Introduction

In 1962 David Astor, then editor of the Observer newspaper, published an article in Encounter on ‘the scourge’, a phenomenon which he described as a perverse morality which leaves those imbued with it with the conviction they have a duty to clean up society by annihilating those they see as corrupting and polluting it. Astor cited the Holocaust as the most recent example of it, but he believed that it had appeared in various guises over the centuries and that it would probably recur, though it might be hard to foresee what form it would take. He argued for the establishment of a research institute to study it, and organised the finance of what became known as the Columbus Centre at Sussex University in 1966. The historian Norman Cohn was appointed as its director because he had written an account of the scourge, ‘The Pursuit of the Millennium’, in the Middle Ages. In the decades that followed the ending of the Second World War and the widespread determination that we must never allow such a cataclysm to happen again, the mission of the Centre was to contribute research that, it was hoped, might prevent its recurrence. In fact there have been further manifestations of it such as those like ISIS that claim the sanction of Islam, but Putin’s Russia could also be viewed as a current version of it.

The book, however, is not a comparative study of current forms of the phenomenon, of the teaching that has inspired them, their organisation, funding and affiliations etc. The formal title of the Columbus Centre was ‘The Institute for the Study of Collective Psychopathology: the aim of the book is to give a critical exposition of that psychopathology in language easily intelligible to the ordinary lay person. The psychology has its origins in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and leads us to us if we can learn anything from its practice as to how we might prevent, or at least contain, the barbarism Astor’s perverse morality encourages, whether the practice of psychotherapy offer us any insights into a different, more inclusive ethics, and, if so, if we can glean any guidance from it on steps we might take to further it.