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The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians
By examining the private correspondence of a circle of German psychoanalyst emigrés that included Otto Fenichel, Annie Reich, and Edith Jacobson, Russell Jacoby recaptures the radical zeal of classical analysis and the efforts of the Fenichel group to preserve psychoanalysis as a social and political theory, open to a broad range of intellectuals regardless of their medical background. In tracing this effort, he illuminates the repression by psychoanalysis of its own radical past and its transformation into a narrow medical technique. This book is of critical interest to the general reader as well as to psychoanalytic historians, theorists, and therapists.
218 pages, Paperback
First published January 9, 1984
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About the author
Russell Jacoby
25Ìýbooks25ÌýfollowersRussell Jacoby (born April 23, 1945) is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an author and a critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are twentieth-century European and American intellectual and cultural history, specifically the history of intellectuals and education.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 20, 2014
At once a fascinating and frustrating book. Fascinating for the tale it tells of the fate of "political psychoanalysis." Second generation analysts, born around 1900, were very closely allied to the German/Austrian Youth Movement and to left-wing politics. The most famous, Wilhelm Reich, charted his own path, which ended in disaster (see comment 3, sub-paragraph 2 below). But Otto Fenichel was a much cannier character and he led a group of analysts who took psychoanalysis to be a political, cultural, and sociological enterprise as much as a matter of individual therapy. Unlike the neo-Freudians (comment 3, sub-paragraph 3), however, with whom they shared an interest in culture and politics, they remained faithful to what they considered essential to psychoanalysis - sexuality and instinct, things they accused the neo-Freudians of abandoning. But unlike other "conservative" analysts, they rejected the over-biologization that accepting instinct theory could lead to.
With the coming of the Nazis, the political psychoanalysts went into exile, and faced with the need for keeping traditional psychoanalysis alive, in the face of the Nazis on the one hand, and the neo-Freudians on the other, they repressed their political and sociological leanings, thus allowing psychoanalysis after the war, in the USA, to become a dry, medicalized technique pursued by conservative, professional medical school candidates. Thus the disaster of American psychoanalysis in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
The book was written in the 80s, and I have spoken elsewhere of the subsequent re-humanization and re-politicization that been given, as a gift, to psychoanalysis by its displacement from the heart of the medical establishment by the current, more biologically-based psychiatry. That story makes an important (and more hopeful) coda to the rather gloomy story told in this book.
What made the book frustrating to me was that in all the discussion of the enthusiasm for political psychoanlaysis of Fenichel and his circle, we get very little sense of what that actually meant for them. Starting around p. 100, we finally learn about their emphasis on the importance of history and reality in the determination of individual neuroses (hence a denial that they resulted purely from the conflict of intrapsychic forces) and on the use of psychoanalytic theories to discern national characters (responsive not to some Herderian genius, but to the social and educational realities of different countries). But we get very little about how all this was worked out in detail, in their voluminous (but often unpublished) writings.
With the coming of the Nazis, the political psychoanalysts went into exile, and faced with the need for keeping traditional psychoanalysis alive, in the face of the Nazis on the one hand, and the neo-Freudians on the other, they repressed their political and sociological leanings, thus allowing psychoanalysis after the war, in the USA, to become a dry, medicalized technique pursued by conservative, professional medical school candidates. Thus the disaster of American psychoanalysis in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
The book was written in the 80s, and I have spoken elsewhere of the subsequent re-humanization and re-politicization that been given, as a gift, to psychoanalysis by its displacement from the heart of the medical establishment by the current, more biologically-based psychiatry. That story makes an important (and more hopeful) coda to the rather gloomy story told in this book.
What made the book frustrating to me was that in all the discussion of the enthusiasm for political psychoanlaysis of Fenichel and his circle, we get very little sense of what that actually meant for them. Starting around p. 100, we finally learn about their emphasis on the importance of history and reality in the determination of individual neuroses (hence a denial that they resulted purely from the conflict of intrapsychic forces) and on the use of psychoanalytic theories to discern national characters (responsive not to some Herderian genius, but to the social and educational realities of different countries). But we get very little about how all this was worked out in detail, in their voluminous (but often unpublished) writings.
July 19, 2017
As the first reviewer says, there is good information here but not much of it, and this makes the book rather frustrating. It is already a short book, but it probably could be pared to within journal-article size without sacrificing anything of interest. I highly recommend Elizabeth Ann Danto's "Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918-1938" instead or in addition.
March 18, 2017
An amazing book for people who are interested in psychoanalysis, cultural studies, immigration, and politics.
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