Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T02:09:29.394Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Interwar “German” Psychobiology: Between Nationalism and the Irrational

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Anne Harrington
Anne Harrington
Affiliation:
Department of the History of ScienceHarvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper is concerned with “holism” as a German cultural “style” of doing psychobiology in Central Europe between the two world wars. The paper takes its starting point from a critical analysis of Forman's writings on nationalism versus internationalism in interwar German science, and the alleged “accommodation” of interwar German physics to an antiscientific, irrationalist culture. The paper argues that psychobiological holism was not just a reaction against nineteenth-century atomistic or mechanistic approaches to modeling life and mind; it also represented a domestically directed answer from within the German biomedical scientific community to broad religious and cultural “disenchantment.” As such, holistic psychobiology emerges as a phenomenon that challenges us with at least four levels of discourse: (1) experimental/clinical, (2) epistemological/philosophical, (3) existential/religious, and (4) ideological/political. The paper defends the methodological appropriateness of a collective case-study approach to the problem of holism as a multilevel discourse. It concludes by offering a preliminary contextualized analysis of the thought of three representative holistic leaders of the time: behavioral biologist and ethologist Jakob von Uexküll; clinical neurologist Constantin von Monakow; and neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1991 , pp. 429 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brugsch, T.:, ed. 1933. Einheitsbestrebungen in der Medizin: Kong Förderrung medizinischer Synthese und ärztlicher Weltanschauung. Tagung, Marienbad, 14–17 September 1932. Dresden and Leipzig: Theodor Steinkopf.Google Scholar
Chamberlain, H. S. 1928. Natur und Leben, edited by von Uexküll., J. Munich: F. Bruckmann.Google Scholar
Crome, I. 1972. “The Medical History of V. I. Lenin.” History of Medicine 4 (2): 20–22.Google Scholar
Decker, H. 1977. Freud in Germany: Revolution and Reaction in Science, 1893–1907. Psychological Issues, Monograph 41. New York: International Universities Press.Google Scholar
Driesch, H. 1931. “Das Wesen des Organismus.” In Das Lebensproblem im Lichte der modernen Forschung, edited by Driesch, H. and Woltereck, R., 385–450. Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer.Google Scholar
Ehrenfels, C. von. 1890. “Über Gestaltqualitäten.” Vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 14:249–92.Google Scholar
Field, G. G. 1981. Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Forman, P. 1971. “Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment.” In Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, edited by McCormach, R., Vol. 3, 1–115. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Forman, P. 1973. “Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists: The Ideology and Its Manipulation in Germany after World War I.” Isis 64:151–80.Google Scholar
Gay, P. 1968. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. London: Secker and Warburg.Google Scholar
Goldstein, K. 1913. Über Rassenhygiene. Berlin: Julius Springer.Google Scholar
Goldstein, K. 1919. Die Behandlung, Fürsorge und Begutachtung der Hirnverletzten: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Verwendung psychologischer1 Methoden in der Klinik. Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel.Google Scholar
Goldstein, K. 1929. “Zum Problem der Angst.” Allgemeine ärztliche Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und psychische Hygiene 2:403–37.Google Scholar
Goldstein, K. 1933. “Die ganzheitliche Betrachtung in der Medizin.” In Einheitsbestrebungen in der Medizin, edited by Brugsch, T., 143–58. Dresden and Leipzig: T. Steinkopf.Google Scholar
Goldstein, K. 1939. The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man, with a foreword by K. Lashley. New York: American Book Co.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldstein, K. 1959a. “Health as Value.” In New Knowledge in Human Values, edited by Maslow, A. H., 178–88. New York: Harper.Google Scholar
Goldstein, K. 1959b. “Notes on the Development of My Concepts.” Reprinted in Selected Papers/Ausgewählte Schriften, edited by Gurwitsch, A., Haudek, E. M. Goldstein, and Haudek, W. E., 1–12. The Hague: Nijhof.Google Scholar
Goldstein, K., and Gelb., A. 1925. “Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer X. Fälle. Über Farbennamenamnesie, nebst Bemerkungen über das Wesen der amnestischen Aphasie überhaupt und die Beziehung zwischen Sprache und dem Verhalten zur Umwelt.” Psychologische Forschung1 6:127–86.Google Scholar
