By spring 1945 when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reich's defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, deploying both political and psychoanalytically oriented social work discourses, cautioned American policy makers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them—in terms suffused with unarticulated gender assumptions, “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.”

Summarizing the activities of the Sigmund-Freud-Institute (SFI) in Frankfurt am Main in 1969, its director Alexander Mitscherlich painted a bleak picture of recent events. Psychoanalysis had always faced opposition in Germany, he wrote, but of late Freudianism contended with several broadsides simultaneously: critics still maintained that it placed too much emphasis on sexuality; some added that behavioral therapy or sophisticated medication did a better job at treating patients than long-term analysis; yet others argued that Freud's teachings may have been relevant in 1900, but that society no longer resembled turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vienna. On top of all this, Mitscherlich complained, a new generation demanded that psychoanalysis figure as chief witness for an antiauthoritarian education that emphasized indulgence rather than sublimation. “Society” continued to make life difficult for psychoanalysis, then, and it was for this reason that the government needed to assist the SFI in its efforts to train a new generation of analysts in Germany.