BOOKS 119

Although he is rejecting a psychological interpretation of the

phenomenon of possession as a whole, Levack points out the parallels
between exorcism as primitive healing and techniques of modern
psychotherapy – because they are treating psychic phenomena (of any
kind whatsoever, one might add). Modern psychotherapy is, for the author
of The Devil Within, something that is indeed comparable to the work of
the social historian: it seems, according to Levack, that possessions were
triggered when the demoniacs experienced some sort of emotional or
psychic crisis; identifying such circumstances, as Levack argues, is the work
of modern psychotherapists, and social historians have ‘to do the same for
their far more elusive and often inscrutable historical subjects’ (p. 170).
Finally, for Levack the concept of possession and exorcism as a theatre
provides an explanation that can apply to all possessions, while respecting
their cultural specificity. It should not be ignored that terms like
performance, actors, psychodrama, sacred dramas, and so on establish a
connection to the theory of the performing arts. Further research will
doubtlessly have to work on this aspect. In addition, when the author asks,
how the demoniacs learnt their scripts, when he speaks of cultural scripts
and so on, he is establishing a connection to literary theory and text
linguistics. Further studies are needed to test the postulate in the field
of small-scale, and therefore more in-depth, analyses. In general, this
overview, comprising an extended timescale and a wide geographical area,
allows us to take into account the phenomenon as a whole. The next step
will probably be to differentiate again, so that diversity will come into
focus.

The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind by Daniel Pick (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012; 357 pp); reviewed by Michael Briant
DOI: 10.3366/pah.2014.0143

Daniel Pick’s latest book describes the contribution of psychiatrists,

psychotherapists and psychoanalysts to the fight against Fascism in the four
or five decades just before, during, and after World War II. As both a
psychoanalyst and Professor of History at Birkbeck College in the
University of London, he brings a deep understanding of both disciplines
to bear on his subject. The greater part of the work focuses first on the
writings of Walter Langer about Hitler and those of Henry Dicks on his
encounters with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess, and it then broadens out to
survey and reflect on psychoanalytic thinking as to how we might prevent
anything of the sort ever happening again. This was an urgent practical

MICHAEL BRIANT is a member of the Guild of Psychotherapists and an associate

member of the Cambridge Society for Psychotherapy. He lives and works in Cambridge.
Address for correspondence: [michaelbriant@ntlworld.com]
120 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2014) 16(1)

issue when the war ended because of the need for the reconstruction of
a totally devastated Germany, but the author also shows how we have
continued to be preoccupied with, or perhaps one should say, to work
through, the trauma of the thirties and forties in seminars, conferences,
novels, films, political philosophy, and many other areas of our culture,
including, as he points out, psychoanalytic theorizing.
Walter Langer’s The Mind of Adolf Hitler was published in 1973, and,
to the author’s surprise and pleasure, it was greeted with widespread
enthusiasm and quickly became a best-seller. Historians, however, were
not impressed. They saw it, in many cases, as exemplifying all the faults of
‘psycho-history’, and reacted savagely. Hugh Trevor-Roper, for example,
dismissed it as ‘wild and unwarranted conjectural analysis’ and went on to
make a withering attack on ‘psychoanalysts who have recently invaded the
field of history and who explain great events by imagining the infantile
experiences and secret perversions of chosen individuals, conveniently
dead’ (p. 263). Trevor-Roper’s contempt, however, was both unfair and
curiously neglectful of the historical context because Langer’s book was
not a work of psychohistory: it was an intelligence profile written during
the war and commissioned by the Office for Strategic Studies, a forerunner
of the CIA. Daniel Pick gives us a detailed description as to how that came
about, pointing out that it was not published until 1973 because it had
been classified for thirty years as ‘secret’. Langer himself had serious
reservations about it and was reluctant to allow it to see the light of day.
‘Personally I never thought too highly of it’, he wrote. ‘To me it was the
product of one of those rush-rush assignments that are common during
wartime and I always felt I could do infinitely better if I had had more time
and space in which to elaborate’ (p. 263). He claimed that he had almost
forgotten about it, until scholars discovered it in the National Archives and
wrote to him to urge its publication.
Henry Dicks was similarly drawn into investigations of ‘the Nazi mind’
as part of the contribution of mental health professionals to the war effort.
He became a Major in Intelligence and his personal background made him
well qualified to contribute to its wartime work. He had been brought up in
Pernau in Estonia, where his father, who was English, had made his fortune
as a timber merchant and acted as honorary British consul. Dicks’s mother
was of German Protestant descent, and Henry grew up bilingual in English
and German. In his teens he was sent to the English Grammar school in St
Petersburg, and became fluent in Russian. He was actually in St Petersburg
in 1917 at the time of the storming of the Winter Palace, but the situation
rapidly became too dangerous and the family was forced to flee through
Finland and Norway to Britain. He became a medical student at St John’s
College, Cambridge shortly after the death of W.H.R. Rivers, who had
been a fellow there, and it seems likely that it was there that he learned
about the work Rivers had pioneered with the ‘talking cure’ in treating
BOOKS 121

