American Imago

Channeling

To clear the static on the direct lines between reunification of the Germanies and the return of German nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, Werner Bohleber makes the Germans a “Presence of the Past.” * But midway he proposes a group-level intervention which responds to the worldwide recycling of World War Two since the end of the Cold War. As has been documented elsewhere, for example in a 1992 volume on anti-Semitism edited by Bohleber, the outbreak of stray, projected hostilities in Germany after the fall of the wall was symptomatically in sync with the eternal rerun of total war phantasms we watched during the Gulf War. From the German response to the opening shot of the war, which followed the leader, to the phantasm of portable gas chambers (made in Germany) strapped to the buzz bombs of the Battle of Britain: World War Two was back on the air. But it wasn’t only this media war that stayed tuned to receptions that were decontextualized and haunting precisely to the extent that, according to Theodor Adorno’s reckoning (112), they referred to the recent past, the past that always flashes back as primal; on another channel we found ourselves watching the old programs or pogroms that were rerunning all over Europe following the end of the divide between the two Germanies. Television was not the “liberator” of the Eastern-European countries (which we had last visited, while they were still safely behind the Iron Curtain, in Shoah). In Eastern Europe the rise [End Page 345] of group psychopathology issued its repress releases via live transmissions at once occult and techno-mediatic, morbid and immortalizing. Painting by the number of racisms and nationalisms that were going down in the missing place of the superego, portraits of the vampire were drawn into relations with the father-leader and (as with the AIDS-infected babies of Rumania) from the blood bond with mother. The Gulf War too mixed receptions between something new and something (the same thing) that’s ancient. Was it possible that, in spite of the diversification of new multicultural tensions that took left wing during the anti-Vietnam-war reunion, the only racism that was back on the air for all to watch (just follow the bouncing bombs) targeted the Jews? Both the renewal of Eastern Europe and the Gulf War tuned or turned into the at once technological and group-psychological reception of phantasms, phantoms, doubles still coming home from the Second World War.

Psy War

Within the media-war contexts that keep coming complete with their own pop-psychological reception of just how to relate to gadgets (namely by following, from trauma to love, the beat of identification), anti-Semitism makes ghost appearances on the season finales of ancient history by taking a spin around the metabolism of modern psychological warfare, a spin cycle with its own recent and primal history. What the U.S. Experts were soon referring to, in short hand, as “psy war” was the group-sized legacy of an internalization, technologization, metabolization of trauma that first stood to analytic attention case by case during the World War One outbreak of war neurosis. Just look at German Expressionist cinema, the sensurround of shell shock and unacknowledgable losses: where there’s doubling, monstrosity, and other literal limits of “assimilation,” of “becoming image,” the Jewish cemetery (in The Student of Prague) or ghetto (in The Golem) can serve as backdrop for the final suicidal showdown.

The Jews were special featured in the German total wars right from the start, but on a continuum with philo-Semitism, [End Page 346] which was the look the projection or propaganda had during the First World War. Before General Ludendorff’s 1935 secondary elaboration of the German loss of the war as the melting plot of Jews and Catholics, his first second thought, right after the war, was that the British really beat the Germans when they jumped the gun and stole the fire from German propaganda initiatives by authorizing Jewish colonization of Palestine (Lasswell 176). The World War One phase of German propaganda or idealism can be tracked in the work of Hanns Heinz Ewers, whose overlaps with psychoanalysis began in 1913 when he wrote the screenplay for Stellan Rye’s The Student of Prague, the cinematic breakthrough of doubling that Freud picked up on in studies of the uncanny and, in the first place, of war neurosis. Ewers’s 1920 novel Vampir understands or follows the heart beat of the war, the lust for blood that the philo-Semitic alliance uniting Germans and Jews against the anti-Semitic nations, America and Russia, had brought to consciousness. Under this double cover Vampir also documents Ewers’s own propaganda efforts on behalf of the German cause while landlocked inside the United States. The problematic blood bonding with vampirism was the line Ewers gave his public between the wars, which is when the novel appeared. But the portion that belongs to Ewers’s stay in the States in 1915 gives evidence for a German propaganda move that protected, I mean projected, the Jews. That Ewers later befriended Hitler, who commissioned Ewers to write the hit novel Horst Wessel, belongs to a metabolism of projection that isn’t only historicizable within vaster eras of intolerance. What changes with World War One, with the German defeat in World War One, is a change of art, of the art of war: the German military complex was now convinced that war would henceforward be won or lost only on group-psychological grounds. While observing the German cutting of losses in preparation for the Second Coming of world war, Frankfurt School theorists recognized a specular reversal or disconnection between the psychoanalytic discourse and the culture of its resistance: National Socialism was “psychoanalysis in reverse” (Arato and Gebhard 1985, 8).

