3. Of Dark Materials and their Weaving

Fairbairn believed that it is this process of splitting and projection that accounts for the phenomena that Freud had attempted to explain with the Death Instinct. Psychoanalytic thinking was central to the concerns of the Institute for the Study of Collective Psychopathology and Norman Cohn, its director, invited professor Henry Dicks, then deputy director of the Tavistock Clinic, to participate in its activities. Dicks had earlier been commissioned by the War office to interview Nazi prisoners of war and develop a psychological profile of them - of the ‘High F’, or, as it is more commonly called, the authoritarian personality. He had also secretly and intermittently held psychiatric responsibility for Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, after Hess’s flight to Britain. The Columbus centre then sponsored Dicks to undertake a study of the psychology of a number of concentration camp guards who had been convicted of crimes against humanity. His findings were published in a book: ‘Licensed Mass Murder’. The psychological model he uses to understand these individuals is Fairbairn’s theory of schizoid states.

However, Dicks robustly rejected the idea that the rise and fall of the Third Reich could be explained in psychological terms. He was asked, he said, to feed back what he as a psychiatrist made of the young Nazis who had been referred to him and that is what he’d done. How all that fitted into an overall explanation of the rise of Nazism was for historians and others to work out. In practice most historians have ignored his views – that is until recently when there has been very brief reference to him by scholars writing on the period, and then, in 2012 a book, ‘The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind’: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts’, by Daniel Pick, a psychoanalyst and professor of History at Birkbeck College, London.