Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism

Matt ffytche, Daniel Pick, Matt ffytche, Daniel Pick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317643173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

These essays show both how the Freudian movement responded to and was transformed by the rise of fascism and communism, the Second World War, and the Cold War, and how powerful new ideas about aggression, destructiveness, control, obedience and psychological freedom were taken up in the investigation of politics. They identify important intersections between clinical debate, political analysis, and theories of minds and groups, and trace influential ideas about totalitarianism that took root in modern culture after 1918, and still resonate in the twenty-first century. At the same time, they suggest how the emergent discourses of 'totalitarian' society were permeated by visions of the unconscious.

Topics include: the psychoanalytic theorizations of anti-Semitism; the psychological origins and impact of Nazism; the post-war struggle to rebuild liberal democracy; state-funded experiments in mind control in Cold War America; coercive 're-education' programmes in Eastern Europe, and the role of psychoanalysis in the politics of decolonization. A concluding trio of chapters argues, in various ways, for the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis, and of these mid-century debates over the psychology of power, submission and freedom in modern mass society.

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism will prove compelling for both specialists and readers with a general interest in modern psychology, politics, culture and society, and in psychoanalysis. The material is relevant for academics and post-graduate students in the human, social and political sciences, the clinical professions, the historical profession and the humanities more widely.

Part I Frameworks

1 Introduction

Daniel Pick and Matt ffytche

DOI: 10.4324/9781315760773-3

This book seeks to alter the way psychoanalysis is positioned in the political landscape of the twentieth century by locating it in ‘totalitarian’ times.¹ It argues that the rise of fascism, the trauma of the Second World War, and the transformation of that struggle in the Cold War, shifted the centre of gravity within the profession as well as the social understanding of its role. Collectively these decades from the 1920s through to the 1960s – a period of large-scale growth, development and repositioning of the psychological sciences as a whole – were permeated by anxieties over the threat of totalitarian societies and the nature of totalitarian ‘mind’, as well as deliberation over the psychological basis for freedom in society. We investigate how particular visions of the mind, therapy and politics interacted during the age of Total War and Cold War, and ask how the history of psychoanalysis might be rewritten in that light.

Freud and the movement he founded have often been associated with liberal and cosmopolitan values. Psychoanalysis, invented by a self-proclaimed ‘Godless Jew’ who inhabited Vienna in the declining decades of the Habsburg Empire, was in obvious ways bound up with Enlightenment ideals (even as it demonstrated the very limits of reason). It was and largely remains sympathetic to individualism, pluralism and the presumption of a right to privacy and confidentiality in the clinical domain. Freud himself tended to view religion or political idealism with irony and treated rituals of faith as versions of obsessional neuroses. Moreover, regimes that have succeeded in collapsing much of the distinction between the private and public sphere have usually shown little tolerance for psychoanalysis, or for sustaining the modicum of security and freedom the practitioner requires in order to work, or the patient needs to ‘free associate’ whilst trusting in the clinician’s discretion.

Yet whatever the ideals and ideal context for psychoanalysis, its practice did not remain confined to liberal forms of polity. Psychoanalytical theories about self and group in our period ramified far beyond the conceptions of the early movement, even as they informed an increasingly large range of social and intellectual activities. At times ideas and techniques drawn (loosely or otherwise) from Freud’s repertoire were deployed for quite other purposes from those he had envisaged, for example as a tool of political or commercial persuasion, in methods of inducing personal ‘recantation’, or in endeavours to ensure the ‘re-education’ of colonized people. In exploring the history of psychoanalysis in ‘totalitarian’ times, we thus approach contentious debates from the past, consider how ‘the talking cure’ has been applied in or used to challenge particular modes of political thought, and map practices and ideas that, for better or for worse, came to be associated with psychoanalysis during the middle decades of the last century.

