ABSTRACT
Psychotherapists responded to the events of 1933 not only by defending their ideas and identity against both medical and political critics, but also by mounting an offensive designed to ride the wave of change that was apparently building to sweep over the German establishment. There was an accompanying satisfied conviction that the times were finally catching up with the revolutionary concepts that were in the process of challenging the traditional perspective on, and treatment of, the human psyche. The psychotherapists' response to—and preemption of—such criticism often took the form of the "cosmetization" of language, that is, the appropriation of Nazi terminology in place of more ambiguous or objectionable wording. Gustav Richard Heyer's Jungian suspicion of the alleged materialism of psychoanalysis was certainly informed by anti-Semitic stereotypes. Such stereotypes made it easier for Heyer to dissociate psychotherapy from psychoanalysis in the Third Reich.
