Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Note to readers of the English edition
- Preface
- Preface to the 1988 revised German pocketbook edition
- Abbreviations
- Map
- 1 Introduction
- 2 On the way to becoming an independent discipline: the institutionalization of psychology in the universities to 1941
- 3 The potential of psychology for selecting workers and officers: diagnostics, character, and expression
- 4 Psychologists at work: the start of new professional activities in industry and the army and their expansion in the war economy
- 5 Legitimation strategies and professional policy
- 6 University courses in psychology and the development of the Diploma Examination Regulations of 1941
- 7 The Diploma Examination Regulations and their consequences
- 8 The disbanding of psychological services in the Luftwaffe and the army in 1942 and the reorientation of psychology during the war
- 9 Self-deception, loyalty, and solidarity: professionalization as a subjective process
- 10 Science, profession, and power
- Comments on sources
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Note to readers of the English edition
- Preface
- Preface to the 1988 revised German pocketbook edition
- Abbreviations
- Map
- 1 Introduction
- 2 On the way to becoming an independent discipline: the institutionalization of psychology in the universities to 1941
- 3 The potential of psychology for selecting workers and officers: diagnostics, character, and expression
- 4 Psychologists at work: the start of new professional activities in industry and the army and their expansion in the war economy
- 5 Legitimation strategies and professional policy
- 6 University courses in psychology and the development of the Diploma Examination Regulations of 1941
- 7 The Diploma Examination Regulations and their consequences
- 8 The disbanding of psychological services in the Luftwaffe and the army in 1942 and the reorientation of psychology during the war
- 9 Self-deception, loyalty, and solidarity: professionalization as a subjective process
- 10 Science, profession, and power
- Comments on sources
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Only when it is responsible for providing psychological diagnoses for state purposes does psychology really become important.
Max Simoneit, scientific director of Wehrmacht Psychology, 1938It is becoming … plain that psychology has ceased to be a science for connoisseurs. With activities such as selection, evaluation, control, guidance, and care for the mental hygiene of the healthy members of our people, with aid and advice for the susceptible, the endangered and the inefficiently functioning, it is becoming deeply involved in the necessary tasks of regulating, maintaining, and strengthening the Volkskraft as a whole.
Oswald Kroh, chairman of the German Society for Psychology, 1941It is widely believed that the Nazis were opposed to science in general and to psychology in particular, with the result that they obstructed the development of psychology in every way or indeed threatened its very existence. In fact, the history of the professionalization of psychology during the National Socialist period was not one of setbacks and defeats, but one of gains and successes. This is certainly not easy for psychologists to admit, which is perhaps one of the reasons this aspect of the history of German psychology has often been passed over. After the Second World War German psychologists were more concerned with reestablishing their profession than with raising the question of the relationship between psychology and Nazism. Within the discipline there was some controversy, but public discussion was prevented by professional considerations and the politics of scholarly rivalries, not to mention the general difficulties of “reappraising the past” in Germany (see Adorno 1968).
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992