A Review by Sonu Shamdasani – Geoffrey Cocks, Treating mind and body…

A Review by Sonu Shamdasani – Geoffrey Cocks, Treating mind and body…

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300066862, Page 417-419

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A Review by Sonu Shamdasani – Geoffrey Cocks, Treating mind and body: essays in the history of science, professions, and society under extreme conditions.

In this volume, Geoffrey Cocks has collected together a series of his essays dealing with psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and medicine in twentieth-century Germany and under the Third Reich in particular.

He introduces them with an account of his intellectual trajectory and the specific occasions that gave rise to them.

Slightly disconcertingly, Cocks commences his introduction by discussing his enthusiasm for psychobiography and his essays exploring the psychobiography of A A Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, which are not reprinted in this volume.

After this, however, Cocks presents the themes of his major 1985 work, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: the Goering Institute, recently reprinted in a considerably expanded and improved form (New Brunswick, Transaction, 1997).

A number of the essays in this volume can be read as adjuncts and addendas to this book.

According to the legend, the Nazis had banned psychoanalysis as a Jewish science and there was no organized psychotherapy in a situation dominated by racial biology.

In Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, Cocks recovered the history of the German institute for psychological research and psychotherapy, generally known as the Goering Institute after its chief, the psychotherapist Mathias Goering, a cousin of the infamous Hermann Goering.

He dismantled these legends, and indicated how they arose in a postwar era of institutional reconstruction for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, when practitioners were keen to claim a moral high ground and portray themselves as intrinsically allied to liberal and democratic tendencies and deny any evidence to the contrary.

At the same time, he presented what remains the best documented and most judicious account of C G Jung’s relations with German psychotherapy at this time.

What Cocks accomplished was the relocation of the history of psychoanalysis within the institutional development of psychotherapy as a whole, and of the latter in its connections with medicine and psychology and within the wider social and political context of mid-twentieth-century Germany.

Thus the history of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis become critical sites for addressing wider questions concerning how professions develop in relation to varying social and political conditions-critical, in Cocks’ view, as by the nature of its subject matter, the psychological enterprise is the most permeable of all disciplines to social and political factors.

Thus the cultural and historical study of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy may ultimately have more generality than the disciplines themselves.

Finally, in a study of the émigré psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, Cocks demonstrates that in the essay ‘Two analyses of Mr. Z.’ that launched Kohut’s popular brand of self-sychology, Mr. Z. was a fiction, and the analyses in question were Kohut’s of Ruth Eissler, and his own subsequent self-analysis.

In the foreword to this volume Peter Loewenberg argues that this revelation of the subjective source of Kohut’s discoveries gives them a “greater validity and conviction” (p. xii).

For this reviewer, it indicates rather that dissimulation and invented narratives are no less present in contemporary psychoanalysis than at its inception. ~Sonu Shamdasani, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300066862, Page 417-419