Freud's Free Clinics

“Social psychoanalysis”
1936
THE POLIKLINIK’S premises at 10 Wichmannstrasse were taken over by
the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy on
October 15, 1936. Headed by Matthias Heinrich Göring, protected by
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, and assisted by Carl C. Jung, the newly
configured Göring Institute was the Nazi regime’s center for racialized
psychotherapy training and treatment at least until the end of World War
II. Through a set of complex and often ethically compromised maneuvers,
Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig managed to retain their
society’s membership in the IPA. Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig apparently
felt they could count on the support of Anna Freud and IPA
president Ernest Jones in complying with Matthias Göring’s wishes to
cleanse the Berlin society and the DPG of all its Jewish members.
Jones believed that organizational duty required from him an agreement
with Matthias Göring to maintain the DPG, now absorbed into the
German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy, as a
component society of the IPA. “Personally, I am favorably inclined to the
possibility of the German Society remaining with us,” he wrote to Anna
Freud, with the caveat that it might not “prove to be possible on both
sides.” 1 When he met with Müller-Braunschweig, Boehm, and Göring,
Göring disingenuously assured Jones that psychoanalysis would retain its
independence within the new institute. In exchange, Jones agreed to
make possible the relocation of all Jewish members who had “voluntarily
resigned” from the Berlin society. Jones collaborated, remained friend-