Bohleber sees the contemporary return engagement with [End Page 347] anti-Semitism as directed against the history of the-Germans-and-the-Jews: the Jews get set up, dead or alive, as in the way of the return of interest on a narcissistic investment in nationalism. The reruns that tuned in with reunification thus continued to broadcast the defense measures against guilt or guilt-Geld that the Mitscherlichs diagnosed in the West German administration and reception of the restitution to be awarded victims of Nazi persecution (81). The xenophobic attacks on asylum seekers, in particular the charge that they are bogus victims (in other words, simulators or malingerers), indeed reflect a radical lack of empathy, the intrapsychic shutdown of the ability to make reparations.

But when the charge of simulation meets its match and maker in internal problems of reparation, a series of psychohistorical contexts has already opened up around the questions Bohleber raises. Bohleber grounds his understanding of anti-Semitism in Ernst Simmel’s World War Two essay on this special-interest-group psychopathology: it is here that Simmel identifies anti-Semitism as one of the living ends of Nazi psychological warfare, one that will, if left unattended, continue breaking out, he writes in 1945, among U.S. Veterans returning to peacetime conditions. In this work of caution, Simmel locates anti-Semitism within the uncanny cohabitation of psychoanalysis with National Socialism:

The second Nazi teaching of significance for us was that the fundamental principles laid down by men like Freud . . . could by skillful misapplication be used, contrary to the intent of their discoverers, to create hate and destruction. Anyone who studies the book, German Psychological Warfare, will be amazed at the scholarliness and the attention to minute detail with which the knowledge of dynamic psychology is employed in organizing for destruction, for clouding and disintegrating the collective and the individual human mind. . . . For this purpose, anti-Semitism became their most handy and terrible weapon. Anti-Semitism is the psychological robot bomb of the Nazis. They fired these bombs effectively long before the war started.

(72–73)

[End Page 348]

The “flight into mass psychosis” Simmel attributes to anti-Semitism—“an escape not only from reality, but also from individual insanity” (49)—is on one continuum with the theory and therapy of war neurosis he developed for World War One, and which he refers back to his second take on war neurosis written during World War Two, and thus at the same time as the essay on anti-Semitism, as follows: “I think my statement of twenty-five years ago that the soldier’s ego saves him from a psychosis by developing a neurosis is still valid” (233). Reading between the texts, anti-Semitism would be one of the ways in which psychological warfare gives shelter from the individual breakdowns of traumatic or war neurosis. Could the rise in the popularity or nihilism ratings of anti-Semitism that followed reunification be seen, then, as registering the press of the war neuroses, which were significantly absent down the German ranks at the end of the war? Germany’s doubling and dividing would then link up with deferral of the outbreak of war neuroticization, which Nazi psychological warfare had previously doubled and contained, and against which the post-Third-Reich German populace was reinoculated through the series of emergency identifications with U.S. Pop culture addressed by the Mitscherlichs in The Inability to Mourn. There are psychohistorical contexts for this inside view of the loss or trauma that a reunified Germany was not able, not right away, to control release, not before the mass-psychotic self-help programs of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia first filled in with surefire projections the blanks that the long-running split and leavetaking between the two Germanies had supplied.

Freud’s observation that in his day anti-Semitism had become a popular outlet for resistance to his science opens up, along the stereo tracks of ambivalence, a “success story” of psychoanalysis that begins with the therapeutic encounter with war neurosis. The entry of Freud’s intrapsychic model into all the adjacent departments of psychological therapy and theory was brought about through the acceptance of psychoanalysis by the military complex as treatment of choice for war neurotics. Freud opens his 1919 introduction to the proceedings volume Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses with a flashback and [End Page 349] near miss. In 1918 official representatives from the highest quarters of the Central European Powers were present as observers of the papers and other proceedings devoted to war neurosis at the Fifth Psychoanalytic Congress: “The hopeful result of this first contract was that the establishment of psychoanalytic Centers was promised, at which analytically trained physicians would have leisure and opportunity for studying the nature of these puzzling disorders and the therapeutic effect exercised on them by psychoanalysis. Before these proposals could be put into effect, the war came to an end, the state organizations collapsed and interest in the war neuroses gave place to other concerns” (207). But what came too late for the war effort was right on time for the peace that everyone was out to win.

