German National Socialists denounced this man?s work in 1933 with the declaration as his writings were burned: "Down with the soul-devouring exaggeration of instinctive life, up with the nobility
In the great Nazi book-burning frenzy of May, 1933, Freud?s work went up in flames, with the declaration: "Down with the soul-devouring exaggeration of instinctive life, up with the nobility of the human soul!? Also burned were the works of Marx, Brecht, Bloch, Hemingway and many others. Austrian physician and psychologist Sigmund Freud was the founder of theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis, the first to try to make emotional energies the ?object of empirical science.? Freud?s influence had spread beyond medicine and social science and into contemporary arts. The National Socialists condemned Freud?s theories as a ?denial of all moral values? and the embodiment of ?the high level of moral dissolution peculiar to Jewry.? Born in 1856, Freud was convinced to flee Vienna for England in 1938 after Germany annexed Austria and after his daughter was arrested by the Gestapo and held in custody for a day. He died in London on September 23, 1939.
