After 87 years, Wilhelm Reich’s Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (1933) appears for the first time in its edited original text.
by Andreas Peglau
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„Society must defend itself against us, because we behave critically against it; we prove to it that it itself has a large share in the causation of neuroses“ (Sigmund Freud, 1910).
Consistent psychoanalysis is critical of society, both as a social science and as a therapeutic method. This is another reason why the original of Reich’s Massensychologie des Faschismus, released in the late summer of 1933, is one of the most important psychoanalytic books ever published. Moreover, within what is now called research on right-wing extremism, it was the first publication on the psychosocial background of the Nazi system.
Nevertheless, this first edition has been almost completely forgotten and remains available only as a pirated edition or as an expensive antiquarian offering. Those who meanwhile refer to Reich’s Massenpsychologie almost always mean the English-language third edition of 1946, which has also been obtainable in German since 1971.
But this third edition differs seriously from the original. Weiterlesen →