The Cold War arguably provided Freud’s movement with its greatest opportunities for public attention and certainly added to its political relevance. It was during the Cold War that psychoanalysis gained its firmest purchase on public life, at least in America. Whether or not this wider legitimation was a direct consequence of the turbulent context, or simply coincided with it, the development of psychoanalysis as a more global, professional and politically active force was undoubtedly deeply entangled with the experience of widespread conflict and political instability. The ‘Age of Totalitarianism’ called forth particular versions of psychoanalysis that aimed to meet the demands of violent times.

Totalitarianism

Between the 1920s and 1950s the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ emerged and took root. But it did not always mean the same thing. Soon after the First World War influential supporters of the Italian Fascist Party, for instance, wrote in praise of totalitarian systems of government, and Mussolini quickly adopted the word. It served, rhetorically, to point up the contrast between an old Italy marked by individualism, regional differences, factionalism, and selfish materialism, and the new regime’s idealized ‘total’ community, which bound individual and collective interest together in a common aim, while providing a bulwark against liberalism and Bolshevism.

By contrast with Freud’s notion of unavoidable psychic division, fascism envisioned minds in harmony with each other, and with the state. The fascist utopia, no less than the communist version, proposed to reshape bodies and minds, to create citizens fit for regenerated and unified societies. Many liberal and conservative commentators in America and Britain saw some merit in, or in some cases even enthusiastically welcomed, European fascist political experiments on the grounds that they restored order. By the 1930s, however, with the Duce’s ruthlessness, violence, and imperial ambitions ever harder to ignore, previous agnostics abroad were, often enough, expressing unbridled dismay, even as many Italians continued to reveal powerful feelings of devotion to and desire for their leader (Alpers, 2003; Duggan, 2012). During that decade, Freud would address Mussolini – ironically or not – as a ‘cultural hero’, while gifting him a copy of Why War?, Freud and Einstein’s extended correspondence, which had been sponsored in 1932 by that ever-more fragile and notional entity, the League of Nations (Gay, 1998: 448, n).

Dramatic though the Italian case appeared, Germany’s was to prove overwhelmingly more important and fearsome in the transformation of Europe and the wider world. Nazi ideologues had also seized upon this notion of totality, and with a vengeance. Through the 1920s, 30s and early 40s, Nazism became ever more radical in its ambitions to create a unified state and Volk, in which the supposed purification of ‘race’ would be achieved through the elimination of population groups designated as ‘degenerate’, above all the Jews. The new ‘imagined communities’ in Italy and in Germany had been reinforced by collective displays of euphoria during the interwar decades. At the same time both Mussolini and Hitler pursued the violent intimidation, and where necessary elimination, of those who stood in their way. The battle-hardened mind and the war-ready nation were extolled by numerous enthusiasts (not for the first time in history) as essential antidotes to decadence. Different forms of fascism around the world have relied upon different levels of intimidation and terror in practice, but violence and the mobilization of fear have always been essential hallmarks, as has the ecstatic performance of allegiance. Demonstrations of popular affiliation with the Nazi cause at the Nuremberg rallies and elsewhere were carefully choreographed; but that is not to deny the extent of the admiration and fervour that huge numbers of people felt on seeing or hearing the Führer.

The phenomenon of the Show Trials in Moscow in the late 1930s brought home another element of what came to be viewed as ‘totalitarian’ practices, and subsequently generated considerable debate about the possibility of political ‘brainwashing’. Communism, at some key historical moments, made much of such staged public confessions. In Darkness at Noon (1940) Arthur Koestler famously depicted an old but suspect ‘comrade’, confined to a bleak cell, eventually embracing the required confessional narrative before his inevitable execution. A terrifying cult of the leader, many commentators showed, required a corresponding abjection of political subjects – ‘captive minds’, ultimately with nowhere to go. Meanwhile, amidst the violence and the excoriation of degenerate or renegade types, both fascist and socialist realist art portrayed model men and women as purified, unified, and remade, happily obedient, under the command of a benevolent supreme authority.

