Zersetzung der Seele: Psychologie und Psychiatrie im Dienste der Stasi
✍ Scribed by Geoffrey Cocks
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 8 KB
- Volume
- 33
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Klaus Behnke and Jürgen Fuchs both studied psychology in the German Democratic Republic and both were expelled from the GDR in 1977. Largely as a result of the mass of material liberated from the East German Ministry for State Security ("Stasi") and administered by the so-called "Gauck-Behörde," Behnke and Fuchs have managed to assemble a collection of well-documented essays on the abuse of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy by the Stasi. Zersetzung der Seele ("decomposition of the soul," the Stasi's own term) also benefits from the recollections of psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists from the former GDR. There is no bibliography or index, but there are notes to primary and secondary sources for most of the chapters.
Perhaps surprisingly, it seems that the East German regime mobilized psychologists and psychotherapists in service to the state to a far greater degree than did the National Socialists, although the Nazis, in service to racial eugenics, were more systematic in their mobilization of psychiatrists to sterilize and murder "incurable" mental patients. The Juristische Hochschule in Potsdam-Eiche/Golm was dedicated to the training of Stasi personnel and included in the curriculum was instruction in "operative psychology [comprised of] methods of social and clinical psychology for use against dissidents" (7). While these methods were allegedly based on a "very primitive and undifferentiated psychology" (98) that, among other things, "basically misunderstood the [psychodynamics of] adolescent striving for autonomy" (198), they were in widespread use in the recruiting of "citizen-spies" ("innoffizielle Mitarbeiter"), the persecution of "enemies," and the education of youth. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists were also recruited, not only to teach these methods but -contrary to East German law on medical confidentiality -to spy on their patients. Many such collaborators have gone on to careers since 1989.
These essays offer some hints at a broader social history of the GDR: instances of (eventual) refusal to spy for the Stasi, social fear and opprobrium of the Stasi, psychological sequelae of spying or being spied upon, and the meld and clash of ideology, idealism, loyalty, utilitarianism, amelioration, and doubt among leaders and followers. For example, a number of GDR psychologists have reported that they were motivated to study psychology in East Germany in the 1960s because the field was turning away from the mechanistic Soviet style of Pavlovian reductionism toward a more "humanistic" psychology emphasizing an autonomous consciousness and the education of the whole person in service to society. The essay by Mitchell Ash, however, reminds us that all psychology -like all scienceembodies normative and institutional qualities inimical to humane ends. Psychiatrists and psychotherapists represent an even greater danger to individuals because of their access to patients' secrets and vulnerabilities as well as the tendency of physicians to use the authoritarianism of expertise.