ABSTRACT
For the first three decades after the war, the professional legacy of the Matthias Heinrich Goring Institute had been ignored by psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in both East and West Germany, who concentrated instead on reconstructing their professional present and repressing their professional past. Psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts have therefore shared in the gradual recapturing of memory after 1945. This process went 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. To be sure, all three styles have overlapped to some degree and both the criticism and the excesses that arose from the social crises and youth rebellions of the late 1960s and early 1970s laid the basis for subsequent professional critiques and self-examinations.