Whilst nobody who took any close interest in such matters could deny the many differences between social and political life under Stalinism and Nazism, or between Stalinism and Maoism, various notable theorists looked for the shared, monolithic qualities of the new ‘total state’ (in all its forms). Thus critical commentators drew parallels between the kinds of obedience sought from populations under fascism and communism, or between the ruthless purges conducted by both Hitler and Stalin, as essential features held in common. By the 1950s, ‘totalitarian’ had become a widely used word in political discourse, signifying, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, ‘of or pertaining to a system of government which tolerates only one political party, to which all other institutions are subordinated, and which usually demands the complete subservience of the individual to the state’.

War in the mind

One element this definition neglects is the role of psychology. A crucial concern in post-war narratives on totalitarianism developed by Hannah Arendt, Jacob Talmon and many others, was the capacity of totalitarian states successfully to invade the minds of their subjects. No shortage of commentators also wrote of the risk that totalitarian enemies would successfully export their ideas abroad; the Cold War was cast precisely as a global battle of ideas and beliefs. Hence, it was often argued, the urgent need for liberal democracies to shore up the psychological strength of their populations against these dangerous lures. Roosevelt (United States president from 1933 to 1945) and his successors, Truman and Eisenhower, needed little convincing that psychological expertise was a powerful part of the political toolkit, as relevant in shaping analysis of foreign affairs and decoding enemy propaganda as in securing support for controversial policy measures at home. Through radio and other media, the twentieth-century leader could speak directly to the citizen, in the intimacy of the home. Electors were often portrayed as susceptible to hidden and orchestrated forms of influence, or as unconsciously captivated by causes, rather than rationally choosing between options. The argument had been powerfully set out before the war, for example in The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (1939), a work by Peter Drucker, émigré to America, prolific writer and specialist in management theory. Mussolini or Churchill, Hitler or Roosevelt might well have agreed at least on the fact that electorates are swayed by powerful emotional forces, and therefore require strong leadership figures. To recognize such an unconscious domain of psychic factors in collective action and belief was, admittedly, far from a novel insight in political thought in the 1930s. The psychology of ‘the masses’ had already emerged in the late nineteenth century as a supposedly scientific field of study in its own right. But the combination of mass democracy and those ever-more pervasive technologies of cinema, radio and, later, television changed the terms of the discussion. Moreover, the human sciences were themselves coming into service in industry and commerce, or in the ‘messaging’ strategies of diverse political parties, with the aim of influencing the prior opinion of consumers and voters. In short, the notion of politics as a field in which individuals might consciously weigh up and exert choices according to their personal inclination was often seen as hopelessly outmoded.

Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, a pioneering public relations consultant in America, had already attempted, during the interwar period, to make use of psychoanalytic ideas in his commercial work and advice to government. Alarmed by the rise of the far right in Europe and by Goebbels’ skilful use of radio and other means of propaganda in Germany, his writings, such as Speak up for Democracy (1940) and Democratic Leadership in Total War (1943), called for action to sustain vulnerable minds and consolidate allegiance to American values in a time of global uncertainty. The very techniques of mass persuasion and unconscious domination that characterized those modern highly illiberal European states, he suggested, might need to be deployed in the ‘Land of the Free’, even at the price of corroding that freedom to some degree. No shortage of political theorists in the 1930s, such as Harold Lasswell, also argued forcefully that the phenomenon of ‘Hitlerism’ required a sophisticated combination of political and psychological response if there was to be any hope of defeating it (Pick, 2012: 95–6, 123). By the war years a substantial body of opinion in Washington, especially in the field of intelligence, accepted that psychoanalysis and anthropology (among other disciplines) were necessary forms of expertise in a world struggle between liberty and fascistic or communistic forms of tyranny. Not long after its creation in 1947, the CIA developed experimental projects in universities and sometimes hospitals to harness medicine, and the research evidence gathered within human and natural sciences, in order to foster still further the endeavours of its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, which had already pioneered political profiling, new interrogation and officer selection techniques, ‘black’ propaganda and ‘dirty tricks’ operations.

