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Werner Bohleber is one of several German analysts who have contributed to the revival of psychoanalysis in Germany since the late 1960s. He is editor
of Psyche, the most respected and best-known journal of psychoanalytic thought in the German-speaking world, served as the president of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (German Psychoanalytic Association) from 2000 to 2002, and has been active in European psychoanalysis and in the International Psychoanalytical Association. He has a long list of publications to his credit, mostly in German. This recently published book is his first to appear in English, and it introduces his thinking to a broader, English-speaking audience.
In this book, Bohleber brings together three themes that have concerned him as a psychoanalyst over the years, and in which he has developed considerable expertise: the current state of psychoanalysis, theoretically and clinically; the nature and treatment of trauma in the history of psychoanalysis; and destructiveness and violence, especially linked to political and religious genocidal ideologies and practices in the 20th and 21st centuries. I have come to appreciate how closely Bohleber's work is both a product of German history and an attempt to comprehend and learn from it. What unifies these disparate themes in the book is “the way in which the changing present and the individual situated within it are conceptually mirrored in psychoanalytic reflection” (p. 10).1 Bohleber is well schooled in Continental philosophy and is familiar with, and close to, the Frankfurt school of sociology. He understands that the development of psychoanalysis historically reflects larger social and cultural trends and forces. This gnosio-sociological2 (wissenssoziologisch) approach forms a light backdrop to the book throughout, although the main focus is clearly psychoanalytic. In what follows, I hope to show how the three themes in the book are interrelated in other significant ways.
The reconstitution and