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Robert Samuels, a lecturer in the UCLA Writing Programs, is concerned that anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and other genocidal traumas are being trivialized and misrepresented in contemporary American culture. His book takes aim at the various ways Samuels thinks popular culture aids and abets this trivialization, and seeks to correct his students' unconscious participation in the erasure of meaning he purports to have found. Using psychoanalytic terminology and concepts of his own invention, he proposes nothing less than ‘a new model of education’ (p. 5) intended to overcome student resistances to learning. Samuels believes ‘that most of our colleges and universities feed the rhetorical defense mechanisms that our students have learned from popular culture, and these defensive structures call for universalized indifference, personal passivity, idealized authority, and assimilated prejudices and stereotypes’ (p. 7). ‘The main thesis of this work,’ he writes, ‘is that an effective way to teach the ethical lessons of the Holocaust in contemporary classrooms is to articulate and overcome the central defense mechanisms shaping students’ resistances to critical thinking and positive social change' (p. 3). This ambitious project, part of a series of publications called ‘Education, Psychoanalysis and Social Transformation,’ comes with high praise in jacket blurbs from reputable faculty in literature and applied psychoanalysis.
Unfortunately, Samuels' performance does not live up to its billing. Despite his admirable commitment to progressive education, throughout this short but repetitive book Samuels' insights into the misrepresentations of the Holocaust compete with terminological confusion, distorted and tendentious arguments, unsupported assertions and a myopic view of Holocaust education in America. To illustrate the nature and extent of the book's limitations, let me give some examples.
Samuels claims that four defense mechanisms account for resistance to a proper underst