Daniel Pick,The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler,Hess,and the Analysts

Reviewed by: Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, Atlanta, USA

The very term ‘psychohistory’ is today in ill repute. Perhaps because of the level of speculation and paucity of evidence demanded for such undertakings (from Sigmund Freud’s account of Leonardo da Vinci in 1916 on), we rarely hear of ‘psychobiographies’ any longer. Yet we are in the midst of an explosion of interest in biographies; they are constantly among the bestselling non-fiction works. And all of them are to one degree or another, as Stanley Fish lamented about the very nature of modern biographies more than a decade ago, accounts of the inner lives of their subjects.

One reason that we seem to have problems with confronting the very idea of an inner biography is the distance between the biography’s author and the subject. There is always a sense that, as the evidence writers of biographies have is almost always second hand, what we are confronted with in psychobiographies is a Rorschach test revealing the inner life of the book’s author – not of the subject. This is in a real sense the subject of Daniel Pick’s valuable and readable account of how psychoanalysis, or at least psychoanalytically inflected accounts of the psyches, of the leading Nazis were written from the 1930s through the end of the Second World War, as well as the echoes of such studies thereafter. Pick’s account, which uses much unpublished and hitherto unknown material on British and American covert use of such analysis to get ‘inside the minds’ of the enemy, is really an account of how the needs of the war effort shaped the needs of such analysts and psychologists. And what is extraordinary in Pick’s account is that it is not truly important what the evidence was: whether, as with Freud’s Leonardo, it was inherently second-hand (or invented, as Freud used D. S. Merezhkovsky’s novel, The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci, as one of his sources) or direct. Pick provides detailed accounts of a wide range of theoretical approaches to the psychology of the Nazis (from Wilhelm Reich in 1933 on). He centres on the ‘real’ case of Rudolf Hess, whose flight to the UK in 1941 provided a Nazi for the British psychiatrists to examine and analyse, and Hitler, whose psyche was plumbed through a database of 1000 pages of material. This material was culled from interviews with those who knew him (and had fled Germany), from newspapers that printed accounts of his activities, as well as from pure invention, such as the ‘first-hand’ account of Hitler by his (invented) doctor Kurt Krueger, written by the American pornographer Samuel Roth. (A fascinating new biography of Roth by Jay A. Gertzman has just appeared with the University of Florida Press.)

Pick’s account of the players in this game of intelligence gathering ranges from Walter Langer and Herbert Marcuse in the USA to Henry Dicks and Anna Freud in the UK. Indeed, few of the major psychoanalytic thinkers of the time were not engaged in such activities. This is not a great surprise as psychiatrists and analysts were understood to be an essential part of the war effort, given the success and problems with ‘shell shock’ during the First World War. But their role was enhanced by 1939 because the very idea of examining the inner life through analytic models (often bowdlerized and flattened) had become part of the common coin of mass culture during the 1920s. That psychoanalysis was under attack from before the First World War as a ‘Jewish science’, and that many of the German-speaking analysts were Jews, also added to the pressure to provide answers to the nature of the ‘Nazi mind’ and the role of anti-Semitism in shaping that worldview.

Now the difficulty with this is the simple fact that such a construct as the ‘Nazi mind’ could not exist (even within Freudian psychoanalytic theory which rejected the ideas of race). No exemplary ‘Nazi’ was possible; even Hess had to be seen as an individual. In addition, the pragmatic fact that such knowledge provided little or no predictive advantage did not stop the Allies from generating as well as making use of it. Indeed, multiple studies of the ‘Nazi Mind’, including studies of mass movements from Hermann Broch to Elias Canetti, and of anti-Semitism from Ernst Simmel to Theodor Adorno (et al.) were funded by the Allies and bodies like the Rockefeller Foundation in order to undermine the Axis war effort or to prevent such manifestations from reappearing after 1945. Ironically, these were rarely applied after 1945 to the real-existing fascist states such as Spain and Portugal that continued happily pursuing their racist state policies after the defeat of the Nazis. By then the Cold War had created another target less amenable to psychological analysis.

The ability to examine individuals who were Nazis such as Hess or interned party officials or Nazi officers added little to the ability of Allied intelligence to undermine the confidence of the enemy. Indeed, the techniques that seemed most valuable were those well known from mass anti-civilian warfare as early as the American Civil War: terror and horror on the home front and the undermining of day-to-day existence. Even these were not always successful. Pick shows how the imagined ‘Nazi mind’ takes on a life of its own after the Second World War in a number of serious psychoanalytic thinkers such as Otto Kernberg as a sort of assumed model for a psychopathological character structure. Now not limited to the Nazis, this model draws perhaps unconsciously or at least unselfconsciously on the models generated by the work undertaken during the war.

Pick’s book is first-rate history but also highlights the problems attendant in putting science in the thrall of politics, even for a noble cause. The idea, for example, that anti-Semitism was a form of psychopathology has its roots in the rise of clinical psychiatry in the late nineteenth century, and even has echoes today in claims that the drug Propranolol could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. However, at the same time in the early 1950s that Adorno et al. were publishing The Authoritarian Personality, Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism was arguing that such beliefs were essentially evil and not to be ‘cured’ by behavioural or even chemical means. Pick’s book is a strong object lesson about our own rootedness in the claims and politics of our age.