"Psychoanalysis is good, synthesis is better": the German reception of Freud, 1930 and 1956

Frankfurt's decision to award Freud the Goethe Prize in 1930 as well as the same city's decision to celebrate Freud's 100th birthday in 1956 will allow us to trace specific traditions in the German encounter with psychoanalysis. The diachronic approach will show that certain traditions survived well into the late 1950s, at a time when West Germany's intellectual landscape was otherwise changing on several fronts. Psychoanalysis remained anathema because it did not conform with the idealism and holism prevalent in the academic community.