Heilbron, J. L. 1985. “The Earliest Missionaries of the Copenhagen Spirit.” Revue d'histoire des sciences 38 (3–4):195–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnston, W. M. 1972. The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, E. 1934. “[Review of] Uexkuell, J. von: Staatsbiologie.” Der Biologe 3:25.Google Scholar
McGrath, W. G. 1974. Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Minkowski, M., ed. 1950. Gehirn und Gewissen: Psychobiologische Aufsätze. Zurich: Morgarten Verlag Conzett and Huber.Google Scholar
Monakow, C. von. 1908–1930. Manuscripts, notes, and correspondence. Monakow archive. Institute for the History of Medicine, University of Zurich.Google Scholar
Monakow, C. von. [1915] 1950. “Gefühl, Gesittung und Gehirn,” three lectures, held at the Psychiatric-Neurological Society of Zurich, 23 October and 13 and 23 November 1915. Reprinted in Minkowski 1950, 97–230.Google Scholar
Monakow, C. von. [1927] 1950. “Das Syneidesis, das biologische Gewissen”. Reprinted in Minkowski 1950, 231–82.Google Scholar
Monakow, C. von. [1930a] 1950. “Religion und Nervensystem (Biologische Betrachtungen). ” Reprinted in Minkowski 1950, 341–73.Google Scholar
Monakow, C. von. [1930b] 1950. “Wahrheit, Irrtum, Lüge.” Reprinted in Minkowski 1950, 283–340.Google Scholar
Monakow, C. von, and Mourgue., R. 1928. Introduction biologique à l'étude de la neurologie et de la psychopathologie: Intégration et désintégration de la fonction. Paris: Félix Alcan.Google Scholar
Murphy, G. 1968. “Personal Impressions of Kurt Goldstein.” In The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, edited by Simmel., M. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Prinz, W. 1985. “Ganzheits- und Gestaltpsychologie und Nationalsozialismus.” Psychologie im Nationalsozialismus. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Pusirewsky, M. von. 1953. Monakow als Arzt und Erzieher: Erinnerungen. Zurich: Orell Füssli.Google Scholar
Riese, W. [1958] 1977. “The Principle of Diaschisis.” Reprinted in Selected Papers on the History of Aphasia. Vol. 7 of Neurolinguistics, edited by Hoods, R. and Lebrun, Y., 124–36. Amsterdam and Lisse: Svets & Zeitlinger.Google ScholarPubMed
Ringer, F. 1969. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Semon, R. 1904. Die Mneme als Erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des Organischen Geschehens. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann.Google Scholar
Sondheimer, K. 1968. Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933. Munich: Nymphenburger.Google Scholar
Spengler, O. [1918] 1926, 1928. The Decline of the West, 2 vols. Translated by Atkinson., C. F. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. 1917. “Darwin und die englische Moral.” Deutsche Rundschau 173:215–42.Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. 1918. “Biologie und Wahlrecht.” Deutsche Rundschau 174:183–203.Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. [1920] 1933. Staatsbiologie (Anatomie — Physiologie — Pathologie des Staates), 2nd enlarged ed. Special issue of Deutsche Rundschau. Berlin: Gebrcder Poetel.Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. 1922a. Unpublished letter to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, April 1922. In Nachlass Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Signature 196 [r]). Richard Wagner-Gedenkstätte der Stadt Bayreuth (Bayreuth, Germany).Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. 1922b. “Das Problem des Lebens.” Deutsche Rundschau 193:235–47.Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. 1922c. “Leben und Tod.” Deutsche Rundschau 48 (5):173–83.Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. 1923. “Weltanschauung und Gewissen.” Deutsche Rundschau 197:253–66.Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. 1926. “Gott oder Gorilla.” Deutsche Rundschau 208:232–42.Google Scholar
Uexküll, J. von. 1936. Niegeschaute Welten. Die Umwelten Meiner Freunde: Ein Erinnerungsbuch. Berlin: S. Fischer.Google Scholar
Waser, M. 1933. Begegnung am Abend: Ein Vermvchtnis. Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.Google Scholar
Weber, M. [1918] 1946. “Science as a Vocation [Wissenschaft als Beruf].” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright, 129–56. New York: Oxford Univercity Press.Google Scholar
Weinhandl, F. 1940. Philosophie: Werkzeug und Waffe. Neumünster: Wachholtz.Google Scholar
Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe. 1955. Edited by Hoffmeister., J. 2nd ed. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.Google Scholar