ABSTRACT
As some psychologists started to adopt Freudian language, and as cooperation with anthropologists expanded, psychoanalysis both entered and legitimated the cultural unconscious. By the early 1950s the prestige of psychoanalysis was at its peak: analysts earned a good deal of money, and their institutes had more applicants for candidacy than they could handle. By 1945, every country either had its own psychoanalytic tradition or was aware of the lack of one. And as Sigmund Freud's ideas were increasingly being adapted to national concerns, they were also being molded in response to institutional needs and to interpretations by dominant figures. In Germany, the more venturesome Freudians took on the cultural psychoanalysts; and a number of analysts, led by the Mitscherlichs, proposed their own theories about the causes of Nazi atrocities. Classical Freudians could not accept the primacy of sociocultural and linguistic symbolisms over those of individual experience.
