ABSTRACT
Psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts have shared in the gradual recapturing of memory after 1945 which has gone through three distinct stages in West Germany. First, there was the repression characteristic of the 1950s, second, the angry generational confrontations of the 1960s, and, third, the more complicated and thoroughgoing recollections of the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the impetus for the critical examination of the history of German psychotherapy and psychoanalysis stems from concern over the resultant social identity, role, and responsibility of the field, a concern that also often obstructs understanding of the past. Challenges to the assertion of professional innocence among psychotherapists first came across disciplinary boundaries in West Germany as a result of the professional competition sharpened and even created under National Socialism. In 1960 the director of the German Society for Psychology responded to charges of Nazi collaboration among psychologists by arguing that psychotherapists had compromised themselves to a much greater degree.