In the newfound lab space that was World War One, analysis had seen that war trauma alone did not guarantee symptom production. The shell’s direct hit tracked down the dotted line of predisposition all the way to childhood trauma, to problems of dependency or separation anxiety. But it doesn’t really matter whether the psychoanalytic success story was based on actual cure-all. More important is that the healed war neurotic became the most potent myth underlying what might be called “greater psychoanalysis” (by which I mean that widest ranging of Freud’s intrapsychic model through all the departments of therapy that was ready, set, and going with Freud’s World-War-One engagement with war neurosis). World War One had provided the large-scale uniform or uniformed populations for study under the laboratory conditions of total war. During World War Two the insights into war neurosis were tested on the newest research resource, the children and adolescents evacuated from the target sites of total air war. The “Sceno-Test,” for example, was originally devised at the Berlin psychotherapy institute for treatment of children whose separation anxieties were set to go off with the bombings. In England, on emergency island, hands-on work with children and adolescents became the latest specialization of analysis, both the Kleinian and Anna-Freudian brands.

That only greater psychoanalysis won the world wars doesn’t cover the complete history. What’s missing is that even [End Page 350] or especially psychoanalysis (by which I mean greater psychoanalysis) could not be left out of the Nazi reunification of psychotherapies beginning in 1933. But therapeutic eclecticism or correctness wasn’t a real imposition that just happened to psychoanalysis. A comparison shopping of approaches was how psychoanalysis expanded and shifted on contact, inside and out, with the newness of the shock. This consumerist perspective is evident throughout the 1919 volume that carried name-brand approval, the volume Freud turned up full blast with his introductory offer of the dynamic of doubling (which he saw going down in war neurotics between “peace ego” and “war ego” or, as Freud would distill the formulation one year later, ego and superego). Two of the contributions (Simmel’s and Sandor Ferenczi’s) address the resistance and boundary-blending between psychoanalysis and all the standard-brand bearers of shock treatment during the corridor wars waged over the massively presenting problem of war neurosis. Simmel, one of the psychiatrists who crossed over to psychoanalysis during his field work with shell shock victims, could read between the front lines of denial. Even those physicians who submitted war neurotics to a “system of tortures” in order to “blackmail” them into letting go of their symptoms “acknowledge unconsciously in the reversal of the Freudian principle its basic view”: they try to make the neurotic “flee into health” (59–60). Indeed the war was all fair, a trade fair for “the comparative study of the different so-called psychotherapeutic methods” (42).

With the pressure on to treat soldiers in two to three sessions, Simmel found he had to mix and match all the techniques occupying the common ground of all-round acceptance (or denial) of the psychogenesis of war neurosis into a blend that left out the interminable associations and directions of peacetime analysis and kept a cleaner sight of target problems. The personality disorder was left alone. Nor was sexual content the focus in session. Instead Simmel dealt with the affects born of war (terror, anxiety, rage) and their war-related mental representations. Unlike the sex drive which serves the preservation of the species, the affects of war are along for a basic drive to preserve oneself. In the intro that [End Page 351] established the value or rate of Simmel’s contribution by volume, Freud gave his first lasting formulation of the division of labor of love between ego libido or narcissistic libido and object libido, the one-sided focus or frame of analysis before the Great War, one that remained linked and limited to the transferentially inflected neuroses.

War, Simmel declares, brings up issues of Selbstsicherung: self protection, security, insurance. But whether war or peace, all neurosis gets organized around splitting, which gives the basic “insurance” coverage. Thus the symptom-formational shift (also through splitting) from psychic to physical registers already gives shelter or protection (Sicherung) to the beginning of healing. The first baby step in therapy therefore is to introduce the patient to the “meaning of the neurotic healing tendency which lies in the symptom” (47). Hypnosis is the fast two-step that follows: war neurotic symptoms are themselves “realized posthypnotic auto-suggestions” (49).

Same time, same volume, Ferenczi reviews the defense and insurance contexts of the wartime showdown between the neurologists and the analysis. Already prewar, the diagnosis of traumatic neurosis (following, say, a train wreck or factory accident) had redefined neurosis at large according to the striving for security or insurance which in turn promoted the contamination of the neurotic condition or conditioning by so-called simulation for insurance benefit. When during World War One neurologists transferred their view of “pension hysteria” to war neurosis, they recognized the wish fulfillment piece of the traumatic-neurotic symptom formation, but did not include a place for unconscious psychic processes. But after several years of standoff engagement with shell shock, the neurologists had to interpret the neurotic symptoms that didn’t want to go away and infer their unconscious content and discontent. Within the large body of neuropsychiatric investigations of shell shock victims that picked up following this shift in attention span, Ferenczi is able to point out the signs or symptoms of an acceptance of psychoanalysis so complete that it went without acknowledgment even as it almost went all the way: “So you see, Ladies and Gentlemen: the experiences made with war neurotics gradually led further than to the [End Page 352] discovery of the psyche—they led the neurologists almost to the discovery of psychoanalysis” (19).

