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.

Summarizing the activities of the Sigmund-Freud-Institute (SFI) in Frankfurt am Main in 1969, its director Alexander Mitscherlich painted a bleak picture of recent events. Psychoanalysis had always faced opposition in Germany, he wrote, but of late Freudianism contended with several broadsides simultaneously: critics still maintained that it placed too much emphasis on sexuality; some added that behavioral therapy or sophisticated medication did a better job at treating patients than long-term analysis; yet others argued that Freud's teachings may have been relevant in 1900, but that society no longer resembled turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vienna. On top of all this, Mitscherlich complained, a new generation demanded that psychoanalysis figure as chief witness for an antiauthoritarian education that emphasized indulgence rather than sublimation. “Society” continued to make life difficult for psychoanalysis, then, and it was for this reason that the government needed to assist the SFI in its efforts to train a new generation of analysts in Germany.

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