The pursuit of the Nazi mind Hitler, Hess, and the analysts

Historian/psychoanalyst Pick (Birkbeck College, Univ. of London) is eminently qualified to study this topic. Pick begins his remarkable, richly informative, and profound work by focusing on Rudolf Hess. He moves to Adolph Hitler and examines the years of WW II, the Allied victory, the de-Nazification of Germany, and the Cold War. In May 1941, Hess bizarrely single-handedly flew a plane from Germany to Great Britain, parachuted from it, and was promptly arrested, becoming a prisoner of war and a patient. Britain now had a Nazi who could possibly provide insights into the Nazi psyche. Pick substantiates that many of the period's luminaries who studied the "Nazi mind" and authoritarianism were psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychologists. He explores several popular films reflective of the era's "group fantasies." It is difficult to do justice to this highly readable, extensively researched book in a brief review, but there is a serious scholarly lacuna. Pick does not employ one German source. All are in English. Furthermore, although there are some references to the field of psychohistory, there are no references to psychohistorical journals, which have been prominent in examining the period's issues. Nevertheless, this thought-provoking work marks a major contribution to understanding this very complex period. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most public and university libraries. J. Szaluta emeritus, United States Merchant Marine Academy

Nazism was the one historical phenomenon crazy enough to license the wildest flights of psychoanalytic speculation, to judge by this probing study of Freudian efforts to understand the Third Reich. University of London historian and psychoanalyst Pick (Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture) examines several attempts to put Nazism on the couch: British psychiatrists' interviews with captive Nazis, including Hitler's crony Rudolph Hess, a raving nut obsessed with health food nostrums and paranoid delusions of Jewish plots; reports on Hitler's psyche commissioned by the wartime American OSS; postwar psychiatry, scholarship, novels, and movies that took Nazism as a template for sociopolitical pathology. Pick's lucid but rather dry discussion is appropriately critical of knee-jerk Freudian dogmas, remaining cautious about analysts' impulses to ground fascist attitudes in infantile trauma and a harsh Germanic "super-ego" or to theorize about Hitler's Oedipal issues. But he also shows why psychoanalytic concepts, with their focus on the irrational roots of behavior, unconscious desires and fantasies, and the hysterical emotions Hitler elicited from Germans, were so persuasive to contemporaries trying to understand the power of Nazism. The result is a thought-provoking, though inconclusive, investigation of psychoanalysis at its peak of ambition and influence, and of the link between politics and individual psychology. Photos. 20 b&w illus. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.