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In a series of short chapters, this book constructs a robust case for what historical understanding can gain from psychoanalytic thought, and how it can illuminate struggles over the memory of the Holocaust in post-war Germany. Its central contention is that for the past 70 years Germany has been caught between two opposing impulses, on the one hand engaging in a form of remembering that identifies with the suffering of Jewish victims and accepts that Germany cannot be relieved of the burdens of the past, and on the other, striving to put this past behind it. Figlio calls these tendencies ‘remembering true’ and ‘remembering false’. They map onto central tenets of Kleinian theory, where the recognition by the infant of its aggressive urges may lead to feelings of guilt and remorse but can also result in manic reparation characterized by omnipotence and triumphalism which wills guilt away. The social structures of post-war memory in Germany and the psychic structures of Kleinian psychoanalysis operate in a mirror image.
The opening chapters address the criticism often levelled at psychoanalysis that societies do not possess a mind and do not behave according to unconscious motives, and thus any attempt to apply concepts drawn from the treatment of individuals to the behaviour of groups is ontologically wrong. ‘I do not claim that there is a social mind,’ Figlio states, ‘but that the social has properties of a subject’ (p. 21) His interest is in the attachments that individuals make to larger formations, which can then exhibit and act in accordance with the unconscious motives and defences that operate within the psyches of individuals. The social world may expose an ‘actuality that gives expression to the internal world’ (pp. 155, 242). Figlio argues that groups are even more likely than individuals to mobilize primitive defences, particularly when the group is formed through attachment to an illusory homogeneous entity like the nation. These chapters argue for the val