From Weimar Culture (Peter Gay, 2001) pp34-5
But the influence of the Warburg Institute, if profound, was narrow; all its survivors testify to its serene isolation. German right-wingers looking for Kultur-Bolschewiken found no material for suspicion in the Warburg Institute’s publications on the world view of St. Augustine, the contents of medieval encyclopedias, or the iconography of a Durer engraving.
It was different with those other students of myth, the psychoanalysts, for the myths they studied were the — often unacknowledged — possessions of everyone. The Psychoanalytical Institute in Berlin, which had begun as a branch of the International Association in 1910, became independent in 1920, complete with clinic and training facilities — a decisive step, as Freud recognized, toward creating a body of well-trained analysts. To judge from the names of those who trained and were trained in Berlin — Sandor Rado, Franz Alexander, Karen Horney, Otto Fenichel, Melanie Klein, Wilhelm Reich — the institute participated in that sense of excitement so characteristic of Weimar culture, and its founder, Max Eitingon, its chief training analyst, Hanns Sachs, and its imaginative theoretician, Karl Abraham, were quite as remarkable as the psychoanalysts they trained. It was a rigorous school, and stiff; Rudolph Loewenstein, who was analyzed in Berlin by Hanns Sachs, found it “cold, very German.” But even Loewenstein, with all his reservations, thought Sachs splendid (“a true empiricist”) and Rado brilliant (‘a magnificent teacher” and an “extraordinary intelligent man”). And, in addition to the excitement generated by the local talent, there was one unforgettable incursion by the Founder himself; at the Berlin Congress of 1922, the last he ever attended, Freud read a paper, “Some Remarks on the Unconscious,” which those present never forgot. It was in this paper, Loewenstein recalls, that Freud “introduced a whole new approach, a revolution in analysis,” the “structural theory” of “the superego, the ego, and the id.” The lecture was, Loewenstein says, “one of the greatest esthetic, scientific-esthetic experiences I’ve ever had in my life.”
However magnificent, such experiences had a limited public; in Germany, as elsewhere and perhaps more than elsewhere, psycho- analysis was viewed with considerable suspicion. Ironically enough, it was the war that called psychoanalysis to the favorable attention of a hostile profession; psychiatrists approached German analysts to ad- minister rapid cures to shell-shocked soldiers that they might be fitted for combat once again, an access of pragmatic interest Abraham found unwelcome. “I did not like the idea,” he wrote Freud, “that psychoanalysis should suddenly become fashionable because of purely practical considerations. We would rapidly have acquired a number of colleagues who would merely have paid lip-service and would after- wards have called themselves psychoanalysts. Our position as outsiders,” he concluded, in obvious relief, “will continue for the time being.”
There were few signs of change, but Abraham greeted each of them optimistically; he was asked, on occasion, to address meetings of psychiatrists, and in 1920 he even wrote a long piece for Die neue Rundschau, the Fischer Verlag’s highly esteemed monthly, expounding the general principles of psychoanalysis. “Berlin,” Abraham told Freud in October 1919, “is clamoring for psychoanalysis.”…
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