One of the most striking passages in Daniel Pick’s The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind describes the scene at Nuremberg when the Allies were preparing to try the Nazi leadership for their crimes. While much of Europe and the city of Nuremberg itself lay in ruins, ‘the idea of due process and of civilized deliberations reigned in the courthouse’ (170). Like the legal proceedings in Nuremberg, much of what followed World War II was about restoring perceived rationality and order to a world that seemed to have gone mad. As Daniel Pick shows, psychologists were part and parcel of this effort to combat Nazi terror and restore order and civilisation after the war. Fascism, for psychologists, represented a society-wide mental breakdown whose roots lay in individuals’ inner fears and fantasies. Psychologists, it was felt, were equipped and, indeed, had a duty to do something to combat this phenomenon. As the psychologist Abraham Maslow declared, ‘the world will be saved by psychologists – in the very broadest sense – or else it will not be saved at all’.Footnote 1 In the immediate postwar world, with social scientists and policy-makers, as well as the general public, alternating between deep-seated anxiety over the bomb and cold war tensions, but also brimming with confidence in science and technology, the psych professions were employed in a wide interdisciplinary effort to build a better and more democratic world. These postwar efforts were closely linked to the wide range of activities of psychologists and psychiatrists in the war effort against the Germans (though, oddly, much less so against the Japanese or even Italians).Footnote 2 Daniel Pick’s main aim is to recover this history, and his book is a significant and welcome addition to the history of psychoanalysis.
The low fortunes of psychologism and psychohistory, argues Pick, have obscured the important role that Freudian explanations of society have played in our recent history. As Pick rightly noted, ‘Psychoanalytic investigations of the Third Reich have been criticized, but only rarely have they been historicized’ (2). Pick’s book, which aims to fill this gap, is an examination of the role of psychoanalysis in the US and UK during the war and the implications of the psych professions’ wartime role for postwar society. The core of the book is the curious case of Rudolf Hess. Pick uses Hess’s case as a point of entry into the elaborate connections between psychoanalysts and the war effort. He focuses on two psychologists in particular: Walter Langer (1899–1981), who studied Hitler for the SOS, and Henry Dicks (1900–77), who examined Hess. Hess’s fascinating case and Dicks’s subsequent career connect the many parts and stories of the book. Pick, indeed, deals with dazzling array of themes, from the history of the political use of psychology to Freud’s dealing the Nazis and the depiction of psychiatrists in literature and films such as Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933). Pick opens the book with Hess and his puzzling one-man mission to bring peace between Nazi Germany and the British Empire. Pick’s strongest chapters tell this story in the context of medical history. Work on Hess, who very soon turned from a prisoner of war and a political asset to psychiatric case, became part of a growing literature, both within and outside the Allies’ war effort, aiming to understand the ‘Nazi mind’. This elusive psychological objects, as Pick defines it, refers to the notion that one could ‘recover in some shape or form’ the working of the mind of those who fanatically followed Hitler as a tool for understanding the power the movement held over the German people (4). After the war, Hess’s case was a ‘clinical account that might also serve as political warning for the future in the light of what was perceived as the still very present danger of Nazi resurgence’ (62). Thus, beyond Hess, the book examines the history of the psych professions and politics that led to their wartime role, the war effort itself – especially the work within American intelligence by Langer and others to profile Hitler, the Nuremberg trials and the postwar legacies of that history.
Although Pick tries to distance his work from his subjects’ psychologism, he tries, at the same time, to take psychologism’s insights and the impact they had on society seriously. It is here that this author sees the book’s most important contribution, in demonstrating that psychologists once sought, literally, to save the world, and the expanded role of the profession in academia and beyond which was spurned by these efforts. As Pick demonstrates in his two last chapters, Dicks, Langer and others were instrumental in bringing psychology to bear on issues such as war and peace and intercultural conflict in high-profile campaigns in UNESCO and elsewhere. One question that Pick raises and that calls for further research is how such public exposure and collaboration with non-psychologists affected the history of the profession itself. While Pick demonstrates that psychological considerations impacted political developments and attitudes, historians of medicine should also ask how such a dynamic worked in the opposite direction. For instance, one clear phenomenon this author sees, and that Pick suggests, is the connection between the rise of the welfare state and the huge emphasis put on childhood and nurturing in early postwar psychology. ‘Each infant was a political subject in the making’, and thus, educating children became a critical political and psychological concern (5).Footnote 3 It would be interesting to examine how the disintegration of the welfare state and the crisis of confidence within the psychological establishment in the 1970s changed understanding and categories within psychology as the threat of Nazism receded and other issues like social breakdown, unpopular foreign wars and terrorism came to the fore. As Allan Young and others have demonstrated, the rise of trauma and PTSD as significant categories was one important reaction to this later history, but there is a whole array of other developments that resulted from the shift away from efforts to understand ‘Nazi minds’ as other ‘minds’ and phenomena came under the gaze of psychoanalysis.
