Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism provides rich new insights into the history of political thought and clinical knowledge.

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism provides rich new insights into the history of political thought and clinical knowledge. In these chapters, internationally renowned historians and cultural theorists discuss landmark debates about the uses and abuses of 'the talking cure' and map the diverse psychologies and therapeutic practices that have featured in and against tyrannical, modern regimes.

"This volume is unique in exploring what its editors call "the two-way traffic between ideas of psychoanalysis and totalitarianism." We recognize that, whatever its focus on introspection, psychoanalysis is a social and political enterprise. It thrived in postwar Germany because it had a subject, the immediate Nazi past, and a heroic leader, Alexander Mitscherlich, who both interpreted the Nazi movement and lived out his opposition to it.We also learn how psychoanalysis can succumb to its own dogmas and confusions.We emerge with many questions about totalitarianism ("totalism" better serves us psychologically) but with a deepened sense of psychoanalysis in the world."-Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. "Among this book's contributions, two stand out forcefully. It widens and deepens the meaning of both psychoanalysis and totalitarianism, in the context of a history of the Western world from the 1920s to the 1960s. It also evidences the movements of minds at work around these topics, exploring connections between different realms of phantasy and actuality, such as children's mental health in relation to democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian political attitudes; imagination, belief and transference in relation to freedom; psychoanalysis in relation to intelligence work and political torture; and economic and political oppression, including colonialism, in relation to the loss of subjectivity and unconscious dependency. The result provides fascinating reading and opens up new thoughts in transdisciplinary fields of knowledge."-Professor Luisa Passerini, European University Institute, Florence, author of Fascism in Popular Memory. "This important and wide-ranging book explores psychoanalysis, its endeavour to enhance psychic freedom, and the totalitarian forces that aim to make free thought impossible.These essays show us psychoanalysis in radical conflict with dictatorship, discuss the consequences of totalitarian regimes for the psychoanalytic movement, highlight the power of racism and suggest how much political thought and sociology may have to gain from psychoanalytic conceptualisations."-Dr Franco De Masi, Training analyst, Italian Psychoanalytical Society and former president, Centro Milanese di Psicanalasi, author of Making Death Thinkable.