ABSTRACT
Freudian psychoanalysis was, particularly well suited to a war against a totalitarian enemy. Psychoanalytic diagnoses of the Germans and the Japanese during the Second World War illustrate vividly how well designed for propaganda purposes the Freudian language of pathology proved to be. Ironically the neo-Freudian movement was partly inspired by the comparisons that emigre analysts drew between the German personality structure with which they had been most familiar in their earlier careers and the American personality structure they encountered after 1933. The dilemmas faced by cultural relativists when doing 'enemy work' came to something of a climax in two conferences held, as Allied victory appeared increasingly inevitable, to discuss psychiatric approaches to the post-war reconstruction of Germany and Japan. The problem that the neo-Freudians faced in confronting the Cold War was that the psychological differences they posited between national cultures were too great, too unbridgeable, for the purposes of policymakers seeking to fight and win an ideological war.
