ABSTRACT
Alexander Mitscherlich succeeded in his life project of returning psychoanalysis to post-Nazi Central Europe, and securing for it far greater social prestige than it ever had in Freud's own day, primarily by advancing a highly idiosyncratic version of psychoanalysis as a secular moral-political language. By the later 1960s and early 1970s, at least three new versions of Freud were circulating in the West German media and wider public discussion. One was a sex-radical version, which restored to public attention Freud's own erstwhile commitment to seeing libido as the force that explained almost everything in life. As late as 1968, the inventor of psychoanalysis had been celebrated in Der Spiegel, at least, as one of the great liberators of humankind from centuries of hypocrisy around and hostility to sexuality. The analyst Paula Heimann was more careful, and made no presumptions about Lorenz's motivations.
