Uses of guilt in the treatment of dehumanization

It is likely that under the impact of impending Nazism, aggression theory in late Freud, as presented in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), left the entirety of guilt to self‐punishment, thus retracting his view that love functions in the superego as remorse and restitution. This change however, essentially withdraws provision for treating victims of abuse, violence and terror. This paper proposes a paradigm shift that reframes Freud's late instinct theory into a theory of dehumanization by recovering reparative and relational components of guilt. This reframe has major implications for the position taken with regard to the role of witnessing and the moral imperative in recovery from dehumanizing experience, which orthodox psychoanalytic theory has essentially bypassed. It is propose that victim treatment, as case examples illustrate, reformulates guilt as drawing on the life instincts to revivify victims’ humanity through analytic witnessing and acknowledgment. Indeed, unless breaches of humanity are confronted by a witness, the life instincts stay merely rhetorical, if not contradictory, by leaving the death instincts to grow unseen and, thus, unopposed. A two‐fold formulation of guilt may better address and redress disorders of dehumanization, whereby ‘death guilt’ (under the sway of aggression) signifies the orthodox, irrevocable guilt of self‐reproach for the bad we may have done, and ‘life guilt’ (under the sway of a moral imperative) the redeemable guilt for the good we have still to do.     

How I became a Jungian analyst

This paper is a reflection on the significance of 80 years of my life and the 40 years of it I have spent working as a Jungian analyst in Europe and in Israel. If my Jewish identity and my experience of the tragic events of the Holocaust have profoundly influenced the course of my life, it has been my training as a Jungian analyst in Zürich that permitted me to establish a new relationship with the traditional Jewish symbols and created the possibility of a new way of experiencing what it means to be a Jew. This new understanding has in turn helped me both in my work with Holocaust survivors and victims of Israel's various wars and in my theoretical reflections on this subject.     

"Oh Those Crazy Cards Again": A History of the Debate on the Nazi Rorschachs, 1946–2001

This essay provides a critical history of the debate on the Rorschach Inkblot Tests administered to 22 leading figures of the Third Reich who were imprisoned in Nuremberg in 1945–1946. This debate occurred in two stages. The question at the heart of the first stage was whether the Nazi leaders were sane or psychopaths. Despite a strong disagreement concerning the use of these diagnostic labels, there was a surprisingly broad agreement on the actual substance of the discrepant diagnoses. Divisions of opinion, however, arose from political dissension in two areas: the nature of liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, and the possibility of trust in any political leadership. The second stage was marked by an ideology of convergence aimed at establishing a consensual "scientific truth" on the Nazi Rorschachs. Thus, the politics of the second phase were motivated by interests and ambitions internal to the field of Rorschach expertise, rather than by extraneous political anxieties.     

Hitler's theology: A cautionary tale for today's peril

In this article the author updates and renews his thesis from 2013 about the Weimarization of American political culture. He argues that fascism is an endemic modern possibility that has a theological dimension that becomes visible when the left‐right ideological binary descending from the French Revolution is set aside. Reviewing the evidence from Hitler's Table Talks, he shows how Hitler both understood himself as a progressive change agent and envisioned writing a new theology for triumphant Nazism in retirement. The article concludes by drawing upon Giorgio Agamben's analysis of Nazi biopolitics in Homo Sacer to point towards a messianic alternative.     

Stefan Lux (1888–1936): a calculated suicide before the Second World War

In 1936 Stefan Lux, a Jew born in Vienna, and naturalized in Czchoslovakia, shot himself during a session of the League of Nations in Geneva. The situation would become much more dire for German Jews in the coming years, and few sensed that anything akin to the Holocaust was in store. Lux believed he had timed his suicide precisely to bring attention to, and counteract, the problem of “statelessness” that was on the agenda of the League. Lux also feared that the defences Jews had utilized before 1933 to ward off antisemitism were no longer viable, as they were under assault by the entirety of the arts and cultural apparatus in Germany. This case illustrates both the prescience and limits of Lux’s carefully orchestrated suicide.     

Professional relationships in dangerous times: C. G. Jung and the Society for Psychotherapy

Relying in part on previously unpublished documents of the 1930s, this paper(1) describes the origins and mission of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, both as it existed before Hitler's rise to power and as it was transformed afterward. Jung accepted the Society's presidency in 1933-34, on condition that it be restructured as an international, politically neutral organization, free from the laws of Gleichschaltung (Nazi conformity). The paper also contains a close study of Jung's collaboration with one interesting German colleague, Walter Cimbal. Cimbal, a neurologist, was briefly a member of the Nazi Party and, judging from his early letters to Jung, a Hitler enthusiast. Yet he also seems to have tried, together with Jung, to alleviate the difficulties of German Jewish colleagues whose lives were disrupted by the Hitler revolution. The paper includes translated passages from Cimbal's previously unpublished letters from 1933-36 and the post-war years. It also includes a first-person account by Wladimir Rosenbaum, the Zurich lawyer who assisted Jung in 1934, when Jung tried to mitigate the impact of anti-Jewish laws on his German Jewish colleagues. In the primary materials of this period one discovers more evidence of moral shadow-and also less-than is sometimes assumed.     

A Response to Richard Wolin on Gadamer and the Nazis

Richard Wolin, in his article 'Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Untruth and Method' ( New Republic , 15 May 2000, pp. 36-45), wrongly accuses Gadamer of being 'in complicity' with the Nazis. The present article in reply was rejected by the New Republic , but is printed here to show that Wolin in his article is misinformed and unfair. First, Wolin makes elementary factual errors, such as stating that Gadamer was born in Breslau instead of Marburg. He relies on a highly questionable source, Teresa Orozco, as 'definitive'. He argues often by misconstruing the evidence and guilt by association. For instance, he associates Gadamer with Werner Jaeger, with whom he disagreed and had little contact. Finally,he misinterprets basic terms in Gadamer's hermeneutics, Vorurteil and authority, attributing to them the popular sense of these terms instead of their place in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Vorurteil , popularly translated as 'prejudice', but better rendered as 'prejudgment', refers to the prior knowledge that one needs in order to understand a situation or a text. In some cases, this is part of the inherited tradition. Authority refers to the respect one pays to those one recognizes as having more knowledge than oneself: one's doctor, or parent, or teacher, a judge, or certain texts. It is not an abject surrender to all authority but the necessary respect for authority in human relationships and in society in general. By misconstruing these terms, Wolin attempts to discredit Gadamer's general philosophy,not just to demonstrate a connection to the Nazis. At the end, his argument turns into a misinformed general political attack on Gadamer as an enemy of Enlightenment values.     

A note on the history of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society from 1933 to 1945

The Norwegian analysts, who were trained in Berlin before 1933, were drawn into a struggle against fascism, informed by politically leftist analysts who worked at the Berlin Institute. The Norwegian group, including the analysts Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, were committed to Marxist or social democratic ideologies in order to fight down fascism and Nazism. They were a source of inspiration but also of conflict. After the war the leadership of the IPA was sceptical about the Norwegian group because of its former connections with Die Linke, as well as its relations with Wilhelm Reich. This paper in part considers the courageous efforts of Nic Waal, whom Ernest Jones used as a delegate and courier to solve problems for the IPA and who was unjustlytreated after the war.