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What was the two-way traffic between psychoanalysis and totalitarianism in the years between the installation of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and the execution of the Nazi Holocaust organizer, Adolf Eichmann, in 1962? This is the question Matt ffytche and Daniel Pick seek to answer with the chapters they bring together in this book.
It begins with the historian, Joel Isaac, explaining that ‘the origins of the idea of totalitarianism’ are linked with ‘the total penetration of the human subject by the state or party’ (p. 22). The term ‘totalitarian’, he says, was first coined in Italy in 1923. It was subsequently used, as the sociologist Michael Rustin points out in another chapter, by Friedrich Hayek in 1944, by Karl Popper in 1945, and by subsequent commentators as means of analysing and justifying, in the name of freedom and democracy, resistance to the Nazi regime of Hitler and to the Soviet regime of Stalin. The term was also used, says Rustin, to warn against milder forms of political collectivism or socialism.
So how have the ideas of totalitarianism and psychoanalysis interacted? In answering this question Stephen Frosh highlights the way that, in the late 1940s, the psychoanalytic theory of repression and projection was used to explain psychological adherence to Nazi totalitarianism and anti-Semitism. Ffytche in turn draws attention to ways in which susceptibility to fascist and totalitarian propaganda was explained psychoanalytically by Frankfurt School sociologists in terms of early childhood submission to the father and to other father-like figures beyond the family.
Many readers might be familiar with this interaction between totalitarianism and psychoanalysis. New to me is material in subsequent chapters about ways in which psychoanalysis was used before, during, and following the second world war to combat totalitarianism. Ffytche and Pick include in this category a chapter by Michael Shapira about the work of psychoanalysts, involved with the L