You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Mankind on the” Couch could be the title of Immanuel Velikovsky's first posthumous book. He started to work on it in the 1950s and kept pursuing his work until the end of his life in 1979. Velikovsky was a psychoanalyst who worked most of his life as a historian, and his publications, so far, have concerned topics of ancient history, mostly hundreds of generations removed. In contrast to these earlier books, Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, Earth in Upheaval, Oedipus and Akhnaton, Peoples of the Sea, and Ramses II and His Time, Mankind in Amnesia concerns our present day and was written “as a service to mankind.” He had told his family that he felt great urgency about having it published. Therefore, after his death on November 17, 1979, his family took over the work, giving priority to this book over others to be published at a later date.
As a good psychoanalyst, Velikovsky had listened and taken his notes very carefully, staying quiet for a very long time-more than 50 years-before giving his interpretation to his patient: mankind. His first book, Worlds in Collision, proved him to be a most independent interpreter of history. In that book, he stated that a collision of a comet with the earth, in historic times, caused a holocaust described in documents of people all over the world. The book Mankind in Amnesia is a companion book to Worlds in Collision. Velikovsky believes that the holocaust around the time of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt was so catastrophic that mankind had to repress its memory and now is suffering from a traumatic amnesia that festers in our unconscious, provoking thus, through repetition compulsion, new holocausts. Through helping to give awareness of this fact, he hopes that mankind will try to overcome its self-destructiveness, because otherwise, our present generation may well provoke a holocaust, having the atomic energy power to do what formerly only natural catastrophic events could do to our lives and culture. While one may be sk