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This book demonstrates how effective and illuminating applied psychoanalysis can be when psychoanalytic thinking is applied sparingly, as it were, with a light touch. Peter Loewenberg, distinguished academician and practising psychoanalyst, shows how he has integrated his dual training in history and psychology. Eschewing the application of psychoanalysis to history, he focuses instead on ‘the point of contact’ (p. 3) between the psychological historian and his data. Like the contemporary, post-modern psychoanalyst or literary critic, this historian seeks to understand his materials through passionate involvement with them. His examples are clear, persuasive, and engaging.
For example, I read this book at the same time I prepared a review of Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust for another journal (Coen, 1996b). When I thought of Loewenberg's complex understanding of the multiple factors driving anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and hence the ambivalence of Jews towards Germanic society, I wished that Goldhagen, also a historian, had a psychoanalytic or at least a psychological perspective. Goldhagen views cognition and ideals as the determining factors in German behaviour without connecting these with other feelings, wishes, and needs. In part, Goldhagen uses this strategy to privilege anti-Semitic belief as the primary motivation for the willingness of ‘ordinary’ Germans to exterminate Jews. He is concerned that consideration of the motivational power of irrational feelings as universal forces would detract from the horror of German humiliation, torture, and murder of Jews. Despite Goldhagen's disclaimers, many believe that his book would have been much more enthusiastically received if he had been able to temper his argument with more balanced historical and psychological analysis. Peter Loewenberg could have provided him with excellent consultation.
Loewenberg's book