The German Soul and Psyche in The Third Reich

A lecture by Sander L. Gilman

"Against the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life! For the nobility of the human soul! We consign to the flames the writings of the school of Sigmund Freud..."

Freud’s works were ritually burned by the Nazi’s in 1933, and we have the pictures to prove it. But the relationship was more complicated than that. The Third Reich Source Book will appear this summer with the University of California Press. It is the most extensive collection of primary documents on the Third Reich ever made available to English readers. It also presents for the first time primary materials on the struggle over the meaning of the psyche and the legacy of psychoanalysis under Hitler. Sander Gilman, one of its editors, will present the reader and the material on psychology and psychoanalysis under the Nazis.

Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press in 2010; his most recent edited volume, Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe) was published in the same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has held many distinguished posts in the UK and across the world, including the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University in 2004-5, and Professor at the Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College from 2007 to 2012. He was elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin in 2000, and has been an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association since 2007.