Nazi Psychoanalysis
Abstract
Laurence A. Rickels. Nazi Psychoanalysis. 3 vols, with a foreword by Benjamin Bennett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Pp. xx + 346, xxii + 332, xxiii + 346. ISBN 0-8166-3697-4, 0-8166-3699-0, 0-8166-3701-6. Nazi Psychoanalysis poses a challenge to any book reviewer writing in an academic journal devoted to history. This is because book reviews have generally been understood to be critical tools that help us, if not 'discover' historical truths, then at least discern more plausible explanations or evoke greater understanding of historical phenomenon. Yet reviewers of Rickels' three-volume opus risk seeing their efforts fail to contribute much in the way of enhanced plausibility or expanded understandings, because Rickels' work subverts the very aims that book reviews are designed to achieve. One can perhaps turn the canons of literary criticism on his work with some effect, but to critique that work as history borders on the banal, because it assumes Rickels is something that he is not: an historian of psychoanalysis. Rickels presents the fruits of his literary labours in a trilogy, each volume being patched together around a general theme. Volume I is entitled 'Only Psychoanalysis Won the War' and returns to World War I theories