You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dedicated to the memory of John Forrester, the late historian of the human sciences whose voice can be heard in dialogue with Eli Zaretsky in the pages of this volume, Matt ffytche and Daniel Pick's compelling edited collection circulates around the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and the ‘age of totalitarianism’. To insist that there is a relation seems intuitively right, even as its complexity is strung out across the varied contributions to the volume. On the one hand, psychoanalysis has an array of concepts and accounts of mental processes that can contribute to an understanding of a ‘totalitarian’ state of mind, positing that we all have an unconscious predilection for submission, largely through modes of identification, whether to a fascist state, to maniacal dictators, or to mass society that controls from within. Psychoanalysis would posit that our shared capacity for murderous feelings, narcissistic states of entitlement, wishes to enslave others, to merge with powerful leaders, and break up human bonds (whether understood as derivatives of a death drive, or as the sequelae of failures of the environment) make us vulnerable to particular social and political formations that may harness such predilections for ‘total’ ends. The Frankfurt school theorists in particular took up these psychoanalytic theories of psychic processes, and used them to account for both fascism and the rise of US mass culture, seeing totalitarian society as itself a product of technological modernity.
On the other hand, psychoanalysis as itself a socio-political formation, one that co-emerges at the turn of the last century amidst the crisis brought about by European modernity, the late colonial state and the independence struggles it gave rise to, the early years of mass production, and the emergence of the twentieth century ideologies of fascism and communism, could barely not have a relation to totalitarianism. As ffytche and Pick argue in their introduction, not