ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

How to get away with Murder: The Rise of Behavioral Therapy within the Psy-Sciences in West-Germany, 1960s–1970s

• In Event: The Making of Psychotherapeutic Knowledge: Research Practices, Epistemic Cultures, and Disciplinary Negotiations 2

English Abstract

In contemporary German universities, behavioral psychotherapy dominates the academic psy-sciences, while psychodynamic therapy is largely confined to clinical practice. This contribution traces the history of this constellation through a case study of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (MPIP) in Munich during the “therapeutic turn” of the 1960s and 1970s. The MPIP served as a key institutional site where behavioral therapy gained traction, while psychodynamic approaches were excluded from academic contexts early on – a development later mirrored across institutions. The international rise of behavioral therapy has often been attributed to its investment in psychotherapy research and its conformity to the ideal of ‘mechanical objectivity’ (Daston). While these dynamics were also central to the MPIP, I argue that two additional, specific conditions shaped the German trajectory. First, German psy-sciences exhibited a longstanding orientation toward biological models and skepticism toward psychodynamic psychotherapy. In the wake of postwar debates about the murder of psychiatric patients during National Socialism, many psychiatrists turned even more decisively toward the natural sciences as ostensibly objective and politically neutral. Second, West German political culture in the late 1960s – marked by student protests and the renewed confrontation with the Nazi past – often overlapped with psychodynamic approaches. Early behavioral therapy, in contrast, restricted itself to narrowly defined research objects of the psyche as a ‘natural kind’ (Hacking) thereby excluding socio-political influences. This constellation produced institutionally anchored path dependencies, resulting in an academic therapeutic culture dominated by behavioral therapy that portrayed itself as objective, apolitical, and epistemically aligned with somatic psychiatry.

Author

• Lisa Malich, University of Luebeck