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Compared to the United States, where psychoanalysis and related fields have been predominantly the interest of practitioners and thus centered around clinical issues, European writers have devoted their energies to psychoanalysis as it illuminates the “understanding of behavior and culture,” in the spirit and tradition of The Psychoanalytic Review. The omnibus volume Hard War/Soft War and Media, 1914-1945, the third volume in the series “Literature and Media Analysis,” now only available in the original German, is a fine example of the latter kind of writing. Editors Stingelin and Scherer have put together a collection of contributions by scholars from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the humanities tracing the impact of a number of technological advances of modern warfare, on culture in general, and psychoanalysis in particular between the two world wars. The latter focus, the shaping of psychoanalysis itself by warfare, a trend begun by Freud himself, has hitherto gone unnoticed.
Perhaps a good way to understand this effort is to bear in mind McLuhan's