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In spite of the importance of Laurence Kahn's What Nazism Has Done to Psychoanalysis,1 I hesitated to review it at a time when the credentials of psychoanalysis are already undermined. But Kahn's arduous undertaking—to face an unpleasant truth, the destructive impact of Nazism on psychoanalysis—prompted me to review her book, a work I think should become an historical reference. As a philosopher, a polyglot philologist, and a psychoanalyst, Kahn goes beyond psychoanalytic theory and clinical questions. Her book is a history of the destruction wrought by Nazis on postwar and contemporary psychoanalysis. Beyond the autos-da-fé2 of Freud's books, the exile of psychoanalysts, and the problematic history of the Göring Institute (founded by Herman Göring's cousin and directed by Carl Jung), Kahn's intention is to explain theoretical distortions of psychoanalytic theory in response to Nazi ideology.
The first damage Kahn identifies is the corruption of the concept of Führer, which began in 1934—nine years after the publication of Mein Kampf, and five years before Freud published Moses and Monotheism. Kahn underscores that by the time Freud (1939) called Moses a Führer, the term was already perverted from its ordinary meaning by Nazi ideology. It is inconceivable that Freud was not aware of the political meaning of the word while he was writing Moses and Monotheism. Kahn considers the intended meaning of Freud's last book in that historical context and suggests that the urgent message of Moses and Monotheism for Freud was to restate, after Totem and Taboo (1912-1913) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), that the role of the “great leader,” in religions and societies, is a predicate for an ethical community coalesced around the prohibition of murder. Here one can recognize Freud's early neurotic narrative applied to the origin of monotheistic religions, as well