‘war neuroses’. After clinical training at St Bartholomew’s, he went into

psychiatry and eventually joined the Tavistock Clinic, of which he was, for
a number of years, the Deputy Director. His wartime duties involved
writing reports on matters such as the morale of the German army, the
likely psychological effect on the German population of defeat, and the
psychodynamics of Nazism. The War Office had asked him to interview
and write reports on a number of German prisoners of war, as if they had
been referred to him for a psychiatric assessment, and he developed this
into a psychological profile which he published under the title ‘Personality
Traits and National Socialist Ideology’ in the journal Human Relations in
1950. Dicks’s most extraordinary and secret assignment, however, was the
psychiatric care of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess, who had flown himself
to Britain and landed on the Duke of Hamilton’s estate in Scotland in May
1941. Hess had come, so far as anyone knows, on his own initiative on a
peace mission, but the British authorities were concerned that he was on
the verge of a psychotic breakdown. Although he did have some initial
contact with government representatives, we are left with the impression
that this was really to humour him, because he was treated in fact as a
prisoner of war and a patient.
Dicks was not alone in working with Hess: other psychiatrists took over
at times, and overall responsibility lay with Jonathan Rees, who was then
Director of the Tavistock Clinic and a friend. He, in turn, reported to the
British government. Daniel Pick is very open about the boundary
confusion between intelligence gathering and psychiatric care in their
engagement with Hess, perhaps because he, like most analysts, therapists
and psychiatrists reading this now, must surely feel uneasy about it. It also
muddies the issue that perplexed people at the time (and was crucial at his
trial in Nuremburg) as to whether he was, or was not, of sound mind, or
whether perhaps he used his psychosis to protect himself when he felt
under threat.
In the period immediately following the war Dicks and others such as
the Kleinian analyst Roger Money-Kyrle were employed on work to
screen out those with authoritarian leanings from the new administrative
framework that was to replace the arrangements of the Third Reich. Then,
in the 1960s, he was asked if he would agree to interview a number of now
imprisoned concentration camp guards for the Columbus Centre at Sussex
University. The Centre had been set up in 1966 for the study of collective
psychopathology under the direction of Professor Norman Cohn, and
Dicks was given the task of studying the motivation of these individuals in
the context of the persecutory ideology which had legitimized their
activities. He published his findings as Licensed Mass Murder in 1972, only
a year or so before his death.
After his wartime intelligence work Walter Langer ceased, apparently,
to be involved in these issues, only emerging from the shadows with the
122 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2014) 16(1)

publication of his book. Where Dicks’s studies had all been based on the
evidence he gained from direct interviews, Langer’s work was necessarily
derived from reports, memoirs, hearsay and rumours by those who had
been close to Hitler and his entourage. He had nevertheless had some
personal brushes with Nazism, because he was in Vienna in training at the
time of the Anschluss. In fact he was in analysis with Anna Freud and
he took part in the efforts to help Freud and his wife and daughter to leave
the country. From the outset, however, he had had misgivings about
attempting to psychoanalyse someone who was not a patient, but of course
it was literally a matter of life or death to gain some insight into the
workings of the enemy’s psyche.
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind is a very readable, thoughtful and deeply
impressive study. I was puzzled, however, by the absence of any mention of
Fairbairn in Pick’s account of the psychological background of Dicks’s
work, despite the fact that, in Licensed Mass Murder, Dicks makes no
fewer than eight references to him. The model that guided him, he makes
clear, was not just Klein, but Klein as revised by Fairbairn. If the model
were solely Klein, one might expect that the subject of mass murder would
be the supreme example of a case where the explanatory power of the
‘death instinct’ could be demonstrated. It plays no part, however, in Dicks’s
views on the psychodynamics of Nazism in general or of individual
mass murderers, because Dicks followed Fairbairn in believing it to be
superfluous. The account he gives is premissed on his belief, derived from
Fairbairn, that our primary human need is for relationship, and that the
psychological origins of the psychopathy he had investigated lay in conflicts
and failures in relationship, and the struggles of individuals and the culture
in which they lived to manage those conflicts. As Dicks writes in Licensed
Mass Murder:
‘Our knowledge about the social learning and internalizing processes in children
took a great stride forward with the work of Melanie Klein and W.R.D.
Fairbairn. The palimpsest of Freud’s sometimes inconsistent theories based on
sex instinct has been replaced by a concept according to which the motive force
for social and emotional growth is the infant’s striving to attach itself to a being
(the object) which would give it support. This “object relations” theory,
supported by common sense, clinical observations and rigorous research, fits the
ethological and biological facts better. This is the baby’s active reaching out for a
loving mother to ensure survival.’ (p. 22)
The omission of Fairbairn is all the more perplexing in that the text makes
several references to Lacan, even though Lacan’s image of the ‘proper’
father role is uncomfortably close to that described by Dicks (and others
such as Reich, Fromm and Erikson at the time) as the psychological seed
bed of Fascism. Lacan famously portrays it as characterized by a rejection,
the ‘non’ or ‘nom du père’; little is said about the father’s love for the child
BOOKS 123

