Psychology and psychotherapy under National Socialism

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German psychology during the Nazi era was essentially determined by the prevailing ideology . The leading psychologists in Germany between 1933 and 1945 were involved to a considerable extent in the Nazi regime and in many cases intertwined their own work with thoughts on racial ideology.

Expulsion and conformity

As a result of the law enacted on April 7, 1933 to restore the civil service , leading researchers of Jewish origin or ideologically 'unreliable' university lecturers were forced to retire and dismissed: These included William Stern , Max Wertheimer , Otto Selz , Wolfgang Köhler , Gustav Kafka . Even before this law, William Stern, David Katz and Karl Bühler resigned from the board of the German Society for Psychology (DGfP) , which was now placed under the leadership of politically adapted functionaries (from 1933 Felix Krueger , Walther Poppelreuter , Narziss Ach and Otto Klemm ) . DGfP chairmen such as Erich Jaensch and later Oswald Kroh explicitly committed to the Nazi ideology after 1933.

Many predominantly Jewish researchers, especially those from Gestalt psychology ( Berlin School ) and psychoanalysis , emigrated to the USA and did not return after the founding of the German Society for Psychology in 1948, but determined the further development of psychology in the United States. The most prominent names include Kurt Lewin , who anticipated his dismissal by giving up his teaching license, as well as Max Wertheimer and Karl and Charlotte Bühler .

Otto Selz (Mannheim) was arrested in exile in Holland and murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp. Kurt Huber (Munich) was executed in 1944 for his commitment to the ' White Rose '.

Psychology under the regime

A trend in psychology particularly promoted by the Nazi regime - as in the USA, the Soviet Union and Great Britain - was the investigation of military service candidates or soldiers . This funding is thanks to a further development of a number of measurement psychological and empirical methods. In all other areas, however, officially practiced psychology in Germany between 1933 and 1945 adapted to the Nazi ideology and in many cases even defended it.

During the Nazi era, official psychology in Germany can essentially be divided into characterology and type theories . Typological theories attempt to classify people according to their predominant properties or characteristics and to classify people with similar properties into 'types'. Characterologists, on the other hand, are more concerned with the special structure of properties of individuals . Both currents represented very contradicting views. In many cases, however, there was an overemphasis on the hereditary component in the acquisition of behavior in accordance with the Nazi racial ideology. In general, there was a pluralism of methods - experimental procedures and theoretical deductions sometimes differed greatly.

What all currents had in common, however, was essentially the intention of ' ethnologizing ' psychology. As in contemporary philosophy - for example with Plessner or Scheler - efforts were made to classify a comprehensive overall picture of man from an ethnological point of view. Holistic psychological theses were, for example, interpreted by Friedrich Sander in the sense of the Nazi state doctrine 'on the whole of the people'. Wolfgang Metzger attempted a political adaptation of Gestalt psychology .

Influence after the war

The largely not empirically confirmed and ideologically falsified psychology of the Nazi era then lost its influence very quickly after 1945. Most of the theories listed above (with the exception of gestalt psychology) are hardly mentioned in psychology today - unless in contributions to history. In contrast to the psychological theories, most of the leading psychologists of the Nazi era fared after 1945: Many of them still taught without restriction at German universities in the 1970s.

see also: Medicine under National Socialism

literature

  • Ulfried Geuter: The professionalization of German psychology under National Socialism . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1988, ISBN 3-518-28301-4 , ( Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 701).