One year earlier, in 1918, Simmel had already published a substantial monograph on his combo of therapeutic techniques which included in its mix and medley direct hits of analytic theory. Simmel analogizes his treatment of trauma with the mobilization of the freeze frame that, spliced together again with the discarded or repressed frames on the cutting room floor, lets roll, lets go, within the “film” that comes on under therapeutic direction (25). On the way to this reprojection, the war neurotic has already split into illness. Running on the reserves of predisposition, splitting peels its expanding protective layers off an equally expansive recording surface that stores in split level all the bad impressions “like on a gramophone record” (13). But where there’s more and more likelihood of nervous illness, that’s where more insurance coverage can also be extended. Selbstsicherung, protecting or insuring oneself, is what the neurotic organism is doing when it gets into battle fatigues (11–12). Contortionist or cramplike symptoms, which often “strongly border on psychotic expressions” (43), represent “the substitute action through which the split personality satisfied the need for physical activity in the service of self protection [Selbstsicherung]” (43). What Simmel already in 1918 brought to consciousness or theory as the insurance drive, takes out its war-neurosis policy against the threat of psychosis (83).

This view that the neuroses were safety catches or fuses that helped prevent psychotic blowout, which was just one self-help step away from Simmel’s follow-up reflection (in the essay on anti-Semitism) that membership in mass psychosis or psychological warfare issues group protection against breaking down one by one, participates in an opening up of access for control of the internal splitting and doubling of the ego in wartime. Soldiers and civilians alike were to be sent to the borderline between neurosis and psychosis, a new-found no man’s land that, from World War One onward, doubled as the place of “psy-fi” expansionism into the outer spaces of psychosis. By 1918 German military psychologists saw in Freud’s close encounter with war neurosis brand-new training grounds for [End Page 353] the defense and offense industries opening up. That’s why, again, when the psychotherapies that had split psychoanalysis by World War One were reunited in 1933 under the leadership of Göring’s cousin, Göring, who was an Adlerian therapist, psychoanalysis could not be excluded.

Family Packaging

In session Bohleber sees the psychohistorical continuum that belongs to the institution of greater psychoanalysis (where, like the uncanny in Freud’s wartime essay, it was to be forgotten but was in effect preserved) come out in the wash of the transference, but always at the one narcissistic remove or removal of the most immediate gap of generation. “In a painful process of remembering, German psychoanalysts had to confess to their own involvement in the Nazi regime. The silence had to be broken, idealizations had to be taken back and the truth recognized, before we are able to deal with the Nazi inheritance that is still transgenerationally effective in psychoanalytic treatments.” The “trans-,” the “across” that every one-on-one unit or unity must bear, rebounds from the generation that is not the parental one. The grandparents are the “trans-parents,” doubles of their grandchildren, who share the fantasy of tension-free relations somewhere over the reign and dread bodies of parents and offspring. This is the Oedipal articulation, played close to the family network, of a fundamental disconnection lying between (or rather across) the couple and the group, between the transferential relation and the psychology, the transparent bonding, of groups.

Bohleber touches down on the group-psychological trajectory of the phantasm delegations of National Socialism and on the specific genealogy of the Nazi and not-seen secret within the institution and history of psychoanalysis (and, in family packs, across the skipped gap of generation). Although the German reunification with phantasms (all but one accounted for by Bohleber) has been a big bashing success, “The Presence of the Past” doesn’t touch the homosexual question. The exclusion, I take it, is not to be taken interpersonally but is [End Page 354] meant to pass as the discretionary policy of a kind of hypercorrect politesse. Right to the point and credit of Bohleber’s discretion is his avoidance of the utter availability of applied-psychoanalytic interpretations of the fascistoid psyche in terms of the degrees of homosexuality secretly attained. Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies offered a stay against this automatism of analytic explanation that locates the origins of the acting out and psychotic make up of National Socialism now or ever within the toxic dumping grounds of ungraduated perversion. But Theweleit’s corrective which, when push came to shove, attempted to return the whole package deal of group psychology to a paranoid, controlling sender inside psychoanalysis went too far by half, by the missing half of what Bohleber refers to as “the fantasy of the group as unitary entity or whole or as a mother’s body.” Bohleber agains shows discretion by not assigning homosexuals to the same lineup of exterminations that went single file for the Jews and Gypsies. Homosexuals who stumbled across the neuropsychiatric end of the corridor of treatment were indeed forced into the cure-alls of castration, sterilization, and extermination. But the protective wing of psychotherapeutic eclecticism that was on the rise throughout the Nazi era (the first time and place that insurance coverage found extension to psychotherapeutic treatments) advocated for the talking cure of the pervert. Lines that were originally laid down to all the outer, narcissistic limits of the transferential model following the grand opening advertised by Freud’s inside view of the war neuroses would be given in therapy to every behavior that could be (of course) construed as neurotic and thus as treatable. For this reason, however, homosexuality holds the bottomline, seen from both sides now, of Nazi projections and science fictions. In turn, Nazi rewiring of the perversions and psychoses to the group effort of total war is unthinkable without the psychoanalytic intervention in shell shock (which was rapidly syndicated within Freud’s thought as group psychology and inside the military-psychological complex as the new art of psychological warfare).

