view and flies off into a world of his own…. I always thought that he is honest as far as he himself knows, which most of the others do not believe of him. But, of course, he is not consistent or logic[al] in his actions, which one could expect if he were honest and sane. I think he had quite a deep understanding of psycho-analysis and is taking it in places now where it does not go together with his much less complicated beliefs. He is an unhappy person … and I am afraid this will end in sickness. But since he is our world still, I am sure the way you dealt with him is the best possible way. He is near Vienna in the mountains just now to see his wife and children.⁶

When Fenichel and Reich reasoned that their stance on politics and sexuality, and on the totality of theory and praxis, was closer to the original Freud, they were correct. Psychoanalysis could only reach its full potential in a socialist society. Fenichel was neither isolationist nor sectarian, since he merely elaborated on Freud’s own postwar social democratic thinking. On the personal level, however, the arguments between Fenichel and Reich escalated and the two men, friends and coworkers since medical school in 1919, separated at the end of 1934. Reich, tired of the bickering, turned to his work in Oslo, while Fenichel, who loved to write, kept up his essays for the Sex-Pol journal. Even to an outsider like Martin Grotjahn, Fenichel’s differences with Reich had become obvious. Anna Freud noticed it too. “Somebody told me privately,” she wrote to Jones, “that now Fenichel’s troubles with Reich have begun.”⁷ Reich still identified with Communism, while Fenichel held to his social democratic roots in Red Vienna. Second, Reich, considered as much a deviant in institutional psychoanalysis as in institutional Communism, had been rejected by both establishments whereas Fenichel embraced organizational affiliations at almost any cost. Ever since medical school, Fenichel had seemed to push his friends too hard, but he also stayed extremely loyal. In letters, essays, papers, and speeches he continued to argue that Marxism should accept psychoanalysis and that his friend Wilhelm Reich had understood that best. “The materialist’s distrust of psychology [is] understandable [but] … is not justified,” he wrote. “The [Marxists’] unawareness of the details of dynamic interactions can become a great impediment to their cause…. Reich placed these factors⁸ in their proper light.”⁹

In a barely disguised whitewashing of the Nazi takeover, the IJP editors announced that “according to information received [the Berlin society and Poliklinik] resumed work in January 1934. Lecture courses for practitioners of psychoanalysis and for teachers are being given on approximately the same lines as before, the Institute having new regulations for admission.” Presumably it was Jones who found just the right euphemisms for masking the facts, but he was worried. “Have you found any reason to suppose,” he asked Eitingon, “that the Society will depart from our work in either theory or practice?”¹⁰ Obviously Eitingon had, or he would still be in Berlin. Jones’s failure to comprehend what he called the “riddle” of why Eitingon “left Germany for good” was nothing new. In all the early years of the psychoanalysis, Jones had tried to put the movement’s needs ahead of his own and generally succeeded, if only for lack of imagination. But his devotion had been painfully tested recently, and the seemingly sudden resolve of so many colleagues (all Jews) to safeguard themselves instead of the “cause” unnerved him. He concluded that Ernst Simmel had “got in with a rather bad lot” when he drew up plans for an experimental, and no doubt politically activist, institute in Los Angeles.¹¹ And, instead of conceding that the mass relocation of traumatized colleagues might justifiably destabilize their institutions, Jones suggested narrowly that “the old Berlin Society has transferred its interminable personal quarrels to other countries.”¹² Fortunately Jones made other public announcements as well. “A Psycho-Analytical Institute and a Treatment Centre will be opened shortly in Jerusalem under the direction of Dr. Eitingon” and a few former associates from Berlin.¹³ Actually both Jones and Anna Freud were genuinely delighted that Eitingon had petitioned the chancellor of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University to organize a “department of psychoanalysis.”¹⁴ In the midst of the destruction all around them, new academic activity would be “splendid.”

