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
_______________________________________________________
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.

Lucy
Felice, first of all, can you talk a little about your background, what you were doing professionally just before and during the time you did the Database?

Felice
I was on the faculty at NYU School of Medicine. I was trained with a PhD in physiology, was hired as a physiologist, and I taught medical students physiology, but most of my life. I’ve had this dual interest in literature and in biology. And in fact, that’s from high school on, and when I started college, I had to make a decision about whether to major in English or in biology. And I decided to major in biology because I thought, well, I can do literature on my own any day, and I’ll never be able to make it a profession. Whereas, you know, I can’t do science on my own, I have to be trained. And so that was the path I took, which was a science path, but I never lost my interest in reading and thinking about literary things. And let’s see, at one point I decided to start a discussion group with the medical students and any faculty who were interested. It was a small group, and it changed from year to year, but we met once a month, and I would, initially, pick out readings. They were short readings because students don’t have much time to read non-medical stuff– poetry, short stories, essays, and that continued for several years. At the same time, and really, I have to say that without my husband’s help and interest in what I was doing none of this would have happened because he of course, was interested in the use of technology, computers in medical education, but he was also interested in what I was doing with my literary stuff. So he set up a database for me on my own computer.

Lucy
And this was in the early 1990s.

Felice 
Yes, 1993 or thereabouts; he set up a computer program for me so that I could keep track of the readings that I was doing with the students, because I didn’t want to repeat anything with the same group, essentially. And I also was kind of following the work of Joanne Trautman Banks, who was a pioneer. She really was the one who started the field. I have to give her full credit. In 1978 she published a book of annotations of literature that had to do with medicine. I don’t really remember how I found it, but it was very helpful in my own work with the students. I decided, basically, to copy what she did, with some modifications of my own, in my own database that my husband Marty Nachbar helped me to set up. So to begin with, that’s what we did. Marty’s idea was that I should recruit other people in the field who were doing this kind of teaching with their students, and who might be interested in submitting annotations to this database. And secondly, that we should make it online, so that anybody out there who has access to the internet could stumble on this thing and maybe get interested. And the idea, his idea, was that it might expand the whole field, which was, at that time, just literature and medicine.

Lucy 
I had the privilege of knowing your husband and saw how he was really ahead of his field.

Felice 
He was a visionary. Definitely not just with that, but with all kinds of stuff that had to do with tech. You know, computers in medical education.

Lucy 
He was a big help to me when I had a grant from the NIH to do a project. He really zeroed in on its strengths, its weaknesses, and helped me in a very generous way. Just to backtrack a little bit, how did you choose the work that you shared with the students? What were you looking for when you selected certain work?

Felice 
I really had a pretty broad range of what I chose, and how I looked for it. Of course, if it was something to do with doctor or resident or medical student experience with patients– that was what I was looking for. But then there was patient experience, also from the patient’s perspective, how they were interacting, and what their feelings were about their illness or disabilities. And then as I started getting interested in this, I decided I really needed more training, and I decided to get a master’s degree, not in literature, but in something that was called at that point, humanities and social thought– that was the track at NYU in one of their master’s programs. And through that, I got really interested in the social thought part and societal issues that directly or indirectly affected medical practice, patient experience, and so forth. So that really also was important for me to get that degree, because when I started recruiting other faculty from other institutions, they [thought] I was an imposter. I was coming into that field without any background other than my interest in it. And they did not think highly of my intrusion into their field, and I don’t blame them. But you know, when they got to know me and what I was doing, they sort of became more accepting. But the thing that really clinched it was when I started this degree program, because then they felt okay, she’s serious. She’s going to get some professional training that makes it more legitimate to be associated with her. But of course, it was a really great thing for me, because it did give me a lot more background for what I was doing and what I would like to have been doing.

Lucy
You were very successful in recruiting a national board of editors.

Felice
Yes–the contributors were from all different places. They were very interested in making this a national internet-based project, because they were interested in furthering the field, and they saw the potential if it was on the internet, But initially I also had two NYU medical students who helped me choose material and write annotations. And then the site, especially once it became web based, was heavily used by so many and got so many hits–about a million a year. 

Lucy
It’s clear that the users went beyond medical students and physicians. What do you think attracted the wider audience?

Felice 
Well, I would occasionally get some notes, you know– I think there was a mechanism– I don’t remember exactly, where a user could contact me or somebody who was paying attention at NYU. What I found really interesting was there were patients who were using it. I don’t know what percentage of the users were patients, but there were patients who found stuff that was helpful to what they were going through. And so that was interesting to me, and I thought it was important, you know, it wasn’t my original intent to reach out to patients. It was really more of an education-based thing, but there it was. And why not?

Lucy 
We’re all patients at some point in our lives.

Felice 
Yes, right. That’s exactly true– issues about death and dying, not necessarily for the individual person, user, but family of theirs, friends who were in serious medical situations–all of that, it makes, made sense. So the audience became very broad.

