The University of Chicago Experimental Futures And
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES AND IMPOSSIBLE PROFESSIONS: PSYCHOANALYSIS, EDUCATION, AND POLITICS IN INTERWAR VIENNA, 1918-1938 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY PHILLIP J. HENRY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS DISSERTATION ABSTRACT v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS x INTRODUCTION 1 Red Vienna 6 Interwar Psychoanalysis 20 Psychoanalysis, Education, and Politics in Interwar Vienna 35 CHAPTER ONE Between Seduction and Sublimation: The Emergence of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Education, 1896-1914 44 Unstable Foundations 45 Verführung and its Vicissitudes 50 Erziehung zur Realität 65 The Possibilities for Prophylaxis and the Elusiveness of Sublimation 78 Psychoanalysis and the New Education 91 CHAPTER TWO Recasting Bourgeois Psychoanalysis: Education, Authority, and the Politics of Analytic Therapy in the Freudian Revision of 1918 99 Out of the Wilderness, Into the Wasteland 104 Suggestion and its Discontents 110 Forming a Class Body for Psychoanalysis 119 The Ways and Means of Psychoanalysis 123 Beyond the Classical Paradigm 135 ii CHAPTER THREE Fashioning a New Psychoanalysis: Exceptional States and the Crisis of Authority in Analytic Practice, 1919-1925 139 States of Exception 146 Analysis for the Masses 157 Ego Politics and the Pedagogy of Reconstruction 167 Psychoanalytisches Neuland 177 The Limits of Analytic Therapy 184 CHAPTER FOUR The Mass Psychology of Education: Freudian Experiments in Collective Upbringing in Postwar Vienna 193 Confronting the Masses, Theorizing the Revolution 195 Youth in Motion 202 Education to Community 217 Wayward Youth and Surrogate Fathers 230 Nursery Politics and the Problem of Aggression 241 Living with the Father’s Ghost 253 CHAPTER FIVE Thinking at the Limits of Education: Siegfried Bernfeld and Socialist Pedagogy in Red Vienna 261 School Reform and Class Struggle 266 The Pedagogical Construction of the New Person 276 On Pedagogy and Pedagogues 286 Limits Without and Limits Within 293 A Pedagogical Politics of Disillusionment 305 CHAPTER SIX Psychoanalytic Pedagogy and the Politics of Enlightenment iii in the Interwar Austrian Kulturkampf 316 Educating the Educators 324 Autonomy and Enlightenment 337 Sexuelle Aufklärung and the Kulturkampf Within 348 The Future of Enlightenment 359 CHAPTER SEVEN Anxiety, Aggression, and the Defense of the Ego: Anna Freud and the Psychoanalytic Education of the Child 370 The Psychoanalysis of the Child 376 Birth Traumas, Death Drives, and the Problem of Anxiety 395 Analyzing the Defenses I 405 Analyzing the Defenses II 412 Education in a New Light 418 CONCLUSION 429 BIBLIOGRAPHY 435 iv – Dissertation Abstract – “[W]e have never prided ourselves on the completeness and finality of our knowledge and capacity. We are just as ready now as we were earlier…to learn new things and to alter our methods in any way that can improve them.” With these words, delivered to a psychoanalytic congress in the last months of the Great War, Sigmund Freud inaugurated a period of far-reaching revision and open-ended experimentation for his science. Over the following two decades, Freudians in central Europe would push their thought in new directions, developing revised models of the mind, innovative theories of the relationship between individual and society, and experimental therapeutic techniques while simultaneously pioneering novel applications of analytic thought and practice to social problems. As they fashioned these new methods and perspectives, psychoanalysts were reflecting on and responding to a series of crises that wracked interwar Europe in the aftermath of total war and the dissolution of venerable empires. Yet at the time Freud spoke, crisis appeared to be closely bound up with opportunity – the political upheavals of the moment seemed to augur new possibilities for the refashioning of social life through the application of new modes of expert intervention. Focusing on Vienna, the hub of the interwar psychoanalytic movement and the site, after 1920, of an ambitious experiment in municipal socialism, this project explores how psychoanalysts sought to reconstruct and renovate society by recasting their own theory and practice between the world wars. In so doing, Freudians were not only reflecting on the crises that marked the interwar conjuncture but were effectively rethinking selfhood and the social bond for a new era. The intimate relationship between psychoanalysis and the vibrant, conflict-ridden modernity of the interwar has become a standard trope of historical scholarship. Yet no existing v study has shown how fundamentally the crises unfolding without were interwoven with those that emerged within psychoanalytic