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The Psychoanalysis of Nazism: Language and the Unconscious in the Third Reich

Author(s) : A. Laurence Rickels

Reviews and Endorsements

'Laurence Rickels offers blazing illumination of the invisible undertow of disquiet and uncanny in our knowledge of culture, consciousness and technology. The riveting conclusions of his research are matched by his persistence and command in unveiling their implications for our here and now.'
Jonathan Lethem

'For Freud, symptoms bore the dual-imprint of conflicts between the repressed unconscious wishes on the one hand and the defences on the other that brought them about. Such compromise-formations can thus reveal something of their origins to the careful reader. This latest volume by Laurence Rickels, the acclaimed author of the monumental three-volume Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002), brings a new generation of readers back to the dark days of National Socialism in Germany and its aftermath in the post-war GDR in his exploration of the lure of Nazi ideas, particularly on the psychoanalysts Alexander Mette and Gerhart Scheunert. Rickels’s careful reading uncovers not just the resultant deformaties this wrecked in their lives and praxis, but its wider influence on psychoanalysis in Germany and beyond. In a new era where totalitarian politics is again on the rise, where strong-man ideologies flex, where truth and lies compete, and there are miriad pressure towards conformity and group-think, Rickels’s work is not just a fascinating retrospective study but consititues a particularly prescient warning from history. Thoroughly recommended!'
Roger Willoughby, clinical psychologist and historian of psychoanalysis, Gradiva Award winner, author of Masud Khan: The Myth and the Reality (2005) and Freud’s British Family: Reclaiming Lost Lives in Manchester and London (2024)