Berlin was “a difficult, but meaningful ground” for the enforcement of psycho-analysis, Sigmund Freud wrote in 1908. This was a task he doubted that his German disciples, Karl Abraham, had met the young psycho-analysis as an assistant at the Burghölzli in Zürich (C. G. Jung), and by Freud himself in Vienna, before he opened in 1907, his own practice in Berlin. In 1910 he founded with eight members of the Berlin psychoanalytic Association of Vienna and in 1920 by Max Eitingon and the Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute. It was the world’s leading training center for analysts, and Analysts such as Karen Horney and Melanie Klein. In the same year opened Abraham’s first psycho-analytical polyclinic in the Potsdamer Straße 29.

A truly difficult floor. Berlin to Freud’s teaching, only after Abraham’s death in 1925, when Freud’s students, Wilhelm Reich, and Harald Schultz-Hencke away from the pure teaching of Freud Rich as a Marxist with his politicization of the analysis, and Schultz-Hencke as a critic of Freud’s libido theory, which was oriented to Freud’s principles, but also of Adler and Jung. Reich in 1933 and had to emigrate, while the “writings of the school of Freud” were burned because of “soul zerfresse of the Overestimation of the power of life” by the Nazis to the public. Schultz-Hencke and colleagues still sought to keep the psycho-analysis in Germany through adaptation to the life.

In Berlin: Attempted Arrangement with the “third Reich”

For this goal, the German psycho-analytical Association with Freud’s endorsement was even ready to separate from the work of Wilhelm Reich. But Freud also wanted to prevent Schultz-Hencke as the Board of management and head of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. To the Chairman and spokesmen of the Arrangements with the “third Reich” so renamed Felix Boehm and Karl Müller, Braunschweig, until the DPG in 1936 and eventually was dissolved. Schultz-Hencke was able to publish 1940 his Textbook “The hanging man”, the experienced after 1945, and five pads. All three participated in the Federal Republic of Germany, the leading positions in the – fractious – psychoanalytic associations.

Even if the psychoanalysis in Germany so not, as Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones writes, has been completely “liquidated”, it was by the – for tactical reasons – the “voluntary” withdrawal of Jewish analysts and the broader exile, impoverished and isolated. Their continuation and development they experienced, especially in the American exile, where she entered in the double sense of a new continent. During the Empire, analysis of the psychological and of the Communist International excluded in the United States for his orgone theory has developed, cracks in the aerial roots of other “Berliners” as Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, completely.

These and other paths and detours of psychoanalysis, Uffa Jensen, a Professor at the center for research on antisemitism of the Technical University of Berlin, followed, in his recent book “How the Couch to Calcutta”. His study focuses on the life’s work of Freud until his death in 1939, but not on views in addition, on the periphery of the psychoanalysis in French-speaking countries of Europe, the far East and Latin America. Africa is a “white” spots on your map, Switzerland as the realm of Jung’s psychoanalysis, in a sense, enemy territory. Only the strip can be broken Jensen, the initially hopeful, later – where not to be liquidated – psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union. His “global history”, who wants to explicitly “not a “total history”, in its four main cities of Vienna, Berlin, London and Calcutta.

In Kolkata, the Couch, a lounger chair

was That his Overview thus Jensen established focuses with its “provocative” Thesis: “psycho-analysis was at different places in parallel, if also time invented treated.” Prime example of this is the special development of the Indian psycho-analysis of Girindrasekhar Bose. His ideas could “not as a deviation from or development of the Freudian psychoanalysis can be understood, but must be considered as a standalone discovery”. The eponymous icon is Jensen the Couch of the psychoanalyst, which took in Kolkata, the figure of a reclining chair. To took as Bose himself known life to Freud – the first contact with him, he in 1921, and it was criticized as his “renegade” students, there may be, according to Jensen, no doubt to Freud’s authorship of the psycho-analysis.

After all, Bose questioned a core part of Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex, “he wrote,” only in European, but not in his Indian Analysands found. He held him – as the anthropologist Malinowski – for in the Euro-Patriarchal family culture. In India, the mother plays a much larger role than the father and is also subject to the domestic mother-deities. Freud held the contrary, “that the” tricky Oedipus-matter “is not resolved, the efficiency of the castration fear underestimate”, even if still completely. Bose’s wishes in the Indian Tradition-rooted ideas of his main work “Theory of Mental Life”, specifically the idea of the opposite, was not in a position to explain, “anxiety, or the phenomenon of displacement”.

Nevertheless, accepted Freud’s psychoanalysis in Calcutta as part of the international psycho-analysis, spoken perhaps in an act of – analytical – wishful thinking. Left alone, Freud got the theme never says Jensen, especially in connection with his controversial death instinct Hypothesis: “Should have the Bengal by Bose as well as insights, not to the edge of the psycho-analytical theory discussion belonged to, but at the core touched?”

Transfer and resistance: Freud analysed by critics such as patient

The saw Freud in the analytical interplay of transference and resistance, he diagnosed not only with his patients but also his critics. Those who accept both, he had written in 1914, was allowed to call himself a psychoanalyst. So, even Bose!

The sound generous than the practice of the “secret Committee” of 1912 (against dissenters such as Jung and Adler) and the International psycho-analytical Association, which were both under the Aegis of the later Governor in London, and biographer Ernest Jones. Jones woke up during Freud’s lifetime, institutionally and in the media about the purity of his teaching, and was editor of its global Central organ of the “International Journal of Psychoanalysis”. In England, he had to prevail in a field of practical analysis approaches, from Adler to Jung, but after all, he was the one imported with Freud’s exile in London, whose authority.

In his own autobiography, Jones touches a delicate point in the Transmission of early childhood emotions on to the analyst. In 1908, he even had to leave London for some years on suspicion of sexual Assault on children. Jones explains this as a misunderstanding of his way of dealing with early childhood sexuality, discovered by psychoanalysis, but the Public was scandalized. This is an issue of concern not only to today – for example, in the case of the Berlin psychologist Helmut Kentler and other ‘ 68 – the Public. Psychoanalysis is aware of the therapeutically desired Transfer of libidinal impulses to respect people than risk their release, the want to control it through a professional distance – such as the placement of the analyst behind the Couch – to solve to you after successful processing. The possible counter-transference of the analyst to the Analysand(inn)en as an art mistake, if not misconduct. Examples of the relationship of C. G. Jung and his student Sabina the game are called pure or Sandor Ferenczi’s Declaration of love to a patient, which Freud as a teaching analyst on the Plan.

Kraus, Popper and Tucholsky mocked the psycho analysis

emotion researchers Jensen detects in the analytical mobilisation and manipulation of emotions is the essence of psycho-analysis. It had only been, especially in Freud’s Version – either as a “liberal-enlightened project”, the engine control or, on the contrary, as the unleashing of sexuality misunderstood. Karl Kraus mocked the psycho-analysis than the disease, “for whose therapy she considers herself”, Karl Popper, has rejected as “pseudo-science”, Kurt Tucholsky as a time spirit of delusion ridiculed: “Every young man of a little good manners / look nuts deflower./ Any woman who fits in the era / hated your father./ And the story comes from Vienna, and that is why it is particularly the rail!“

in Contrast, Jensen, results of neuro-biological Scans comparing the brain activities of the “romantic” sex love and mother’s love in the same regions of the brain situate and Freud’s libido concept seem to confirm this. “What are brain activities”, he ironically, “would record includes a fMRI Scanner probably, if we had shown a picture of our psycho-analyst?”

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Uffa Jensen: came the Couch to Calcutta. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019. 538 Pages, 28 Euro.