ABSTRACT
In England, too, the psychoanalyst Pearl King reported, the Freudians cooperated with the armed forces and by 1944 controlled their psychiatric division. Sigmund Freud was plagued by the contradiction between scientific and political aims. But many of his early followers had been drawn to psychoanalysis in order to exploit its democratizing potential. The more the Freudians were convinced that psychoanalysis was a science, the less they entered the political arena. Whenever psychoanalysts were mobilized to support peace movements, antinuclear protests, antiapartheid and anti-Nazi groups, they would routinely quote Freud to support the cause. It would seem that they had come to believe in the efficacy of what Nathan Leites called "psycho-cultural analyses of social events." The Freudian emigres very quickly had become successful and identified with America. They had been accepted by a society where anti-Semitism was kept under wraps. In Germany, they were increasingly geared to investigations of the Nazi past and to global politics.
