The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany

Abstract

It has been widely believed that psychology in Germany, faced with political antipathy and mass emigration of its leading minds, withered under national Socialism. Yet in The Professionalisation of Psychology in Nazi Germany Ulfried Geuter tells a radically different story of how German psychology, rather than disappearing, rapidly grew into a fully developed profession during the Third Reich. Geuter makes it clear that the rising demands of a modern industrial nation gearing up for a war afforded psychology with a unique opportunity in Nazi Germany: to transform itself from a marginal academic discipline into a state-sanctioned profession. This opportunity was mainly presented byWehrmacht, whose demand for psychological expertise led to increasing support for academic departments, and to the expansion and standardisation of training programmes - a process of professionalization which culminated in 1941 with the creation of a state examination for Diplom, a professional psychology degree. Although the Wehrmacht's demand for its services fell along with the fortunes of the Nazi regime, the professional base psychology has carved for itself remained for the duration of the war and to this date.

Sick Heil: Self and Illness in Nazi Germany

“…The jettisoning of psychological selection in the military was likewise prelude and accompaniment to numerous Wehrmacht and SS executions of deserters and defeatists carried out not on the basis of racial selection but in an attempt to stem and preempt the loss of manpower. 56 The official and professional focus, too, was now on problems rather than on projects. There was a growing, if regionally varied, shortage of doctors (particularly specialists, especially surgeons), drugs, and hospital beds in the civilian sector, leading to the greater employment of female and foreign physicians on the German home front and even prompting the brief consideration by some medical officials of employing Jewish doctors to treat Aryans.…”

The Critique of Psychology

“…Also the conservative Eduard Spranger opposed Hitler's policies (see Geuter, 1984Geuter, /1992 and continued his academic studies. Again there are examples of German fascism in which progressive academics in their opposition to Hitler became politically active and developed their academic endeavors differently from the mainstream (members of the Weisse Rose, for example).…”

Unfenced constructivisms

“…Recent work on the history of the self, for example, shows the way (e.g., Pfister & Schnog, 1996). European work has been particularly helpful for those interested in this expansion (Geuter, 1992;Rose, 1990), emerging as it does from a historicist context. American social science, by contrast, has long been centered around notions of individualism and American exceptionalism (Ross, 1992).…”