ABSTRACT
The late Tony Judt (2007) has described Western post-war Europe as 'an imposing edifice resting atop an unspeakable past'. The subject of the Second World War, Nazism and the Holocaust, is invoked and discussed. Simi-lar forms of historical revisionism have been observed in other parts of Eastern Europe, in, for example, Hungary and the Ukraine, though they have also, as in Lithuania, been met with opposition. An integration of psychoanalytic ideas with historical research appears to confirm Kernberg's view that there are very direct parallels between the paranoid and the narcissistic features of political organisations and mass movements, and the processes of projective identification, denial, pathological splitting, and omnipotent control seen clinically in severely personality-disordered individuals. Richie (1988) and other historians have had no doubt that Hitler and the Nazis possessed a certain kind of genius in touching and exploiting these subterranean currents in the emotional life of the German nation, in setting in motion already existing structures of feeling.
