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The conference on ‘Psychoanalysis, Fascism and Fundamentalism’ which produced the papers which this Journal is pleased to publish was an intense, stimulating and memorable event. As one hopes of such a conference, it produced as many questions as it answered. Yet none of the speakers picked out one odd feature of linking the three nouns together to make a title and a theme. Psychoanalysis is a science and a therapeutic practice, Fascism is a political ideology and a political practice and fundamentalism is, following the OED, a movement advocating strict adherence to certain tenets held to be fundamental (i.e. non-negotiable or not open to question) to a religious faith. So three movements: one quasi-scientific, one political, one religious. Why bring these three different worlds together?
Finding an answer to this question may be helped by noting a further oddity - a coincidence that may be more than that. Fascism was born in Italy in the wake of the First World War; although psychoanalysis was formed as a theory and a programme in the first two decades of the 20th century, it only became a movement with a major cultural resonance, whose ripples from a certain moment onwards extended very widely and with no coordinated control through the arts and sciences, in the same historical moment - in the wake of the First World War. Strikingly, fundamentalism as a term and a movement also dates from the same moment; the OED gives a first usage in English-American in 1923 (Daily Mail, 24 May 1923, p. 8: ‘Mr. William Jennings Bryan has been exerting the full force of his great eloquence in a campaign on behalf of what is termed “Fundamentalism” ‘), with a usefully indicative usage in 1925 from the journal Relig. Yesterday & To-morrow: ‘There has been in America some surprise at the sudden rise of Fundamentalism in the last five years.’ The third OED reference, from The Observer in 1927, even points - inadvertently? is this another coincidence? - to a link between fundamentalis