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Dear Editor
Daniel Pick's thoughtful article on psychoanalysis and fascism (‘“In pursuit of the Nazi mind?” The deployment of psychoanalysis in the allied struggle against Germany’, Psychoanalysis and History Special Issue: Psychoanalysis, Fascism and Fundamentalism 11(2): 137-57) uses Jane O'Grady's review of my book, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, as a foil, so as to show how wrong-headed is the idea that analysts were not deeply engaged in the fight against Nazism. Left unsaid is the fact that O'Grady's vile imaginings-Jewish analysts masturbating while the Nazis prepare to roll in — came in flagrant disregard of the documented facts in the book she was supposedly reviewing. If the reviewer bothered to peruse my table of contents, she would have noticed that the last chapter was entitled ‘The psychopolitics of freedom’. If she read that section — much less the rest of the book, since engagement with the political world is discussed throughout-she would have found evidence that the emergence of fascism dominated psychoanalytic thinking after 1933. I covered a wide range of increasingly frantic efforts to both understand and undermine totalitarianism from Simmel, Reich, Fenichel, Glover, and Waelder, to name but a very few. Instead of acknowledging all this historical detail, that reviewer let her defamatory fantasy spew forth. I could not let the possible though, I am sure, unintended impression stand that O'Grady's view was an ignorant but understandable response to previous scholarship, including my own.
Yours sincerely