Please note the following: My English skills are not very good. Most of the following texts were therefore first translated with DeepL and then corrected by me. I am sure that there are still translation errors in these articles – and ask those who discover such errors to send a message to info@andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de
The „English section“ also contains some articles that are not available as pdf.
Apolitical Science? Wilhelm Reich and Psychoanalysis in National Socialism. An abridged version (2023)
by Andreas Peglau
In 2013, my dissertation „Unpolitische Wissenschaft? Wilhelm Reich und die Psychoanalyse im Nationalsozialismus“ was first published as a book. In 2015, the second edition followed and in 2017, the Psychosozial-Verlag Gießen brought it out in a third and expanded edition.
I then compiled some of the most important results of my years of research in 2019 – with the kind permission of Psychosozial Verlag – in an abridged version in the orignal German. It has since been downloaded several thousand times from my website.
In order to make this information even more widely available, I have now supplemented and updated the text and translated it into English with the help of DeepL.
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Wilhelm Reich and Willy Brandt as „High Traitors“
by Andreas Peglau
Announcement of an astonishing find: the psychoanalyst Reich and the later German Chancellor Willy Brandt were jointly targeted by the Nazi People’s Court for high treason in 1939. The role, perhaps decisive for Reich’s survival, of a hitherto unjustly unknown person is also revealed: Martin Mayer.
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Were there psychoanalytic writings against fascism? Results of an (almost futile) research lasting several months.
by Andreas Peglau
Jan-Pieter Barbian balances: „[S]henever open criticism of the National Socialist state or the NSDAP was voiced, the Minister of Propaganda did not shy away from the threat of physical violence“ (Barbian 1995, p. 398); as soon as „a writer overstepped the political boundaries set for him by the regime, he risked not only his membership in the Reichsschrifttumskammer and thus his professional existence, but in extreme cases also his life“ (Barbian 2008, p. 20).
But to what extent did this affect psychoanalysis? Which psychoanalytic authors – before and after 1933 – exercised such unequivocal criticism in their publications?
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A visit to the Wilhelm Reich Archive in Boston in the year 2012
by Andreas Peglau
Before Wilhelm Reich died in the U.S. on Nov. 3, 1957, he had stipulated in his will that his legacy would not be made available to the public until 50 years after his death. In November 2007 the time had come. As part of my book and dissertation project „Unpolitische Wissenschaft? Wilhelm Reich und die Psychoanalyse im Nationalsozialismus,“ in January 2012 I visited – apparently as the first German-speaking researcher – this archive, now located at the Medical School of Boston’s Harvard University.
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The Unified Associations for Proletarian Sexual Reform and Maternity Protection and Wilhelm Reich’s real role in the German „Sexpol“
by Andreas Peglau
Through the creation of mass organisations, the KPD attempted from 1924 onwards to reach broader sections of the population and at the same time to draw them away from the SPD. With this aim in mind, for example, the Kampfgemeinschaft der Arbeitersänger, the Arbeitermandolinisten or the Verband Proletarischer Freidenker Deutschlands came into being. This was not always accompanied by large membership numbers, which was often concealed by „corporate memberships“: other associations joined as members – which made the membership numbers skyrocket on paper. Nevertheless, these organisations as a whole had an impressive following.
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What would a Wilhelm Reich-oriented psychoanalysis look like?
by Andreas Peglau
The question of what psychoanalysts can and should do here and now for the preservation of peace – at least where it is still possible to speak of peace at all, i.e. not least in Central Europe – is, in my view, by far the most important reason why a profound discussion of Reich within psychoanalysis should urgently – for the first time – be put on the agenda.
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Reich at the Marxist Workers‘ School MASCH
by Andreas Peglau
Initiated by the KPD in Berlin in 1925/26, the founding of MASCH marked the beginning of an educational project that was in many respects unique and unjustly almost forgotten.The aim of the MASCH was to provide workers with education, above all basic knowledge of Marxism.
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A Marxist psychoanalyst of Jewish origin experiences the end of the Weimar Republic.
After 87 years, Wilhelm Reich’s Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (1933) appears for the first time in its edited original text.
by Andreas Peglau
Consistent psychoanalysis is critical of society, as a social science as well as a therapeutic method. For this reason, too, the original of Reich’s Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, published in the late summer of 1933, is one of the most important psychoanalytic books ever to have appeared. Moreover, within what is now called research on right-wing extremism, it was the first publication on the psychosocial background of the Nazi system.
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Schlangenbader Str. 87, 14197 Berlin: the birthplace of body psychotherapy
by Andreas Peglau
In November 1930, Reich moved from Vienna to Berlin. The German psychoanalysts, he writes about this, „were far more progressive in social questions than the Viennese. The youth breathed more freely.“ He received professional recognition here as well, became a teaching analyst again, and also a member of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG). In particular, the circle of „left-wing“ analysts around Otto Fenichel, which also included Edith Jacobssohn and – for a time – Erich Fromm, enabled him to exchange views among largely like-minded people.
