Daniel Pick: Well the thing I’ve been really interested in the last few years in my research is thinking about the problem of fascism and Nazism, and the way in which in the human sciences, the history of the human sciences, these phenomena came to be understood. And so I started to excavate, really, the history of that endeavor to understand something that seemed to many people so puzzling. Which is why after the First World War there was this enormous attraction for fascist leaders.
Of course there was another set of questions to do with communism, and sometimes those questions converged later on in the idea of totalitarianism, which brought together thinking about Stalinism and fascism. But my research was really focused on fascism and Nazism. And particularly the role of psychoanalysis, the role that Sigmund Freud’s theories and the practice psychoanalysis came to play during the inter-war period, the 20s and 30s. And then particularly in the Second World War, the way in which models of the mind, Freud’s model of the mind, was deployed by the Allies in trying to get a deeper understanding of the attractions of fascism. And the more famous kind of landmarks of that literature were produced later, after the Second World War. Books like Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality and some of his studies of fascist propaganda and generally the Frankfurt School work.
But what I realized was there was a much kind of bigger hinterland of studies on both sides of the Atlantic that focused really on that set of problems. And it’s a literature that mostly isn’t read now. That if it’s looked at by historians it’s usually just in a footnote to say that it was simplistic or bad, psychobiography, or psychohistory. But I think what I was interested in doing was historicizing it, sort of showing why it emerged, where it emerged, and where it led. And that’s really what I did in that project, particularly looking at there were two different stories, in a way, I got very absorbed in. One was the story of what happened in Britain when Rudolf Hess, who was the Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party, became a prisoner of state after this bizarre flight when Hess came to Scotland on a plane with a kind of one-man peace mission. And then he became a prisoner and he became the patient of various army doctors because of Hess’ symptoms. They started to study him and to get interested in his psychopathology. And that led to a series of studies and investigations both in Britain and then at the Nuremberg trial of Hess as an individual and his psychopathology.
And on the other side of the Atlantic at the same time, the American Secret Services commissioned some psychoanalysts to study Hitler. And these were produced as intelligence reports in Washington. And I was trying to compare and contrast these endeavors and in a way to situate them in a bigger thing which came from the inter-war period, which was not about individuals but about the so-called masses. And perhaps the most famous landmark of that literature would be Wilhelm Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was in 1933.
Fiona Schouten: And this project you’re describing ended up being a book. It’s called In Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, did I say that correct?
Pick: The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, yes. I thought of “in pursuit,” but I changed it because actually it’s not me in pursuit, it’s really a book— Although I’m a psychoanalyst and a historian, I thought of this book primarily as a history of the endeavor that was made to pursue this—
Schouten: Okay.
Pick: —and to sort of in a way give the context and to show the diversity of what was done.
Schouten: Okay, yeah. I did read it. I couldn’t remember correctly. So, is the Nazi mind our mind? All kinds of conclusions have been drawn over the years, mostly by psychoanalysts, about the darker layers in ourselves. How do you see that?
Pick: Well I think first of all I’m skeptical about the idea that there is such a thing as the Nazi mind, because clearly there would be a plurality of states of mind that attracted people towards fascism. So I think “the Nazi mind” in a way needs to be in quotations. But it was a concept that became quite elaborated in the earlier parts of the century, that there was something essential about the mind and about fascism that came together.
And I think the language of psychoanalysis did resonate very much in that period in trying to understand. I mean, of course there was a diversity of reasons why people were drawn to Mussolini, Hitler, and other fascist leaders. But there was some sort of sense that the terrain that Freud and his followers like Melanie Klein were investigating that was relevant to thinking about the so-called Nazi mind. And people were I think very puzzled during the period of the rise of fascism really to understand this phenomenon of what was it that seemed in a way so counterintuitive. Why people would go for this political ideology that was so extreme, so phobic, so paranoid in its structures. And there was gradually a recognition that standard forms of political theory to explain fascism didn’t seem to quite do it, didn’t seem quite adequate. That were was something else going on. A kind of enjoyment of fascism that you see obviously in dramatic ways at things like the Nuremberg rallies in the 30s. But a kind of identification, and excitement, and euphoria in those sorts of festivals and spectacles of fascism, that demanded some kind of explanation and why it was that people were drawn to this kind of extremist philosophy.
And it was in that kind of space of puzzlement about what was going on between the leader and the led, both in the minds of the elite and the entourage around Hitler and in Hitler himself, and then in raport between Hitler and the larger electorate, that led to a new kind of space for exploration in the human sciences. I think both psychoanalysis was brought to bear, and also cultural anthropology…other forms of knowledge—sociology, history. And there was an attempt to—in a way a multi-disciplinary attempt, to bring all of these forms of knowledge together to try to understand what was going on, and above all to learn lessons about how you could avoid a relapse into new forms of fascism after 1945.
So in a way my research project was both looking at the lead-up to the war and the war, and then at the aftermath of the war, and the attempts that were made in America, in Britain, in Paris—UNESCO for example—which was set up as one of the kind of outcrops of the war through the UN and then UNESCO. But where they tried to bring people in who would think about this with a concern and then anxiety, how did you avoid a return to new forms of fascism. And I thought those endeavors were worth recovering and exploring again because they also seemed very relevant to us. It’s not just a history that’s dead or past. It’s a history that in a way is relevant to contemporary thinking.
Schouten: You [indistinct] in the project really the 20th century, when psychoanalysis was very important for all the reasons you’ve just mentioned. What will its relevance be in the 21st century?
Pick: Well of course one of the things that’s very notable about psychoanalysis is it’s very much under attack. There are other forms, both of therapy that compete with it, and many people are very skeptical about it. Now, in a way that’s been true throughout the history of psychoanalysis. There’s always been a history of controversy surrounding its efficacy as a clinical procedure, and its theory of the mind, and its method of investigation. So I think that’s part of the history of psychoanalysis. But I think that it does continue to have relevance as a kind of resource we have. A problematic resource but nonetheless a very rich resource, both for thinking about mental processes, and it provides a very rich vocabulary for thinking about the mind. I think in a way it’s the most sophisticated account we have of the inner world, you know.
But it also does have relevance to thinking about social, cultural, political questions. Although one needs a big caveat with that, which is that it can’t replace other forms of knowledge. And perhaps where psychoanalysis was at its worst as a kind of applied discipline was when it at times in the 20th century did seek to replace or to sort of provide a key, a kind of explanatory key to everything as though it could replace sociology, or anthropology, or economics, or history. And I think it can’t do that. And that one needs to be cautious because minds are not the same as groups. And groups aren’t the same as states. All of these levels of existence require different kinds of investigation.
But I think nonetheless that psychoanalysis has something of relevance to offer. Because in a way that’s a role of fantasy that is not just in the mind of individual people but that also resonates in the life of groups. And also in culture and ideology. That there can be powerful fantasies mobilized that psychoanalysis has been quite good at exploring and contributing to our understanding of.