Berlin Psychoanalytic by Fuechtner Veronika

Author:Fuechtner, Veronika
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2011-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE BERLIN PSYCHOANALYTIC LEAVES GERMANY

Zweig left Germany immediately after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, and, following short stays in Prague and southern France, he settled in the port city of Haifa in Palestine in December of that same year. Max Eitingon arrived in Palestine a few months later. Eitingon had met Freud in 1907 while working at the Burghölzli in Zurich, and subsequently he had moved to Berlin to build (along with Karl Abraham) what became the BPI. Until November 1933, Eitingon was the head of the German Psychoanalytic Society and a board member of the BPI. But early in 1933, while Eitingon was away on vacation, Felix Boehm, one of the non-Jewish members of the BPI, traveled to Vienna to discuss with Freud how the BPI should react to a new National Socialist law requiring that all medical organizations have an exclusively non-Jewish board. Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig (also a non-Jewish BPI analyst) had contacted various government officials, presumably to check on the status of the BPI and to dispel the National Socialists’ negative image of psychoanalysis. Because of their increasingly hostile interactions with the Nazi officials, the pair became convinced that they could avert the closing of the institute only by voting off all Jewish board members. Anxious to preserve a psychoanalytic institution in Germany that would remain under the control of Freudian analysts, Freud agreed to the election of a new non-Jewish executive board.

The first proposal for a change to non-Jewish leadership was voted down by the majority of the psychoanalysts, including Eitingon himself, who felt very alienated by this move. Eitingon continued seeing his patients at the Berlin polyclinic until September 1933, and then left for Palestine to prepare for his emigration. (Freud and Ernest Jones, president of the International Psychoanalytic Association [IPA], would have preferred to have Eitingon stay in Europe. And Albert Einstein appealed to Eitingon to seriously consider the United States rather than Palestine, which was “cramped” and “naturally flooded by doctors of all sorts.”)21 Shortly thereafter he founded the Palestine Psychoanalytic Association (PPA) before returning briefly to Berlin that November, during which time he and Simmel finally consented to the transition to a non-Jewish executive board headed by Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig.

After the transition, the already tense atmosphere at the institute became worse: Boehm’s report to the IPA describes how the new directors averted several attempts at closing. In this same report, Boehm also inadvertently depicts how the Jewish members were increasingly marginalized by their own colleagues. Eitingon finally resigned his membership of the German Psychoanalytic Society and left Germany for good in December 1933.22

By August 1934, twenty-four of the thirty-six original members of the Berlin Institute had left the country—some under dramatic circumstances.23 Simmel, for example, was in the middle of conducting a psychoanalytic session when he received a call from a friend on the police force that the Gestapo was on its way. Simmel fled through the back window of his private practice, with the help of his patient, a self-proclaimed traumatized future psychoanalyst.

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