The Psychologization of the Socialist Self: East German Forensic Psychology and its Deviants, 1945--1975

In the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s, East Germanylargely criminalized and politicized such things as drug abuse,alcoholism, delinquency, and even mental illness, often treatingthem as moral threats and acts of subversion. By the 1960s,however, policy makers, courts, and social services in the GDR,in a development paralleled in other industrialized countriesat the time, began turning to psychological and psychiatricapproaches in addressing antisocial behaviour. Based on publishedand archival records, this essay argues that this change wasthe result of a constellation of social, party-political, institutional,and international developments that led not only to a reconsiderationof anti-social conduct in the GDR, but also to a sweeping reconceptualizationof the psychological workings of the individual within socialism,culminating in the ideal of the ‘socialist personality.’This mirrored trends in contemporary western Europe and theUnited States, granting psychological complexity and depth todeviant personalities in East Germany; however, it representedless a pragmatic concession to western reforms than an extensionof the socialist utopian project. As a result, professionalsand policy-makers in the GDR minted an historically unique conceptof deviance that wedded Marxism—Lenin-Leninism with mainstreampsychiatry and psychology. The example of forensic psychologyin East Germany raises important questions about the relationshipbetween liberal, socialist, and fascist projects of social reformin twentieth-century Germany.