ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the psychological causes, taking into account the many social, economic, and political factors involved in the developments. It describes her experiences and analyses of the totalitarian system in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and early 1960s, when totalitarian rule was at its most severe. The chapter discusses the ideas of several important psychoanalytic thin kers about social groups and their application to the analysis of group processes in the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia. It explores the dynamics of social groups in the totalitarian Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, established in 1948. The chapter focuses on the development in the Czech region of what was formerly Czechoslovakia. Sigmund Freud’s ideas about regression in primary groups, in which people give up their ideal and substitute for it the group ideal as embodied in the leader, are highly relevant to totalitarian dynamics.