thought. In the wake of the war, established guidelines for the exercise of therapeutic authority and orthodox psychoanalytic theories appeared to be both invalidated by recent experience and detached from the new social and political order. A product of a liberal bourgeois milieu, psychoanalysis found itself untethered from its prewar moorings in the mass democratic era that dawned in the aftermath of war and revolution. In the fraught process of recasting their science, Freudians were forced to renegotiate the commitments at the heart of their profession by rethinking the means and ends of their thought and practice in the new context. Education loomed especially large in this endeavor. Like many contemporaries, particularly in “Red” Vienna, Freudians saw a reformed education as vital to confronting the catastrophic postwar conjuncture: their attempts to bring psychoanalytic insights to bear on broad social pathologies led to the creation of novel pedagogical experiments and to wide-ranging contributions to contemporary education debates. As they sought to rethink the upbringing of children along psychoanalytic lines and to expand the social reach of analysis, Freudians were forced to consider how their own therapeutic practice constituted a form of education, one that either sustained or subverted social structures. In both facets of what came to be known as the “psychoanalytic pedagogy” movement, Freudians were drawn ever closer to the tasks of governing and thus to the political problems that dominated the interwar moment. Together, educating, healing, and governing – the “three impossible callings” in Freud’s words – would be intimately bound in novel ways in interwar psychoanalysis. Amid this far-reaching experimentation, a number of important shifts can be discerned. Prewar psychoanalysis, as Freud argued in 1905, was a practice intended primarily for the cultivated and ethically “valuable” members of the Bildungsbürgertum, subjects possessing a vi modicum of personal autonomy but oppressed by the sexually repressive culture into which they had been reared. Yet with the undermining of bourgeois society amid the upheavals of war and revolution, the questions of who psychoanalysis was intended for and how it cured were far less certain. Plunged into an era of the masses, one in which the supposedly autonomous bourgeois individual – the imaginative foundation of liberal politics – seemed in danger of vanishing into the anonymous collective, psychoanalysts began to fashion novel therapeutic practices for types of suffering and classes of sufferers that previously had lain beyond their therapeutic purview. Reflecting the unprecedented levels of collective vulnerability generated by the recent upheavals, Freudians increasingly turned to subjects whose mental suffering seemed intimately connected to their exposure to the violence of their environments. It was around these subjects – war neurotics, youth delinquents, lower-class borderline patients, and above all, children – that analysts fashioned their experimental therapeutic and pedagogical techniques between the wars. The turn to subjects beyond the constitutive limits of classical psychoanalysis was inseparable from both a rethinking of the self and a recasting of analytic authority, a fraught process in which the identity of psychoanalysis and its basic ethicopolitical commitments seemed up for grabs. Faced by selves exposed to overwhelming, traumatic forces in their environments, psychoanalysts reoriented their practice around the ego, the anxious, vulnerable agency tasked with upholding the borders between within and without and with securing the subject’s adaptation to normative social demands. With the turn to the ego, analytic therapy assumed new responsibilities, ones that often exceeded, and indeed transgressed, the liberality of classical psychoanalysis. Connecting the psychic and the social, analysts sought both to shore up the ego’s capacity to resist the forces in its environment and to facilitate its readjustment to cultural norms as a means of recovering social stability. In place of the private, individualist orientation of vii orthodox psychoanalysis, the post-classical techniques developed by analysts like Sándor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich, Siegfried Bernfeld, August Aichhorn, and Anna Freud were understood to extend analytic therapy beyond its classical setting as a means of responding to the urgent social necessities of the times. If classical psychoanalysis had sought to safeguard the independence and uniqueness of its patients by placing strict limits on the exercise of the analyst’s authority, the post- classical techniques that emerged over the interwar years were often as educational as they were purely analytic. Coupling what Sigmund