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This is a book of more than one dimension. The author discusses the links of psychoanalysis to Jewishness with the help of three case studies, starting with Freud, against the background of his era. The author considers psychoanalysis to be one of the expressions of the Jewish mind, which, on the one hand, reflects Western civilization and, on the other, analyses the latter, revealing its irrational and intense underside. The suspicion that psychoanalysis is a Jewish affair has had far-reaching consequences. In the Nazi period, that label was murderously dangerous. The Nazi period is seen as the moment when the psychoanalytic movement was brutally faced with the requirement to defend or repudiate its Jewish identity. In this connection, Frosh refers to the collaborationist tendency in psychoanalysis at that time, and its own anti-Semitic dimension.
Frosh devotes three chapters to the Nazi era, the period during which psychoanalysis underwent a divestment of its Jewishness, with regard to content, persons, and radical ideology. He tells the reader precisely which individuals who participated in psychoanalytic work survived the period 1933-45, relating the history exhaustively and in considerable detail. He explains the differences and similarities in outlook between the two German psychoanalytic societies (Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft and Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung), and tries to give to