ABSTRACT
Martin Gumpert observed that Nazi attempts to mobilize the health of the German populace were "opposed to the fundamental tenets of all civilized health welfare work, the substance of which is that care and consideration are the essential presuppositions of social achievement." He argued that what could be witnessed in Nazi Germany was a "general nervous breakdown which hangs like a dark cloud over Germany." In order to determine the incidence and social place in it of common mental illness, therefore, it is necessary to disaggregate as much as possible the society of Nazi Germany. Although various modes of psychotherapy were used in private practice by German psychotherapists and by physicians and layper-sons throughout the Third Reich, the work of the approximately fifty psychotherapists of the Matthias Heinrich Goring Institute's outpatient clinic alone provides a significant sample of the methods used to treat various neurotic conditions.
