PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS COURSE IS NO LONGER RUNNING AT THE LONDON CONSORTIUM.
Daniel Pick
This is an optional extra course, provided for both Consortium students and students from Birkbeck College’s History Department. Students taking this course may elect to substitute their essay mark as one of the final marks for the year.
This course introduces students to psychoanalytic literature on fascism and nazism. It juxtaposes texts produced in the inter-war years and the 1940s with more recent accounts. The aim is to place psychoanalytic investigations of leaders and ‘mass psychology’ in cultural context and to consider the methodological potential and problem of applied Freudian thought. The course also considers whether the psychoanalytic encounter with fascism significantly reshaped attitudes to the mind. A variety of primary and secondary sources as well as some film material will be discussed. Seminars draw attention to a variety of psychoanalytic and psychological concepts that have been deployed in the study of the appeal of fascism, and more widely in explanations of interwar political extremism, violence, war and genocide. It asks how that catastrophic history affected the language and theory of the unconscious, with particular regard to the development of ideas in the British psychoanalytical movement, and asks how ideas such as trauma and transference, splitting and identification, or remembering, forgetting and working through, have been applied to the past.
Reading
Information on seminar reading material is given below. Further advice on the material will be given at the first class. Where possible, photocopied extracts will be supplied.
Books that provide useful background to the course as a whole include Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, Judt, Postwar, Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials and Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul. For the wider history of the period, see Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes or Mazower, Dark Continent.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS COURSE WILL NOT RUN BEYOND THE CURRENT ACADEMIC YEAR.
Programme
In addition to the seminars for this course, students should be aware that there will be six workshops (three in the autumn term and three in the spring term) co-run by Daniel Pick and Jacqueline Rose at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House. Students with a general interest in psychoanalysis, history and politics are strongly encouraged to attend. They are not compulsory; you can attend any - or all - of them as you wish, but please book a place in advance. Further details of these workshops, and reading material for each seminar can be found here.
Seminars and Workshops
Note: meetings are always on Tuesdays except for Saturday 4 November.
Week 1. TUESDAY 10 October (6.00 to 8.00)
Optional workshop: ‘Psychoanalytic Thought, History and Political Life’ (venue IES).
Week 2. TUESDAY 17 October (6.00 to 10.00)
Introduction to the history of Psychoanalysis
6.00 Seminar:
Reading: Gay’s editorial introduction and extracts from Freud, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ and Introductory Lectures, in The Freud Reader. Gay, introduction to The Freud Reader
8.00 Screening: video documentary on the history of psychoanalysis by Elizabeth Roudinesco.
WEEK 3. TUESDAY 24 October
No class this week: read Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul + prepare reading for the double session in week 4.
Week 4. A: TUESDAY 31 October (6.00 to 8.00)
Psychoanalysis in the age of fascism
Seminar
Reading: Einstein-Freud correspondence, ‘Why War?’, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Freud, vol. 22
Additional material and extracts from Money-Kyrle, Collected Papers;
Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism; Theweleit, Male Fantasies; Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness; ‘Psychological approaches’ section of Griffin, Fascism: A Reader
WEEK 4 B: SATURDAY 4 November (10.00 to 12.00)
The Death Drive and the Superego
Seminar.
Reading: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id
Week 5. 7 November. (6.00 to 9.00)
Seminar.
Part 1. Applied analysis.
Reading: Freud, ‘Wild Analysis’, Standard Edition.
In addition, students to chose at least one extract to discuss in class from the following list:
Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, afterword; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, introduction, Gay, Freud for Historians, H.-U. Wehler, ‘Psychoanalysis and History’, Social Research (1980), 47: 519-536, Isaacs, ‘The nature and function of phantasy’ in The Freud-Klein Controversies, 1941-45
Part 2. Remembering, repeating and working though
Reading: Freud, ‘Remembering repeating and working through’, Standard Edition.
In addition, students to chose one extract to discuss in class from the following list: Sebald, The Natural History of Destruction (particularly the opening fifty pages); extracts from Libeksind, The Space of Encounter, LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz and Levi, If this is a Man Memory
Week 6. 14 November (6.00 to 8.00)
Optional workshop:
‘Psychoanalytic Thought, History and Political Life’ (IES).
Week 7. 21 November (6.00 to 10.00)
6.00 Seminar
Reading: Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Bion, ‘Group Psychology: A Review’
Additional material, to be circulated in class, on Hitler’s public speeches
8.00 Screening: Leni Riefenstahl, ‘The Triumph of the Will’
Week 8. 28 November (6.00 to 9.30)
6.00 to 8.00: Seminar.
Nazi Leaders: Case Study Rees et al, Rudolf Hess extracts. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, extracts. Foucault, Abnormal, extracts
Additional extracts from, Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; Bollas, ‘The Fascist state of Mind’; Overy, Interrogations; Sereny, Albert Speer
8.00 to 9.00 Individual and small group appointments as needed.
Week 9. 5 December (6.00 to 8.00)
Optional workshop:
‘Psychoanalytic Thought, History and Political Life’ (IES).
Week 10. 12 December (6.00 to 10.00)
6.00 Biography and Nazism:
Extracts from Fest, Inside Hitler’s Bunker; Kershaw, Hitler and The Myth of Hitler; Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler; Zizek, Did somebody say Totalitarianism?
8.00
Screening: ‘Downfall’