The group or trans-parent delegations Bohleber discusses thus cover the skipping of another beat, that of the law of [End Page 355] reproductive coupling. By the time of his essay on fetishism, Freud was staying tuned to the impulses of gadget love that we’ve been jamming with ever since the onset of technologization. Techno fantasies or science fictions have, at least since the 18th century, special featured the overcoming of a crisis in reproduction through the self-replicating prospects of immortality now (in other words, without the loss of generation). This is the place of tension to which Freud assigns the fetishist: between, on one side, the attractions of splitting or doubling within a borderline zone lying across neurosis and psychosis and, on the other side, the requirements that are still and for the time being with us, the same old ones that only reproduction can keep on fulfilling for the survival of the species. This “psy-fi” tension between techno-replication and reproduction frames Freud’s surprise claim that fetishism (or gadget love by any other name) keeps the subject (who occupies or cathects the zone of so-called oscillation between neurosis and psychosis) from “becoming a homosexual” (154): from premature articulation, in other words, of the “psy-fi” fantasy.

Panic of Influence

The compromise formation that was Arbeitsgruppe A at the Berlin institute is not necessarily the place to look to observe the extent of Freud’s influence, which ranged throughout the Nazi military, psychological, and military-psychological establishments. Freud was there at the outer limits of Nazi research projects and projections, for example in Paul Metz’s work on the intrapsychic relations between the pilot and the flying machine with which he must merge. Yet, it makes a difference if you can’t, even if it’s only in public, published contexts, use the analytic vocabulary. In his introduction to “Gift, das du unbewußt eintrinkst . . .” Bohleber sees the Nazi takeover of analysis as its word by word eradication. But what’s in a word, including the word displaced by the one that’s been censored? Only by restricting the frame to a small group of “analysts” (or “depth psychologists”) at the institute can one derive this sense of shutdown beyond all displacement. But in the big picture, [End Page 356] Nazi Germany was a pop-psychological culture of all-out healing that followed the intrapsychic model even into those regions that had been declared off limits, set aside for management by sociology alone. By the 1940s the military-psychological complex worldwide was following the lead taken by the German colleagues through Freud’s analysis of group psychology (the owner’s manual to our ongoing technologization).

Anticipating or projecting more double take, talk, think along the lines of resistance I have already tripped up and over, a preemptive warning label might fit in here: this genealogical recontextualization of phantasm delegations and their institutional relays is not about laying the blame on Freud (or, better yet, on the Jews). Nor do I subscribe to any of the brands of new historicism, either the German revisionist kind or the kinder and gentler version practiced in U.S. English departments. It might be more to the point to reconsider Freud’s early model of the transference neurosis in the contexts I am excavating or deconstructing as the emergency of a side effect of treatment that at the same time inoculatively gets the psyche reorganized for the cure. At this discursive or institutional intersection the transference neurosis that this analysis-in-progress would construct covers contamination by and containment of the aberrant discontinuities and reactions that continue to give rise to the Nazi regime, the regimen to this day of “not seeing” the continuity that was there. Only the reconstruction of a “Nazi Psychoanalysis” can lead to a resettlement of symptoms within the suffer zone of a future cure. In addition, then, to the application of psychoanalysis to those symptomatic returns of a Nazi past that keep coming under the category of aberration and discontinuity, I have proposed staying with the direct connection between one of the most protected and progressive sources of our modernism and the outbreak of National Socialism, the connection lying therefore within the institution, discourse, and history of what I’m calling greater psychoanalysis but which precisely cannot be separated from psychoanalysis “itself.”

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