One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York—and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School—Veronika Fuechtner traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, she illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, she explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.
Veronika Fuechtner is Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College.
“Fuechtner has done extensive research in both published and unpublished primary materials to detail in a fresh and stimulating manner the contacts between and among practitioners of psychoanalysis in Berlin and representatives of the diverse and vibrant cultural milieu of Berlin between the world wars. Those many interested in the history of psychoanalysis, in the cultural history of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, and in both modern and postmodern subjects and methods of discourse will find this work of interest and value.”—Geoffrey Cocks, author of The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust
“Fuechtner has provided the first full-length scholarly investigation of the circle of writers, artists and doctors that created and constituted 'Berlin psychoanalysis.' This deeply insightful work addresses a topic that has been surprisingly neglected and will have a large audience among literary scholars, art historians, historians of Germany and Central Europe, Jewish studies scholars and of course the large community of readers on Freud and psychoanalysis.”—Paul Lerner, author of Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930
“Berlin Psychoanalytic examines what was the major intellectual counterweight to the world of Sigmund Freud's Vienna, Karl Abraham's Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Berlin’s psychoanalytic world was more political, more literary, more engaged with feminism and gay identity than Vienna ever was. Yet the Nazis managed to efface the Berlin tradition in Germany virtually totally—ironically by transforming the institute rather than closing it. In what is the most important book in ANY language on the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Veronika Fuechtner has captured its intellectual ferment and powerful presence in Imperial and Weimar Germany. This is a book that MUST be read by anyone interested in German intellectual history during that extraordinary epoch.”—Sander L. Gilman, author of Freud, Race, and Gender
"Berlin Psychoanalytic maps out the ideas of Freud, his followers, and his rivals as they permeated a city exploding with grief after the First World War. Veronika Fuechtner's excellent, meticulous, sorely needed study tracks new notions of the mind as they intersected with literature, medicine, and politics in this crucial proving ground of modernity. In the process, she enriches our understanding of an array of dazzling figures, from the stunning novelist Alfred Dõblin and the medical jester Georg Groddeck to the Dadanalyst Richard Huelsenbeck." —George Makari, author of Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis
256 pp.6 x 9Illus: 10 b/w photographs
9780520258372$85.00|£71.00Hardcover
Sep 2011