Though not all post-war philosophical inquiries into freedom of mind, or psychological experiments on authority and obedience, made explicit links to the Cold War conflict and the preceding struggle against fascism and Nazism, such contexts were pervasively present. Psychologists and psychiatrists even invented new words to describe states of mind, or perhaps the annihilation of mind, congruent with totalitarian regimes. ‘Menticide’ for example, a 1950s coinage, directly expressed Cold War visions of the total state’s capacity to murder the mind; meanwhile the word ‘totalism’, favoured by Erik Erikson and Robert Jay Lifton, captured instead a sense of completely boxed-in mental life. ‘Totalism’ described a situation where a subject is held in thrall by an absolute system, operating within a ‘sacred language’, and allowed no leeway for doubt or dissent (Lifton, 1961).

‘Totalitarianism’ was likewise to prove an extraordinarily fertile idea in culture and political thought. It was cast by a large range of critics on both the Left and the Right as the quintessential modern form of tyranny, and as both cause and effect of a warped form of thinking in individuals and groups. Along with German or Soviet villains, sinister Asian, or specifically Chinese, brainwashers, capable of interfering with the unconscious minds of their foes, became commonplace stereotypes of the post-war years. Advocates of CIA-experimental projects on mind control could point to the stories, true or fanciful, of vulnerable PoWs having their emotions worked over, and their opinions turned, during the Korean War. Experiments in behavioural modification, mind-bending drugs and sensory deprivation that, unlike more obvious forms of torture, left few marks upon the body, continued, building on wartime precedents. (Whether skilful operators could truly mesmerize their subjects to act out of character, and to what extent ‘brainwashing’ was a myth, fascinated political and psychological commentators alike.)

Such practical attempts to harness or protect the minds of post-war citizens ran in parallel to (and sometimes directly fuelled) an array of literary and cinematic conceits concerning psychological warfare, or politics as a form of mental interference or derangement. The Manchurian Candidate (a novel in 1959, and a film in 1962), portrayed the shrill atmosphere of McCarthyite America, even as it depicted (more or less facetiously) communist apparatchiks skilled in the new techniques of ‘brainwashing’. The Chinese and the Russians are seen working together in this tale, skilfully harnessing the ‘psy’ sciences not merely to ‘re-educate’ enemy soldiers but to turn them into automata. In Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), the direction of the lens was turned from Moscow to Washington. Kubrick’s film featured, amongst other memorable characters, a paranoid US military officer prepared to unleash nuclear Armageddon whilst convinced not only that communists were tampering with the fluoridization of water (a common fear of the period), but also that an international conspiracy was underway ‘to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids’. In the same year, the historian Richard Hofstadter’s essay entitled ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (which first appeared in Harper’s Magazine, and has been much quoted since) suggested that this pathological strain of thought in US political life had long pre-dated the Cold War (Hofstadter, 1964).

‘Totalitarianism’, as all of this might well suggest, though potent as a cultural metaphor, is a highly problematic concept in contemporary and historical analysis. It is difficult, or perhaps impossible, to extricate it from the intense and often fantastical projections that were made during the Cold War, when rhetorical accounts proliferated about the psychology of entire enemy populations. Totalitarianism may handily conjure up a sense of Nazi Germany, the emergence of Stalin’s dictatorial leadership in Soviet communism, and the triumph of Mao in China. But the label is itself very obviously also a product of particular forms of political rhetoric and Cold War cultural fear. The reader will find some of our contributors regard the term ‘totalitarian’ as hopelessly contaminated by that history, some seek to retrieve it and put it to new uses, while for others again it is simply a source of confusion, given the very notable differences between the various most prominent cases, most obviously of all Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union (cf. Kershaw, 2004). Here we seek to examine rather than just assume the term (the scare quotes, although not insistently flagged every time the word is mentioned, are used advisedly). So the reader will encounter discussion of its history, semantic range and diverse applications (see particularly the contributions by Joel Isaac and Michael Rustin, as well as the discussion between John Forrester and Eli Zaretsky, chaired by Daniel Pick).

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