The remarkable story of how the Allies used psychoanalysis to delve into the motivations of the Nazi leadership and to explore the mass psychology of fascism.

The notion of sexual sadism emerged from nineteenth-century alienist attempts to imagine the pleasure of the torturer or mass killer. This was a time in which sexuality was mapped to social progress, so that perversions were always related either to degeneration or decadence. These ideas were internalized in later Freudian views of the drives within the self, and of their repression under the demands of modern European civilization. Sadism was always presented as the barbarous past that lurked within each of us, ready to burst forth into murderous violence, crime, anti-Semitism, and finally genocide. This idea maintained its currency in European thought after the Second World War as Freudian-influenced accounts of the history of philosophy configured the Marquis de Sade as a kind of Kantian “superego” in a framework that viewed the Western Enlightenment as unraveled by its own inner demons. In this way, a straight line was imagined from the late eighteenth century to the Holocaust. These ideas have had an ongoing legacy in debates about sexual perversion, feminism, genocide representation, and historical memory of Nazism. However, recent genocide research has massively debunked assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence are especially sexually motivated in their cruelty. This book considers how the late twentieth-century imagination eroticized Nazism for its own ends, but also how it has been informed by nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of mass violence as a sexual problem.

How could the Holocaust have happened? How can people do such things to other people? Questions such as these have animated discussion of the Holocaust from our earliest awareness of what had happened. These questions have engaged the lay public as well as academics from many different fields. Psychologists have taken an active role in trying to understand and explain the motivation, thinking, and behavior of all those involved in and affected by the Holocaust. The present volume is, in part, an attempt to provide a kind of historical roadmap to the diverse psychological explanations and interpretations that have been developed by psychologists over the last several decades. While many psychological discussions of the Holocaust dismiss or diminish the significance of work that antedates the Milgram obedience experiments in the early 1960s, this book engages some of these earlier formulations in detail. It strives to be, in this sense, a more complete history of psychological thought on the Holocaust. As many psychologists now accept the idea that a comprehensive psychology of the Holocaust must include more than social influence, the book addresses the question, "What, then?" The answer can be found by looking both backward and forward in time. Gordon Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice remains one of the best psychological attempts to grapple with the Holocaust written, though that was not its primary purpose. In this volume, the reader will find both echoes of Allport and new ideas for ways psychologists can engage this profoundly important subject.

This book draws on a range of key archives and oral testimonies to provide the first systematic and historical study of the origins, context, development, frustrations, inner contradictions, and legacies of the Columbus Centre. The Columbus Centre, a remarkable though largely forgotten research institute, was established at the University of Sussex in 1966, triggered by claims of a dearth of academic research about Nazism and the Holocaust. Its basic stated aim was to bring together psychoanalysis and history for a scholarly investigation of discrimination, mass violence, and the preconditions of genocide in the past and the present. The Nazi crimes were studied along with other instances of prejudice and mass violence, such as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts, South African apartheid, the persecution of the Roma people, and race relations in the United States and modern-day Britain. The book seeks to place the Columbus Centre in the historiography of mass violence by analysing the Centre’s works through four historiographical prisms or power relations in which they were produced: psychoanalysis, class, race, and gender. This interdisciplinary volume is a valuable text for scholars and students of historiography, psychoanalysis, genocide and violence, and postwar Europe, and for professionals within the field of psychology.

Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History is a brief but comprehensive survey of the Third Reich based on current research findings that provides a balanced approach to the study of Hitler’s role in the history of the Third Reich. The book considers the economic, social, and political forces that made possible the rise and development of Nazism; the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich; World War II; and the Holocaust. World War II and the Holocaust are presented as logical outcomes of the ideology of Hitler and the Nazi movement. This new edition contains more information on the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), as well as Nazi complicity in the Reichstag Fire and increased discussion of consent and dissent during the Nazi attempt to create the ideal Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). It takes a greater focus on the experiences of ordinary bystanders, perpetrators, and victims throughout the text, includes more discussion of race and space, and the final chapter has been completely revised. Fully updated, the book ensures that students gain a complete and thorough picture of the period and issues. Supported by maps, images, and thoroughly updated bibliographies that offer further reading suggestions for students to take their study further, the book offers the perfect overview of Hitler and the Third Reich.

