We can find the first adherents of modern dynamic psychology among the educated members of the Central European middle class. The same bourgeoisie that was at the receiving end of contempt and hatred from both the left and the right in the early twentieth century was also participating in the feverish quest for the ‘self ’. This idea of the self fashioning itself was partly a result of the precarious social position of the bourgeoisie: as its members were making money and/or occupied key positions in governmental institutions, they were perceived by one group (the extreme left) as the class enemy and by the other (the extreme right) as greedy materialists. It was this social group, once it fell under the spell of Marxism on the one hand and dynamic psychology on the other, which attempted to redefine its position vis-à-vis other social groups. Among bourgeois citizens, this led to conversions to Marxism as well as to right-wing ideologies but also to psychological ‘identity crises’, self-doubt and a yearning for individual and cultural wholeness. The incessant self-scrutiny of the early twentieth-century bourgeoisie and the success story of dynamic psychology are inescapably intertwined.

In addition to psychoanalysis, it was Marxism that provided light in the darkness for many intellectuals in the post-World War I West. The Russian Revolution of 1917 rekindled hopes for progress and emancipation, and the Soviet Union seemed to represent the first necessary step towards the future utopia. As the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm notes in his autobiography, ‘in the Vienna of the late 1920s, one acquired political consciousness as naturally as sexual awareness’. And by ‘political consciousness’ he means Marxism and socialism. Hobsbawm also explains that Marxism appealed to the younger generation of educated Central Europeans because of its comprehensiveness: