another review Nazi Psychoanalysis Volume 3: Psy Fi

[pynchonoid]

<http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=266161083354965>

Laurence A. Rickels. Nazi Psychoanalysis Volume 3: Psy
Fi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002. xxiii + 347 pp. Foreword, references,
filmography, illustrations, index. $19.95 (paper),
ISBN 0-8166-3701-6.

Reviewed by Jill Gillespie, Department of Modern
Languages, Denison University.
Published by H-German (April, 2004)

[...] In this trilogy on Nazi psychoanalysis, a
continuation of Rickels' research on psychoanalysis
and culture, Rickels not only traces the origin,
development, and conclusion of psychoanalysis but also
argues that psychoanalysis and Nazism are symptoms of
modernity itself. "Psy Fi," the final volume of Nazi
Psychoanalysis, takes the Nazi imaginary as its
central theme. Rickels situates the ineluctable place
of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thought by
demonstrating the ways in which the Nazi imagination
continues to haunt modern life.

The core thesis of volume three posits one fundamental
impulse behind both psychoanalysis and science
fiction, which can be found alongside and within the
Nazi canon. To support his claims of continuity
between modern life and Nazi Germany, as well as of
the effects of psychoanalysis on the present age (a
project about which he began writing in 1991), Rickels
synthesizes a dense collection of supporting material
such as literature, films, case studies, psychological
warfare manuals, psychoanalytic journals,
advertisements, and popular science fiction. Rickels'
theoretical edifice is equally diverse, employing
Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Deleuze and Guattari,
Heidegger, and Nietzsche. The bulk of his references
are to psychoanalytic texts from WWII and the
immediate postwar period. In addition to a wide-range
of literary writers such as Goethe, Döblin, Benjamin,
Hitchcock, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Huxley, and H. G. Wells,
figures such as Daniel Paul Schreber (made famous
through Freud's monograph on paranoia), Hans Dominik,
a popular German science fiction author who died in
1945, and Paul Nipkow--the Nazis 'adopted' father of
television--provide the case studies for this book.[1]
As a result, Rickels successfully traces the
convergence of psychoanalysis and Nazism and its
far-reaching effects on modernity.

[...] 

Furthermore, as befitting an inquiry into the
conjunction of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Rickels
engages with Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, a
two-volume reformulation of Reich's argument examining
the emotional core of fascism by exploring literature
and mass media of the post-WWI era as well as the
memoirs of the Freikorps, a voluntary army who fought
the German working class after WWI.[3] According to
Theweleit, in order to protect against the threat of
the ego-dissolution in early infancy, the fascist male
develops a body armor, which rejects and fortifies
itself against emotions such as weakness, fear, and
guilt. Through repetitive conditioning of the
Freikorps groups, these elements were displaced onto
shunned social members, such as women, Jews, and
Communists. Rickels distinguishes his research from
that of Theweleit, whom he criticizes as "overusing
latent homosexuality as a cure-all explanation for
group or psychotic bonding" (p. 17).
[...] Rickels explores the development of
psychoanalysis during the Nazi period, focusing on the
ways in which "psy fi" is a manifestation of fetishism
or gadget love. The "psy-fi" merger with technology,
using tools and gadgets as extension of the senses and
the limbs, represents an alternative to reproduction.
The third section of the text, the most ambitious and
therefore also the most interesting, continues the
exploration of then Nazi fascination with science and
technology using the motif of doubling as its guiding
principle. Rickels reads examples of technological
replication of women (Maria in Lang's Metropolis and
Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann") as a
desire for survival and mortality and argues that
these fantasies of seeing, replication, and doubling
are fundamental to all technology. Rickels then
develops a wide-ranging comparison of early Weimar
films such as Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse (1922), Frau im
Mond (1929), Metropolis (1926), and Erich Pommer's FP1
antwortet nicht (1932) with Nazi cinema such as M. W.
Kimmich's Germanin (1943) and von Baky's Münchhausen
(1943) and with Hollywood blockbusters Contact (1997),
Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Total Recall (1990), and True
Lies_ (1994) to show that Nazism's totalitarian
will-to-closure and modernity's obsession with
progress are part of the same "psy-fi" era. The fourth
section of "Psy Fi" takes Nazi Germany as itself an
example of science fiction, demonstrated through
research, popular manuals, and especially case studies
of psychotics from the 1930s and 1940s. Rickels uses a
German psychoanalytic study of airplane pilots'
adaptations to rigors of light (above and beyond the
rigors of flight) as an example of the cyborg merging
of man and machine. The parallel between the
importance of flight in war as well as in science
fiction provides the ground of such claims. The fifth
and final section revisits the arguments of the first,
using similarities between Weimar films and recent
Hollywood science fiction films to underscore the
importance of flight in war as in science fiction. For
Nazi Germans and for "psy fi," flight connotes a
psychological techno-fantasy of overcoming the
material restraints of earthly life, and by extension,
avoiding the loss and mourning associated with death.

[...]


	
		
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