Meanwhile what was left of the Poliklinik was now reluctantly codirected by Martin Grotjahn, one of the Rundbriefe outer circle members, just then winding up his own analysis with Felix Boehm. For the first few months of the year, Grotjahn treated a handful of “orphaned” patients remaining at the clinic when their analysts fled the country. Though he came up with various justifications for this work, he felt so anxious that Magnus Hirschfeld’s invitation to leave the Poliklinik in order to direct the Institute for Sexual Science came as a welcome relief. One day after Grotjahn started the new job, the building was surrounded, raided, and burned by Nazi stormtroopers. Since 1919 Hirschfeld’s institute had housed four clinical departments (psychotherapy, somatic sexual medicine, forensic sexology, and gynecology and marriage counseling) as well as a library and the offices of the World League for Sexual Reform and Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the first homosexual organization. Like the Poliklinik, it had emerged in the context of the Weimar Republic’s progressive reform movement and, after 1933, was denounced as immoral, Jewish, and social democratic. Also like the Poliklinik, the institute was closed and reopened as a Nazi office building just three months after Hitler’s takeover. By late fall, as the half-hearted investigation into Edith Jacobson’s recent arrest by the Gestapo continued, an anxious cynicism set in with Grotjahn and other members of the Rundbriefe group. By the next year Jacobson would be in jail. Many analysts had been threatened or harassed, but until then no others had been taken into custody. Grotjahn himself had managed to fend off the government for a while simply by ignoring it: the official paperwork asking about his racial purity and political affiliations lay unanswered on his desk, gathering dust. But his denial and momentary good luck had to be confronted, and his half-Jewish wife’s dismissal from her job as a physician signaled that the moment of decision had arrived. They too ran for their lives.

Red Vienna fell on February 12. Though the Nazis’ attempted takeover failed, Engelbert Dolfuss was assassinated and Kurt von Schuschnigg became Austria’s new chancellor. Fifteen years of a worker’s regime in an urban environment had attempted to show that a new social structure could survive based on equitable housing, employment, and welfare services. It could survive market forces but not armed ones. With the fascist desolation spreading over Europe, Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Reich, two analysts rarely linked in the annals of psychoanalysis, emigrated to the United States. Within an overall socialist municipal policy, these two had militated for the practical application of psychoanalysis, Adler pedagogically and Reich in mental hygiene. Interestingly, separated from the workers movements of Red Vienna, their theories became markedly more removed from social factors. Adler’s educational theories were championed by America’s overvaluation of individualism, while Reich’s bioenergic research and theories of sexual liberation were taken up by later countercultural and radical therapies.

The Ambulatorium, however, seemed to have great staying power even when Red Vienna’s outlook was at its lowest. Otto Isakower, a psychiatrist who had worked in Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic with Paul Schilder and Heinz Hartmann during the late 1920s, joined Hitschmann and was installed as deputy director of the Ambulatorium in 1934. During his psychiatric rounds at the public hospital, Isakower met and hired Betty Grünspan, one of those extraordinary veteran nurses who labored on the front lines of disease as vigorously against syphilis and tuberculosis in the local hospital as against the cholera and spotted fever on the Serbian front in World War I. Like many of her friends among the modern Viennese New Women, she was constantly seeking out fresh challenges and decided to become a physician and specialize in surgery. In the mid-1920s Grünspan followed Tandler into leadership of the public health offices and chartered a continuing education school for graduate nurses. In addition to her teaching, she directed surgery and aftercare at the Am Steinhof Hospital and so habitually observed the mental processes of psychiatric patients. The effects of training notwithstanding, psychotic suffering is particularly vivid to clinicians who watch closely, and Betty Grünspan resolved to study psychoanalysis in order to develop treatments for psychosis. She attended the institute’s training seminars on Pelikangasse, analyzed adults and children, and, in one of those curious twists of fate, lost her post as municipal physician but remained a psychoanalyst at the Ambulatorium, exactly the opposite of the earlier governmental decree of “physicians only” for the Ambulatorium. There Grünspan’s combination of skills and independence attracted the attention of the American pediatrician and child analyst Edith Jackson who would found, license, and finance the Jackson Nursery.¹⁵ Only a woman with Grünspan’s personality would have the strength to take over as assistant at the Ambulatorium in 1937, the clinic’s last intrepid year before the Anschluss.