The Holocaust and the Revival of Psychological History. By Judith M. Hughes (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2015) 188 pp. $67.50 cloth $24.00 paper

Abstract

Hughes, a historian and a psychiatrist, makes an eloquent argument in this book for historians’ existing “reliance on a psychoanalytically inflected commonsense psychology” (11). She argues that many, or even most, historians working on both sides of the turn of the twenty-first century have used such an approach in “recognizing agency” on the part of human beings in their times and places (5, 179). In this claim, Hughes is certainly correct, particularly since the discipline of history has become more interested than ever in documenting in rich detail the experience of human beings as revealed in the many sources that they have left behind. This experience, for Hughes, is filled with deep, complex motives and actions that demonstrate the central role played by fantasy as well as fact. As a case study, Hughes analyzes several works about the history of the Holocaust that engage, with varying degrees of success in her view, this search for agency and motive in history.The great strength of this book is its clear and detailed comparative analysis of these texts. Hughes spends a great deal of time following the narrative of each work that she analyzes for the sake of the general-interest audience that she targets. Historians and graduate students will find these narratives too long and too full of direct quotations, especially in the case of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (New York, 1947). Most of the analysis of the relative poverty of psychodynamic insight in Trevor-Roper’s portrait of Hitler—compared with Ian Kershaw’s full-length Hitler: A Biography (New York, 2010)—is confined to a couple of pages at the end of the first chapter. This organizational imbalance is less evident in the comparison between Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996) and Saul Friedländer’s two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997, 2007). For Hughes, Goldhagen’s account, in contrast to Friedländer’s, lacks psychoanalytical sophistication as well as attention to historical detail in its “unnuanced and tendentious treatment of German anti-Semitism” (47). Hughes could have stressed that Goldhagen is a political scientist and not a historian. His tendency, therefore, is toward the type of categorical and causal thinking that can preempt idiographic concern with the multiple and overdetermined conditions affecting an individual in history.In this regard, Hughes would have done well to discuss Christopher Browning’s disagreement with Goldhagen in the afterword to the second edition of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1993) about the motives of perpetrators. Hughes mentions the afterword in a footnote but does not exploit it in her well-founded criticism of Goldhagen for transforming “his subjects into automata” (180). Likewise, Hughes cites Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial (New York, 2011) but does not mention Lipstadt’s argument concerning Eichmann’s deep antisemitism, which has been recently documented by other historians of the Holocaust. This theme would also have helped to further an argument in her book—criticism of Hannah Arendt’s view of Eichmann as a man without any psychological depths in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963).Hughes’ pronouncement that “assertions about the childhood origins of adult beliefs and behaviors” should be omitted is too strict (4). Documenting the childhood of a historical figure may well be difficult, with the attendant danger of reductionism, but it is hardly impossible. This stricture is also at odds with Hughes’ reliance on Sigmund Freud as a source of psychoanalytical insight for historians. But this apparent contradiction aside, why does Hughes ignore later neo-Freudian and even post-Freudian psychoanalysis? Some mention of Heinz Kohut or Nancy Chodorow would only strengthen her clear, compelling, and essential argument for the utility, indispensability, and inevitability of depth psychology in examining and understanding the past.