Negotiating Free Will: Hypnosis and Crime in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

The history of free will has yet to be written. With few exceptions, the literature on the subject is dominated by legal and philosophical works, most of which recount the ideas of prominent thinkers or discuss hypothetical questions far removed from specific historical contexts. The following article seeks to redress the balance by tracing the debate on hypnosis in Germany from 1894 to 1936. Examining responses to hypnosis is tantamount to recording common understandings of autonomy and heteronomy, self-control and mind control, free will and automaticity. More specifically, it is possible to identify distinct philosophical positions related to the question as to whether hypnosis could surmount free will or not. The article demonstrates that the discourse often centred on the perceived struggle, located within a particular personality', between an individual's character' or soul' and the infiltration by a foreign or hostile force. While one group (compatibilists) emphasized the resilience of the moral inhibitions', another group (determinists) doubted that these were sufficient to withstand hypnosis

West German Psychoanalysis in Post-Analytic Times: Navigating Demands for Self-Actualization, Self-Governance, and Social Change, 1968-1990

This essay critically engages with the view that governmentality defined the parameters of psychotherapy in the late twentieth century. Even though different therapeutic schools embraced the values of autonomy, authenticity, and self-control, the meaning of these objectives varied, and gave rise to interpretations that were not confined to the goal of (“neoliberal”) self-optimization. While in some cases contemporaries associated psychotherapy with familiar (Enlightenment and middle-class) aims of sovereignty of reason and emotional restraint, in other instances they highlighted functionality and efficiency as desirable outcomes of therapy. The essay explores debates around personal self-actualization against the backdrop of psychoanalytic discourse in Germany between 1970 and 1990

"PSYCHOANALYSIS IS GOOD, SYNTHESIS IS BETTER": THE GERMAN RECEPTION OF FREUD, 1930 AND 1956

Frankfurt's decision to award Freud the Goethe Prize in 1930 as well as the same city's decision to celebrate Freud's 100th birthday in 1956 will allow us to trace specific traditions in the German encounter with psychoanalysis. The diachronic approach will show that certain traditions survived well into the late 1950s, at a time when West Germany's intellectual landscape was otherwise changing on several fronts. Psychoanalysis remained anathema because it did not conform with the idealism and holism prevalent in the academic community. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

West German Jewry: Guilt, Power and Pluralism

The essay will address the history of West German Jewry using the concept of guilt as its guiding theme. Jews in West Germany had a bad conscience on account of living in the “land of the murderers.” This bad conscience not only distinguished them from other Jewish communities, it also explains much of what characterized West German Jewry from 1945 to 1989: its particular economic structure; its especially close ties to Israel; its preoccupation with democratization; its power arrangements; and its communal life. The essay will address these issues, and trace a development that led from a close-knit, ideologically homogeneous group to one that became ever more pluralistic in the 1970s and 1980s