ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that psychoanalytic thinking may contribute to such a reinterpretation, and to the identification of certain attributes of the totalitarian phenomena previously overlooked. One generic contribution of the psychoanalytic method has been to demonstrate that what is known and remembered of the past is always in part a construction of people contemporary consciousness with its own specific disavowals. One function of psychoanalysis from the beginning has been to reveal the unconscious motivation of such constructions or distortions of memory, most commonly in analytic practice with individual analysands. Totalitarianism became a central analytic category of political science in the 1940s and 1950s, following an earlier significant discussion of the concept by Franz Borkenau, which was deemed from the first to capture the defining attributes of two actually existing political regimes, those of Nazism and Soviet communism. Arendt's main category for understanding Nazi and Stalinist motivation is 'ideology', and her work has not therefore been understood as psychoanalytic.