An eminent psychiatrist delves into the minds of Nazi leadershipin “a fresh look at the nature of wickedness, and at our attempts to explain it” (Sir Simon Wessely, Royal College of Psychiatrists). When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders, using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. The findings were so disconcerting that portions of the data were hidden away for decades and the research became a topic for vituperative disputes. Gilbert thought that the war criminals’ malice stemmed from depraved psychopathology. Kelley viewed them as morally flawed, ordinary men who were creatures of their environment. Who was right? Drawing on his decades of experience as a psychiatrist and the dramatic advances within psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience since Nuremberg, Joel E. Dimsdale looks anew at the findings and examines in detail four of the war criminals, Robert Ley, Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher, and Rudolf Hess. Using increasingly precise diagnostic tools, he discovers a remarkably broad spectrum of pathology. Anatomy of Malice takes us on a complex and troubling quest to make sense of the most extreme evil. “In this fascinating and compelling journey . . . a respected scientist who has long studied the Holocaust asks probing questions about the nature of malice. I could not put this book down.”—Thomas N. Wise, MD, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine “This harrowing tale and detective story asks whether the Nazi War Criminals were fundamentally like other people, or fundamentally different.”—T.M. Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real

This book offers the first in-depth intellectual and cultural history of British subversive propaganda during the Second World War. Focussing on the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), it tells the story of British efforts to undermine German morale and promote resistance against Nazi hegemony. Staffed by civil servants, journalists, academics and anti-fascist European exiles, PWE oversaw the BBC European Service alongside more than forty unique clandestine radio stations; they maintained a prolific outpouring of subversive leaflets and other printed propaganda; and they trained secret agents in psychological warfare. British policy during the occupation of Germany stemmed in part from the wartime insights and experiences of these propagandists. Rather than analyse military strategy or tactics, British Subversive Propaganda during the Second World War draws on a wealth of archival material from collections in Germany and Britain to develop a critical genealogy of British ideas about Germany and National Socialism. British propagandists invoked discourses around history, morality, psychology, sexuality and religion in order to conceive of an audience susceptible to morale subversion. Revealing much about the contours of mid-century European thought and the origins of our own heavily propagandised world, this book provides unique insights for anyone researching British history, the Second World War, or the fight against fascism.

Winner of the 2022 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book! This book argues that the notion of ‘wild’ analysis, a term coined by Freud to denote the use of would-be psychoanalytic notions, diagnoses, and treatment by an individual who has not undergone psychoanalytic training, also provides us with a striking new way of exploring the limits of psychoanalysis. Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life proposes to reopen the question of so-called ‘wild’ analysis by exploring psychoanalytic ideas at their limits, arguing from a diverse range of perspectives that the thinking produced at these limits – where psychoanalysis strays into other disciplines, and vice versa, as well as moments of impasse in its own theoretical canon – points toward new futures for both psychoanalysis and the humanities. The book’s twelve essays pursue fault lines, dissonances and new resonances in established psychoanalytic theory, often by moving its insights radically further afield. These essays take on sensitive and difficult topics in twentieth-century cultural and political life, including representations of illness, forced migration and the experiences of refugees, and questions of racial identity and identification in post-war and post-apartheid periods, as well as contemporary debates surrounding the Enlightenment and its modern invocations, the practice of critique and ‘paranoid’ reading. Others explore more acute cases of ‘wilding’, such as models of education and research informed by the insights of psychoanalysis, or instances where psychoanalysis strays into taboo political and cultural territory, as in Freud’s references to cannibalism. This book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and students working across the fields of psychoanalysis, history, literature, culture and politics, and to anyone with an interest in the political import of psychoanalytic thought today.

Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed--spun--DDLas the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.

Studies of genocide and mass atrocity most often focus on their causes and consequences, their aims and effects, and the number of people killed. But if the main goal is death, why is torture necessary? By understanding how and why mass violence occurs and the reasons for its variations, The Macabresque aims to explain why so many seemingly normal or "ordinary" people participate in mass atrocity across cultures and why such egregious violence occurs repeatedly through history.