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Psychoanalysis, someone once observed, not altogether unfairly, can explain everything and predict nothing. But in confronting the phenomena of Nazism and the Holocaust, its explanatory power, like the powers of other approaches to extreme human behavior, fails. Thus far, at any rate, neither historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, philosophers, nor any other expert observers of the human experience have been able to discover persuasive reasons to explain why and how Germans collectively went berserk in 1933-1945. In the course of it, they perpetrated one of the greatest horrors, if not the greatest horror, in all of human history. Had they not been defeated in war, there can be little doubt that Judaic-Christian civilization, at least in the West and perhaps everywhere in the world, would have come to an end.
Analyses of Adolf Hitler abound in almost every social science, and they are particularly numerous in the psychological disciplines. The book under review, the joint work of a psychoanalyst and a professional writer and editor, maintains that Hitler "was a