ABSTRACT
Due to the economic and political chaos in Germany, doctors interested in psychotherapy would first begin to organize only several years after the First World War. A large majority of the members of the General Medical Society came from the ranks of internists and neurologists. Internists came by way of their confrontation with psychosomatic disorders. The first congress concerned itself primarily with the antagonistic stance of the bulk of psychiatrists and the incumbent dangers to psychotherapy. The "foreign policies" addressed themselves to psychotherapy's various interfaces with the medical profession and with the social problems and issues which surrounded doctors. Adlerians Fritz Kunkel, Leonhard Seif, and Matthias Heinrich Goring were the chief proponents within the General Medical Society of what they saw as the therapeutic need for a sense of community. Driven by such ideas, the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy had by 1933 become the major forum in Central Europe for consensus and dissent in the field of psychotherapy.
