Pity the poor disciplines of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in modern German history. Traditionally, psychiatry has come in for the worst of it, and not without reason: German psychiatrists (university-centered and biologically-oriented) and neurologists were early and enthusiastic adopters of the new “science” of eugenics in the early twentieth century. They established the field of race hygiene and racial genetics, giving the Nazis a scientific basis for their racial policies, and they were the predominant architects of the notorious “euthanasia” program of the mentally ill and intellectually and developmentally disabled, which killed in aggregate roughly a quarter of a million people between 1939 and 1945, and of the sterilization program, which sterilized over 400,000 between 1933 and 1939.
Far less dramatic—not even in the same league, but disturbing in its own way—is the record of psychoanalysis during the Third Reich (psychoanalysts were not involved in the two programs mentioned above). Psychoanalysis, pejoratively referred to as “the Jewish science” by the Nazis, was of course created by Sigmund Freud in Vienna. One of the early and seminal centers of treatment, research, and training was the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, founded in 1923 (it grew out of the Psychoanalytic Polyclinic, a free clinic founded three years before) by Max Eitingon, who was the director. Many of the faculty, including Eitingon, were Jews; several were also socialists.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Institute’s days were clearly numbered; not only because psychoanalysis was considered “Jewish” and so many psychoanalysts were Jewish, but also because its goals of individual growth, self-knowledge, and independence were directly antithetical to the mindset that a totalitarian government wanted to impose. Freud was now anathema, a new language of “Aryan” terms for analytic principles was devised, all Jews were purged, and the focus of psychoanalysis in Berlin shifted to the furthering of Nazi ideology: treating “war trauma” in soldiers and SS men, prioritization of and obedience to a totalitarian mindset, “reorienting” dissidents towards approved National Socialist thinking, conversion therapy as a treatment for homosexuality, and the like. The talking cure was to be weaponized for state purposes.
Seven months after Hitler seized power, Freud wrote to a colleague in England, “Berlin is lost…” Eitingon was forced to resign and fled Germany and was replaced by two Aryan analysts as co-directors. Three years later the Institute was subsumed into the German Institute for Research and Psychotherapy, known as “the Gӧring Institute,” with a new director, Matthias Gӧring, cousin of Reichsmarshall Hermann Gӧring.
The Institute’s excuse for collaborating with the regime was that it was the only way to “save” psychoanalysis and permit its survival; Freud himself had early on counseled accommodation as necessary to accomplish this end. What the Institute learned was that there is no accommodation short of full cooperation in a totalitarian state. But what was the toll of compromise on the men and women left in the Institute?
This was the history of psychoanalysis under the Nazis, which has been reviewed in a number of scholarly works¹. The novelist Stephen O’Connor has set himself a different task: to examine the life of a fictional non-Jewish German psychoanalyst as it played out against the background of Berlin and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute before and after the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933. His new novel, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, follows its main character, Günter Zeitz, from his initial meeting with Sigmund Freud in 1924 through the years of the Third Reich and beyond. Günter will be our avatar, our surrogate participant through whose eyes we will watch things play out, during the heyday of psychoanalysis and through its suppression. However, the novel is not primarily about the destruction of German psychoanalysis, but about Gunter during the destruction of German psychoanalysis. Günter will be Exhibit 1 in the case for the acute and lingering effects of trauma.
As the novel opens we meet Günter corralling Freud on a street corner in Vienna and asking him to take him on for analytic training, which will consist largely of Günter’s personal analysis, and Freud agrees. In the doctor’s waiting room Günter meets another patient, Josine Rosen, a Jewish woman, and shortly thereafter they begin an affair. It becomes clear that Josine is troubled; she has already had a suicide attempt, and is subject to bouts of depression, but Günter is in love and within a year they marry and soon thereafter have a daughter, Hannah. Despite their ongoing disputes about some aspects of Freud’s “death force” theory, Freud recommends Günter for a position at the prestigious Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, which he accepts. Over time, the course of true love does not exactly run smooth; Josine is unstable, and the National Socialists are increasing in power and presence in Germany, posing a problem for her as a Jew. Günter and Josine will separate and reunite several times and draw others into their story as their world descends into a very rigidly structured type of chaos. How they all navigate this personal and professional turmoil determines the rest of their lives.
Meanwhile, we listen in as the analysts at the Institute discuss the increasingly dangerous situation, and how to respond. They initially dismiss Hitler and his “gang of toothless throwbacks” (p. 127) as upstarts with no political base and no future (as does much of the German public) until 1933, when it becomes apparent that this is no longer the case. In 1936, after Matthias Gӧring assumes the directorship, new rules for psychoanalysis are introduced; complying with these changes is clearly the only way the Institute will be allowed to continue to function. Some analysts flee, some accommodate, and some join the resistance.
