Nazi Psychoanalysis: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War (Nazi Psychoanalysis (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: Are you a nonphobic reader?
Review: The author would have us consider a wide diversity of materials as evidence of our cohabitation with the evil we prefer to think of as being in some other or former place. His aim is for us to see rather than to continue to "not see" certain continuities and juxtapositions that are out there. The good news is that if the author has indeed succeeded in (re-)locating the horror of National Socialism within the psychoanalytic discourse, then there is the outside chance at least that it can be contained (for example as ambivalent introject). The author does insist that the materials undergo the mediation of the unconscious, in particular his own. Hence his style, which walks the borderline, slipping and sliding in and out of pop-cultural puns or noise, will upset those who believe that neutrality and objectivity are still options for "historians" of twentieth-century traumatization. The author, who clearly and endearlingly (or naively) believes that there is intelligent life out there, is looking for nonphobic readers.

Rating:
Summary: Writing In Academese Is A Pointless Bore
Review: There is a really good quote by Noam Chomsky on intellectuals I keep handy in case I force myself to wade through academic dreck. It was published at Znet last year and was in response to a question by Chomsky's longtime interlocutor David Barsamian:
D: Do you look at Foucault's work in this prospective?

Chomsky: Foucault is an interesting case because I'm sure he honestly wants to undermine power but I think with his writings he reinforced it. The only way to understand Foucault is if you are a graduate student or you are attending a university and have been trained in this particular style of discourse. That's a way of guaranteeing, it might not be his purpose, but that's a way of guaranteeing that intellectuals will have power, prestige and influence. If something can be said simply say it simply, so that the carpenter next door can understand you. Anything that is at all well understood about human affairs is pretty simple. I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression. I find that I have to decode him, and after I have decoded him maybe I'm missing something. I don't get the significance of what I am left with. I have never effectively understood what he was talking about. I mean, when I try to take the big words he uses and put them into words that I can understand and use, it is difficult for me to accomplish this task It all strikes me as overly convoluted and very abstract. But -what happens when you try to skip down to real cases? The trouble with Foucault and with this certain kind of theory arises when it tries to come down to earth. Really, nobody was able to explain to me the importance of his work..."

This is exactly how I felt while reading Nazi Psychoanalysis Volume 1: Only Psychoanalysis Won The War, by UC-Santa Barbara German and comparative literature professor Laurence Rickels. I know what he is writing about here. Namely, the influence of psychoanalysis on German military psychiatry during World War I and its influence on the Third Reich. I just don't know what the hell the author is trying to say about it. On this point its worth noting that it is very big of an intellectual of Chomsky's stature to admit he's lost when he reads Foucalt. Just as Foucalt worshippers would no doubt castigate Chomsky for not "getting" the brilliance of their hero, I'm sure defenders of Rickels' book would level the same charge at me. I get this kind of flack from the defenders of Burroughs, who rake me over the coals for not "getting" the "brilliance" of his "novel" Naked Lunch. What Rickell's is engaged in is a semantic art many academics love to engage in. It's the art of saying a lot and nothing. It's a way to appear like you have some profound knowledge on a subject, like psychoanalysis and Nazism, when the average Phd. student in psychology might very well be as knowledgeable.

Of course, the dialect of Academese Rickels writes in is known as Psychobabble. Here is a snippet of it from page 68: "War neurosis already mobilized the difference between doubles and narcissisms that the techno-Faustian footnotes in "On 'the Uncanny'" were on their way to, and which doubles as the difference or transition at once internal to Freud's thinking right from the start and then between the two systems of his thought."

Now there is no doubt that you might be able to impress some people on a college campus and get A's on term papers in psychology class for writing gibberish like this. The carpenter next door isn't going to understand, or care to understand, what you are talking about. In vain did I try to find an angle for understanding where Rickels is coming from in his book. So while reading it, I decided to consult with the Master himself by picking up my copy of Freud's A General Introduction To Psychoanalysis. I thought that maybe reading a classic outline on the subject by the Master himself might help me decode Rickels, but reading this particular work of Freud's was to no avail.

Needless to say, I'm not salivating over the prospect of reading the second and third volumes of Nazi Psychoanalysis and plan to put reading them on hold indefinitely. It's extremely disappointing to see such an interesting topic made a bore by such lousy use of language. I ended up finishing Only Psychoanalysis Won The War knowing as little about what the book about as when I began it. I would have been better off just simply reading brief synopsis on the back cover and saving myself the time of wading through it. My recommendation if you come across this book is to take your pick among the books in the extensive reference section. Any one of them is likely to be better than this academic dreck.