or the love of the child for the father. It is a key contention of Fairbairn’s,
however, that the rejection of a child’s efforts to form a loving relationship
with a parental figure leads to the loading of both the loving overture or
gesture and the image of the rejecting parent with hate. Fascist ideologies
offered, and offer, sons and daughters a way of managing the conflicts
so generated and disposing of the hate and other troubling feelings onto
‘rich old man figures’ such as the Jews. Here also lie the roots of the
virulent homophobia that were also such a feature of Fascism.
It is hard to read this book without being struck by the extent of the
involvement of the ‘psy’ professions in sociopolitical issues before, during,
and for at least three decades after World War II. This was partly because
those in power frequently wondered whether prominent figures in the
Fascist dictatorships were mentally deranged, so that it seemed appropriate
to consult those with training and experience in treating people whose
sanity was precarious. But there was also a willingness on the part of
mental health professionals to help and a feeling on both sides that their
expertise was relevant. Today, as Daniel Pick points out, the situation is
strikingly different. The idea of asking psychotherapists, psychoanalysts
and psychiatrists to comment on contemporary problems would probably
invite derision. When an academic was interviewed on the radio recently
about a paper he had given on the psychodynamics of the bonus culture,
the interviewer responded to him with amused incredulity. How this
situation might have come about is, as its author says, beyond the scope of
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, but five or six years ago an international
conference on the sociopolitical implications of psychoanalysis and the
impact of sociopolitical factors on both theory and practice, the third in a
series originally opened by Derrida, had to be abandoned because of the
‘negative responses’ of the psychoanalytic and Lacanian professional
bodies. Now, more than ever, practitioners agonize over the question of
whether insights drawn from work with individuals can be applied to
sociopolitical issues, as though one could think and theorize about
individuals without taking their social context into account.
This was never a position that Freud himself adopted. It is a reflection,
surely, of the triumph of capitalism (and the atomistic view of the
individual associated with it) following the defeat of Fascism and the
implosion of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Capitalism is
seen as the only game in town, despite the fact that both Communism and
Fascism were products of it as ideologies, and that it was crises in
Capitalism that offered both their opportunities of power. Roger Money-
Kyrle, one of Dicks’s ‘lieutenants’, observed, as many had previously
observed, that Capitalism has two inherent weaknesses: that it leads to
great inequalities of wealth, and has a tendency, periodically, to crisis.
Early in the present crisis, walking through Keynes’s old college, I saw a
sign directing people to a conference on ‘The Economics of the Crisis and
124 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2014) 16(1)

the Crisis in Economics’, the latter seemingly referring to the simplistic

assumptions about human motivation that underlie much economic
theorizing.
Daniel Pick reminds us that a common objection to the use of
psychodynamic insights in understanding sociopolitical issues is that
states are vastly more complicated than individuals. That is obviously
true, but states are made up of individuals, and we are guilty, surely, of
oversimplification if we leave psychology out of the account. Dicks was
very firm and very clear that he was not suggesting that the rise,
development and fall of the Third Reich could be understood in
psychological terms: he had been asked, he tells us, to investigate the
relationship between personality structure and Nazi ideology, but how that
part of the jigsaw fitted into the whole he was not competent to say: it was a
matter for historians, anthropologists and others. He would have insisted,
however, that there was a psychological dimension, and that we ignore that
at our peril. The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind brings us face to face with this: it
could hardly be more timely.

Bettelheim: Living and Dying, by David James Fisher (Volume 8 of

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi
Press, 2008; 180 pp): reviewed by Nathan M. Szajnberg
DOI: 10.3366/pah.2014.0144

Listen to some statements about psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts. How

do they grab you?
Analysts are a suspicious bunch, asking ‘Why?’ ‘Why now?’ ‘How does this feel?’
They are even skeptical of their own theories, interpretations and techniques,
thereby (hopefully, with enough hard honesty) better able not to need to be
taken by their own interpretations, unlike their, at times, idealizing patients.
(pp. 21–2, 26, 27)
And, while analysts are suspicious, the patient is always right (and wrong).
(pp. 4, 6)
Analysts are soul detectives. (pp. 9, 21, 25)
The goals of psychoanalysis are authenticity, wholeness; autonomy (self-rule
from the Greek). (p. 3)
The psychoanalytic situation is an island of serenity for dialogue, self-
discovery, and affective exploration. (pp. 3, 20)
Too much theory estranges, distances, deflects from emotions. (pp. 3, 23, 25)

NATHAN M. SZAJNBERG, MD is Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis,

SFCP; Member, Columbia and New York Psychoanalytic Societies; and Training
Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic and the IPA. He is author of Sheba and Solomon’s
Return: Ethiopian Children in Israel. Address for correspondence: 161 W 61st St Suite
3A, New York, NY 10023, USA. [http://szajnberg.com]