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The totalitarian mind

The chair opened the panel with data related to the history of the two current German psychoanalytic societies. As a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG), Ursula Kreuzer–Haustein referred to the splitting between her Society, which joined the IPA in 2009, and the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV) founded in 1950 by members of the traditional society who had left it after the war. The newly founded DPV was meant to be the ‘good’ society, and was immediately accepted by the IPA in 1951, whereas for several decades the DPG was considered the ‘bad’ Nazi society. Those years of hostile relationships were gradually followed by better contact and psychoanalytic exchanges between them. Kreuzer–Haustein considered this splitting as involving a powerful rejection of becoming aware of the historical responsibility of many members of the DPG, who, yielding to the Nazi racial laws, had first ousted their president, Max Eitingon, in 1933 and in 1935 had asked all the Jewish members to leave the DPG. In The Totalitarian Unconscious, Michael Rustin primarily considers the systems of Nazism and Stalinism as the central examples of totalitarian systems. Nazism was responsible for the exiling of psychoanalysis from its German-speaking heartland, and this meant that the largest development of psychoanalysis in the period since the 1930s took place in the English-speaking world, in France and in Latin America. What distinguishes totalitarianism from other kinds of authoritarian government is the dynamic role of a collective unconscious fantasy (essentially paranoid–schizoid) in the motivation and organization of the totalitarian system. These systems are dominated by extreme idealization, denigration and intolerance of reality. Large populations are prone to succumb to these states of mind as the outcome of extreme social disorganization and accompanying anxieties. Under these circumstances, individual leaders or groups of leaders emerge and achieve power by becoming, via introjective and projective processes, the recipients and amplifiers of anxieties and hatreds among traumatized populations. Rustin illustrated this situation through the defeats of Germany and Russia in World War I, a situation aggravated in Russia by the 1917 Revolution and the subsequent civil war. Rustin pursued a psychoanalytic form of understanding through the principal attributes of the Nazi and Stalinist states. These have been characterized by their irregularity, unpredictability, irrationality, their impoverishment of thought and envious hatred directed towards the more cultivated elements of society. Noticeably, some of the most penetrating descriptions of these regimes, which provide evidence of the unconscious structures of mind that organised them, have been rendered by writers who are themselves either antipathetic or indifferent to psychoanalysis. Rustin cited as the most important Arendt (1951) and Furet (1999), who suggest that similar psycho-social dynamics were operative under Stalinism. The problem is to explain the paradox of a fundamentally delusional structure of mind which is able to function in a serviceable relation to reality. Arendt describes how the inner circle of the Nazi party was surrounded by outer circles of sympathizers, whose essential function was to mediate between the unstable and violent unconscious psychic core and the world of reality by ‘naturalizing’ or ‘normalizing’ the regime. For Arendt, suppressing and excluding through terror alternative versions of reality, namely ‘third positions’ which are the precondition of thinking and engagement with reality, signal the absence of thought. Following from Rustin’s main argument, the demarcation between ‘totalitarian’ and merely ‘authoritarian’ forms of rule becomes clear. A one-party authoritarian state is significantly different from a totalitarian regime, because such a state is no longer primarily animated by delusional passions and fantasies and the perverted and destructive idealism of totalitarian movements. It seeks some accommodation with realities. In The Imagining and Thinking Self in Totalitarian Societies, Jeffrey Prager approached the subject from another stance. He narrated the history of Y, recently emigrated from the PRC, seeking a graduate degree in Psychology. Raised by his grandparents, Y owed his interest in psychoanalysis to his intellectual (paternal) grandfather who was interested in Freud. Prager maintained that Y’s psychological difficulties were the direct expressions of the country’s totalitarianism. His self-formation had been powerfully shaped by the history of post-Revolutionary China, especially when compared to the limited role that external political events typically play in self-development in liberal democratic societies. The unrelenting public attack on the creation of a personal zone of imagination and of thought in totalitarian societies largely accounts for its profound impact on the self. Y’s desire for treatment derived from being overtaken by overpowering outbursts of rage and a desire to act violently, despite his high level of professional achievement, and from feelings of humiliation. Over the years, Y had gained some control over these outbursts and became aware of a desire to act self-