ABSTRACT
The role played by Matthias Heinrich Goring, who was a neurologist and psychotherapist from Wuppertal-Elberfeld in the Ruhr, in the history of psychotherapy in Germany is a prime example of the importance not only of the individual but also of historical accident. Goring provided the protection and prestige necessary for the institutionalization of a marginal medical discipline between 1936 and 1945. The accident of a Goring connection brought to partial professional fruition a number of dynamic intellectual and institutional trends in the realms of medicine, psychology, and social policy in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. The professionalization of psychotherapy in the Third Reich was the culmination of a number of important developments in medicine and psychiatry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Germany. From the middle of the nineteenth century in Germany in particular the new medical sciences of the mind were dominated by a strictly somatological psychiatry.
