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.

Matt ffytche is Director of the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, and Editor of Psychoanalysis and History. He is an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society and has written widely on Freud and American neo-conservatism, psychoanalysis and mid-twentieth century social science, and the relation between psychoanalysis and literature.

Daniel Pick is a psychoanalyst and historian. He is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and of the Royal Historical Society. An editor of History Workshop Journal, he is also a member of the editorial board of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, as well as the advisory boards of Psychoanalysis and History and Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Foreword by Catalina Bronstein

Part 1

Frameworks

1. Daniel Pick and Matt ffytche: Introduction

2. Joel Isaac: Totalitarianism: A Sketch

Part 2

Reckonings with Fascism

3. Stephen Frosh: Studies in Prejudice: Theorising Antisemitism in the Wake of the Nazi Holocaust

4. Lyndsey Stonebridge: 'Inner Emigration': On the Run with Hannah rendt and Anna Freud

5. Matt ffytche: The Superego as Social Critique: Frankfurt School Psychoanalysis and the Fall of the Bourgeois Order

Part 3

Precarious Democracies

6. Michal Shapira: Psychoanalytic Criminology, Childhood, and the Democratic Self

7. Dagmar Herzog: The Aggression Problems of our Time: Psychoanalysis as Moral Politics in Post-Nazi

Germany

8. Peter Mandler: Totalitarianism and Cultural Relativism: The Dilemma of the Neo-Freudians

9. Sally Alexander: D. W.Winnicott and the Social Democratic Vision

Part 4

Writing the History of Psychoanalysis

10. John Forrester and Eli Zaretsky: Totalitarianism and the Talking Cure: A Conversation

Part 5

Mind Control, Communism and the Cold War

11. Knuth Müller: Psychoanalysis and American Intelligence Since 1940: Unexpected Liaisons

12. Ana Antic: Therapeutic Violence: Psychoanalysis and the 're-education' of political prisoners in Cold War Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe

Part 6

Colonial Subjects

13. Erik Linstrum: Spectres of Dependency: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Decolonization

14. Ross Truscott and Derek Hook: The Vicissitudes of Anger: Psychoanalysis in the Time of Apartheid

Part 7

Why Psychoanalysis?

15. Jacqueline Rose: Total Belief - Delirium in the West

16. Michael Rustin: The Totalitarian Unconscious

17. Ruth Leys: Post-psychoanalysis and Post-Totalitarianism