German unification influenced by an unfinished psychosocial history]

The critical form of social psychology presented here is concerned with the modalities and results of German reunification. It proceeds from Freud's insistence on the functional autonomy of psychic dispositions and unconscious forms of identification vis-à-vis the political and economic spheres. With reference to earlier historical experience of the Germans as an "economic nation" the authors suspect that German reunification with the avowed "economistic" priority of establishing the same life conditions in East and West is once again suppressing those problems that are bound up with the post-fascist syndrome handed down from one generation to the next. With a view to casting light on the reunification process and the collective psychic potentials it has released, the authors supplement Freud's mass-psychology approach with Julia Kristeva's outline of a social psychology that hinges on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and the national idea.