However, the novel is really Günter’s story. Günter is eminently likeable; he is a bright, engaged and engaging character pursuing his academic dream who genuinely wants to mitigate human suffering. We watch him grow from the sheltered son of a country doctor to a confident teacher and practitioner, and we watch him fall in love, repeatedly, almost as though he is “feeling his way” in this world of emotions. When the Institute is taken over and its direction changed Günter finds himself in a moral quandary: he is horrified by National Socialism but feels unable to do anything about it. Can there be a small degree of accommodation, to allow him to continue to help those who need help, or is accommodation a slippery slope which ends in a betrayal of self and principles? Silence or resistance? We watch with him as he tries to keep his professional life intact as his personal life begins to unravel. When he is forced to treat Dr. Gӧring’s nephew, an SS lieutenant recently returned from a murderous detail in the East, he reaches his personal Rubicon.
Günter is an everyman caught in the gears of a machine, and the kernel, the gist, of the novel, is a question: how does one go on living one’s life in a system gone mad, and what are our responsibilities to others and ourselves? How do you go to work and go home to your family, how do you love and hate and gossip and drink your coffee and read your newspaper and pick up your paycheck and go to a movie, when you are convinced that a great evil is being perpetrated, that you are told to be part of it, and that any false step on your part might bring that evil down upon you? When it is your country and your countrymen and your colleagues doing it? What is the personal cost, the cost to yourself, and to your self, when—if— you come out on the other side of the madness?
The other characters, and their interplay, are handled carefully and realistically. Josine is a large and critical part of the story. She is clearly—and sadly—damaged, and her behavior is too erratic for us to “like” her, although she engenders tremendous sympathy . She is a tragic figure and we feel for her, although this is not always easy. The student analyst Elke Weber, who becomes a critical participant in the story, is drawn realistically and sympathetically. Hannah will become important as a character in her own right later in the book. The other characters in the novel, including some of the historical figures, are drawn simply but cleanly and expressively; the reader feels that they know them, if only briefly.
We Want So Much to Be Ourselves is well-written, engaging, and suspenseful. O’Connor’s narrative successfully summons up both the atmosphere in the world of psychoanalysis in the 1920’s and Nazi-era Berlin’s anxiety and paranoia in the 1930’s. The reader who has some familiarity with the history of Weimar and Nazi-era Germany will note a rare factual slip², but nothing that is critical for plot development or that takes away from the pleasure of the reading experience; such are the pitfalls of writing historical fiction. When we reach the last hundred pages or so—the postwar years—the narrative tempo speeds up, and near the very end the novel becomes telescoped into a series of rapid-fire moments in the protagonists’ lives, seeming more an epilogue than a continuous part of the novel; this is the section that catalogues the aftermath. Life hobbles on, though one might wish for a more leisurely unwinding of the tale.
We Want So Much to Be Ourselves asks how a person of moral integrity can function in what the German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers has called a Verbrecherstaat, a “criminal state”—not simply a state that occasionally commits crimes, but a state which has been transmuted entirely into a criminal enterprise—and what the price of that functioning, of complicity or resistance, might be. It portrays profoundly human characters who live through societal trauma, from which it is possible to emerge, but rarely to emerge unscathed, and emphasizes the role of connection for moving forward and healing. Importantly, it reminds us that patient care does not exist in a vacuum or a pure state, divorced from the society that surrounds it, and that when it is co-opted and weaponized by political considerations, things go very bad, very fast.
We Want So Much to Be Ourselves
Stephen O’Connor
Bellevue Literary Press, New York 2026: 496 pages
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¹The history is complicated…and contested; see Geoffrey Cocks’ “The devil and the details: psychoanalysis in the Third Reich,” in Psychoanalytic Review, 88 (2), 2001; Zvi Lothane, “The deal with the devil to “save” psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany” Psychoanalytic Review, 88(2), 2001; and Cocks’ review (in Psychoanalysis and History 3(2), 2001) of James and Eileen Goggin’s Death of a Jewish Science—Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich, among others. The Goggins feel that psychoanalysis was “destroyed” under the Nazis, while Cocks notes significant continuities in the discipline through this period, although his analysis includes psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
²At one point one of the characters is said to have been arrested by the police and “…got off the train at Theresienstadt and went straight to the gas chamber…” (p. 425) While the person narrating this event is admittedly unsure that the prisoner went to the gas chamber, the fact is that they could not have; there were no gas chambers at Theresienstadt. In another example, a patient of the Berlin clinic is referred to as a “Leninist” who was a member of “the DKP.” The author is presumably referring here to the German Communist Party, known as the DKP, or Deutsche Kommunistiche Partei. However, the DKP was only founded in 1986. The Communist party in Germany during the Weimar Republic and (though it was rapidly outlawed) in the Third Reich was the KPD (Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands).
Web image by Medhum.org based on the original book cover.
