The Essential Being: Psychoanalytic Understanding of Totalitarianism
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : 2017
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 194
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Category 2 :
Bargain and Discounted Titles - Catalogue No : 39102
- ISBN 13 : 9781782205005
- ISBN 10 : 1782205004
Reviews and Endorsements
‘With daring, learning, and clinical experience, Anamilagros Perez-Morazzani and Rafael E. Lopez-Corvo present the impact of childhood trauma “as it repeats compulsively and continuously” in totalitarianism and terrorism. Perez-Morazzani and Lopez-Corvo detail the unconscious motivational forces in five dictators, showing the “omnipotent and megalomaniac fantasies” of the leader. The Essential Being dramatises the internal dynamics of the tyrant’s hold on power: the cockroach is “killed” but produces “a thousand small ones”. The authors’ immersion in psychoanalysis, with its unique access to unconscious representations and vivid metaphors of patients in analysis, provides an impressive wealth of clinical vignettes in this remarkable study of early trauma and its very different outcome in the psychodynamics of creative genius.’
–– Margaret Ann Hanly, PhD, training and supervising psychoanalyst in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis and past president of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society