Germany

The return to the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud by the group around Müller-Braunschweig was a long process of intellectual renewal and institutional reorganization. A more detailed understanding of this first requires a brief sketch of the intellectual world in which German analysts moved in the period between 1945 and the mid-1950s. The newly founded institutes in Berlin, Munich, and Stuttgart began by pursuing the programme at the “German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy”—namely, of grouping together the various schools in depth psychology under what was called synoptic psychotherapy. Once the constraints instituted by the National Socialist regime to amalgamate were no longer present, it became evident that in the years following the persecution of Jewish colleagues—a period during which German psychoanalysis was cut off from international developments—a clinical and theoretical reorientation had also been under way. The period in question witnessed a reassessment of the values inherent in German idealist thought and, more especially, those originating in the Romantic tradition. Moreover, after 1945 philosophical anthropology, which had at around this time become an important philosophical current within Germany, was to enter the arena. ¹