Lucy 
And also you expanded the format.

Felice 
Well, first of all, when we started in 1993 there wasn’t a worldwide web. It didn’t exist. There was an internet. But the program that allowed people to access the internet was called Gopher, G, O, P, H, E, R. It was much more primitive but that’s what we started with, we put the annotations on this gopher program. Marty’s associate, Roy Smith, was instrumental in helping to set up the gopher program. Roy maintained his interest in our project as it moved forward. Then maybe a year or two later, I don’t know what the time lag was, but when the World Wide Web became available to anybody, I recognized that that would be really important, because it allowed you to make links with hypertext. You could make links between annotations; if you were referring from one thing to another; you could make links to art if you were annotating an art piece. You could make links –that was so key. So the web was just great. That was the way to go. And we were just lucky that it was there pretty early on.

Lucy
You recognized its potential.

Felice
And that wasn’t just Marty, actually. That was me.

Lucy 
And you chose the format of annotation versus a longer review. Was your goal to divide it into summary and commentary, specifically so that people understood what the work was about, but also how it connected to medicine and health? 

Felice 
I was going back to the format, or a slight modification of the book that Joanne Banks published in 1978. I think she used key words and a short paragraph about what the work was about. I think I expanded it to make both a summary and a commentary, because I thought that would be more helpful to people. I was modeling this thing after what she had done in 1978 and then again, she published another version, an updated version, I think, in 1982. In fact she and I had a phone conversation about our respective projects. 

Lucy 
One of the strengths of the web site was open access. You didn’t have to subscribe. That was important to you, I would imagine,

Felice 
Marty was very insistent on that. There were people who said, Oh, you should be charging something or whatever. And he said, No, if you want to make people aware of this field, you just make it completely accessible,

Lucy 
And it stayed that way, and the new site is open access. That leads me to ask, what do you think the role of health humanities is now? 

Felice 
You know, with all this artificial intelligence stuff, –I was reading about, or I saw online, a woman who, instead of having people as friends, she has some kind of an AI setup. And she’s not the only one, apparently, who’s, you know, relying instead of on human contact –on these bots. To me, it’s mind boggling. So I think there is definitely still importance to making this kind of work accessible and promoting it. And I also think it still should be part of medical education, health education, and it should be accessible to anybody who wants it.

Lucy 
Moving on to our new project. It’s based on the database but one of the differences, in my view, is that we’re including reviews that are a little more in depth than the annotations. How do you feel about what’s going on with the new site and how it’s evolved? And you can be honest. I mean, please.

Felice 
I think it is different from the database, and that’s good. It’s fine. You have your own vision of what you’d like to accomplish, and I think it’s working well, you’ve recruited people who’ve written some interesting things, not annotations, but more like essays. And you’ve expanded it so you have included art. I don’t know what else you’re planning to do, but I think it’s a good site, it’s valuable. It’s nice to have something up there that’s medical humanities related. And I really admire what you’ve done. 

Lucy 
Thank you. I think one difference is, you pioneered using links in the old database, and we’re using links much more now that it’s possible to do so. So if we review a book, then the author is interviewed by someone, we might link to the YouTube video. That’s been interesting to do and adds to what we can offer. It’s hard to know who’s using the site. We’re still in the very early stages, but I think it has a fairly broad appeal beyond just practitioners whether they’re doctors, nurses, or trainees, and I’m trying to have the public be interested in the work that we choose.

Felice 
I think you have your vision of the website, and that’s what you’ve voiced here, but it’s not my view of medical humanities.

In fact, I found this online at George Washington University, on their medical humanities site, and they quote me, but they don’t acknowledge that it was me, where I wrote: “Medical Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that includes the humanities, social sciences and the arts and their application to medical education and practice,” and then whatever education materials people develop that are designed “to help students develop and nurture skills of observation, analysis, empathy and self-reflection, skills that are essential for humane medical care.” [Quotes are from the GW website and were at the original NYU medical humanities site.] Especially the first part that I read, I mean that it is a broad, interdisciplinary scholarly field. That is how I have always, or at least for many years, maybe not in the very beginning, looked at it. So that’s a little different from what you are trying to do. And I’m not criticizing you in any way. I mean, I’m just recognizing that there is a difference in what you want to do with your site and what we did with ours.

Lucy 
One of the things that the database could do was show different cultures and describe experiences that the students themselves might not have directly. MedHum is a bridge into other cultures, and that’s what I mean when I say it is a lens on the human experience. That by reading literature, by reading about other societies, and what people who live in those societies go through, which you know only too well, it broadens your ability, hopefully, to empathize and to understand the differences among people.

Thank you, Felice for speaking with me today and for your editorial guidance throughout the years. It’s been an extremely fruitful collaboration.

Web image by Medhum.org

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