Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume II: Crypto-Fetishism

358 Pages·2002·4.33 MB·English

by  Laurence A. Rickels

NAZI PSYCHOANALYSIS
V O L U M E I I
NAZI PSYCHOANALYSIS
V O L U M E I
Only Psychoanalysis Won the War
V O L U M E I I
Crypto-Fetishism
V O L U M E I I I
Psy Fi
NAZI PSYCHOANALYSIS
V O L U M E I I
Crypto-Fetishism
Laurence A. Rickels
F O R E W O R D B Y B E N J A M I N B E N N E T T
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Nancy Barton grants permission to the University of Minnesota Press for the use of the image
“Untitled—Testing” in Nazi Psychoanalysis.
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CONTENTS
Foreword
BENJAMIN BENNETT ix
Achtung
A PREFACE TO NAZI PSYCHOANALYSIS xvii
Part Too
Time to Remember 3
Giving Up Which Ghost? 5
Keeping Up 9
Take Off 13
Fetish Goes to War 19
Halfway 22
Ghost Appearances 31
The Heydays of Radarr 36
Another Allied Example 40
One Four Five Beachwood Drive 43
Cyber-Lacan 60
French Dressing 63
The Games 65
Trippy 71
On Turing 74
Reopener
Air Head 79
Into Africa 82
1945: There’s Still a Place for Psychoanalysis 88
1945 Allied-Style 90
Taking Apart
Air Defense Mechanisms 95
Bomber Room 100
Little Richard 107
Emergency Island 112
Bloody Freud 124
Bion the Pleasure Principle 127
The Father’s Daughter 131
Breaking Up and Making Up 138
Project Group Identification 145
In My Side 147
Objection Relations 150
There Was No Time like the Present 154
Kinder-Reich 157
Soldierhood 169
Let Me Introduce You 185
Secret Wartime Report 195
Heil Homosexuality 198
Schultz Complex 206
Council of Marriage 211
Mohr Therapy 214
Hands-on Reproach 219
The Women 227
Colonization 233
Taking Part
Buffoonery 237
Back in the U.S. of A. 240
Boring 243
Consensual Text 247
Getting to Know You 253
Furer 256
A Couple of Fetishes 260
Parting
Mummy’s the Word 265
Hi Ya Heidegger 272
Being in Therapy 278
The 30 Percent Reich 283
Hey Sullivan Man 287
Drama Psycho 293
Dichten Denken Tanken 298
Only One Thing Missing 306
References 315
Filmography 327
Index 329
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Foreword
B E N J A M I N B E N N E T T
“If God had intended us to fly...,” the saying goes, or at least used to go.
To be sure, the scope of Laurence A. Rickels’s Crypto-Fetishism,the second
volume of Nazi Psychoanalysis, extends well beyond the question of how
human beings might be made suitable for flying. Especially the idea of
fetishism—in the form of a “techno-mourning...that mourns even over
those merely integrative moments in works of mourning and substitution”—
both receives and reveals unexpected significance.
As techno-mourning, fetishism isn’t about the identifiable or
identified-with body. For one, it’s not about couples. And it’s not
about losing, just because you lost. It is about winning, like a
winner and not like a victim; it’s about some power of emer-
gency propulsion that gets us past the totalization and paralysis
of loss to the wide open and outer spacing of what in a more
couplified era or moment of mourning could only be seen as
closed and enclosing delusional states that were the determining
limit and dead end of failed mourning.
Radical transformation is the matter here, something like a turning of the
world inside out, or perhaps rather a disintegration of the whole “couple”
inside/outside in a new space of “greater psychoanalysis” where the inter-
nal (intrapsychic) and external (technological, gadget-loving) aspects of
fetishism are no longer strictly distinguishable. And yet the question of
flying is not merely a metaphor in this context. There is, in fact, no longer
any such thing as a “mere” metaphor in the neither internal nor external
(nor even spatial) space that opens between our world wars, a space we
traverse, if at all, on wings no god ever dreamed of. We can gain perspec-
tive on this situation, I think, by first stepping back a quarter millennium
or so.
To the extent that a main point exists, the main point of Johann Georg
Hamann’sAesthetics in a Nutshell(1762) is probably that scripture and his-
tory, and indeed nature itself, are all versions of a single text, a single di-
vine writing, and that the purport of that writing depends radically on
how the reader approaches it, which in turn never fails to involve the ques-
tion of who the reader really is. These last two ideas are set forth with per-
fect clarity, toward the end of Hamann’s text, in a pair of quotations, the
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