Reich’s reputation as a potential troublemaker, which endangered the maintenance of the desired psychoanalytic image, had, of course, preceded him to Berlin.
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Expatriated psychoanalysts
by Andreas Peglau
Psychoanalysis was far less suppressed under National Socialism than is usually assumed, even by experts. This – and the special position of Wilhelm Reich – is also proven by the files of the Foreign Office, which was responsible for expatriations at that time, evaluated here for the first time.
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„Im Auftrag der Firma.“ Book essay
about Knuth Müllers „On behalf of the company. History and consequences of an unexpected liaison between psychoanalysis and military-intelligence networks of the USA since 1940“.
by Andreas Peglau
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Myth of the Death Instinct. About an aberration of psychoanalysis
by Andreas Peglau
In 1932, Freud (1999c, p. 101) referred to „[t]he theory of drives“ as „our mythology,“ drives as „mythical beings.“ In 1920, in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Freud 1999a, cf. May 2013), he had first publicly presented the most controversial of these „beings“: the destructive or death drive, later named Thanatos, after the Greek god of death. Even today, the assumption of such an instinct has influence inside and outside psychoanalysis – although its remoteness from reality has long been proven.
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An „unfulfillable demand“ on the „lawgiver of philosophizing“. The first public worldview debate of the psychoanalysts
by Andreas Peglau
In 1983 Helmut Dahmer reported in the journal Psyche on publications that took a stand on the identity of psychoanalysis in the late 1920s, early 1930s. Key points were, on the one hand, Wilhelm Reich’s pleas for a rapprochement of psychoanalysis and Marxism, on the other hand, the emphasis on the scientific-objective, therefore „non-political“ character of analysis as well as the distancing from „leftist“ psychoanalysis interpretation and Bolshevism.
Dahmer also pointed out that something comparable had already occurred „on the eve of World War I,“ „in the form of a discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis and ‚philosophy'“ (Dahmer 1983, p. 1133). This earlier controversy is also worthy of consideration.
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Was „Sex-pol“ a movement?
by Andreas Peglau
Even before Reich moved from Norwegian exile to the U.S. in 1939, the final failure of what Reich had called the „Sex-Pol movement“ had occurred. The reasons for this were, on the one hand, harassment by the Norwegian authorities and defamation by various media and academics in the country. In addition, there were internal conflicts within the Norwegian sex-pol group and some elitist ideas of Reich. For example, he wanted only those who had been trained by him in character analysis to be considered „core troops“ of the movement. Already when Reich planned the work program for the following year in the summer of 1937, the „Sex-Pol“ was no longer mentioned.
But does what was disintegrating there really deserve the title „movement“?
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Did the German Democratic Republic (GDR) produce more „right-wing“ attitudes than the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)? No – quite the opposite.
by Andreas Peglau
In 1992, two years after the GDR’s annexation to the FRG, a social science study came to the following conclusion: the „proportion of East Germans expressing anti-Semitic, right-wing extremist or xenophobic views“ was „lower than the corresponding proportion of West Germans. German citizens in the East take the consequences of the Nazi past for the present more seriously.“
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100 years of „Urszene“ („Primal scene“). Notes on a controversial term
by Andreas Peglau
Johannes Cremerius (1995, p. 47) assess that psychoanalysis only has a future if it undergoes „tidying up“ in concept formation instead of continuing to stumble along „rubble heaps of arbitrary, ambiguous terms or that are understandable only to the initiated.“ Even „in the center of psychoanalytic theorizing“ one encounters „generalizing ideas,“ „private philosophies,“ which have never been clarified and passed on without reflection.
I share this view.
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Was Reich „mad“? On the credibility of widespread clichés
by Andreas Peglau
A „campaign of character assassination that continues to the present day“ (Nitzschke 1997a, p. 91) was and is ongoing against Reich.[1] Already during his Scandinavian exile (1933-1939), former colleagues of Reich, including his former teaching analysts Paul Federn[2] and Sándor Rado, put the claim into the world that Reich had gone mad. Preferably, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia (Cremerius 1997, p. 144).
An example of how even former friends of Reich contributed to representations out of touch with reality is provided by Edith Gyömroi.
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Mass Organization or „small splinter group“? About the German „Sex-pol“
by Andreas Peglau
Already during his lifetime Reich was the victim of intense slanders. They never stopped. Peter Bahnen has the merit of being the first to reconstruct Reich’s sexual reform activities in Berlin. However, this was done on the basis of a clearly negative bias against Reich. Bahnen also doubted Reich’s figures about the „German Sex-pol“.
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Concepts of Man
by Andreas Peglau
Each and every one of us has – at least unconsciously – an image or concept of Man: Assumptions about what people are like in general, good or bad, capable of learning and changing or not, reliable or unreliable, lazy or industrious, under what circumstances they feel comfortable, how they react in a particular situation, what makes them happy, sad or angry, what drives them, what can influence them, etc.
Depending on what we consider to be true in this respect, we also assess what causes and remedies there are for negative social developments – such as the fascistoid ones.
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