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Nazi Germany was the first pop-psychological culture of all-out healing.
Rickels Interviewed by ArtForum Magazine
But the Gulf War was America's most successful war in terms of mobilization of group psychology for psychological-warfare purposes. The Nazis were way better at it than we would ever be. Already in 1941, U.S. military-psychologists were racing to catch up with Nazi advances in psychological warfare. They reconstructed the Nazi reading lists, which included references to Freud. It's as though psychoanalysis was enlisted on the Allied side following a trend that the Nazis had set.
Rickels Interviewed by ArtForum Magazine
More than anything else in society, mourning must be diluted and distilled; the corpse is beautiful and the 'hardened survivors' odor free. Alongside this disturbed relationship to the dead, mass media culture conducts that endless work of mourning Freud called melancholia. … The cult of the dead in any given culture is coextensive with the media extensions of the senses current in that culture. Psychoanalysis, our culture's institution of mourning, keeps open lines of communication with the deceased which are precisely lines of telecommunication. Freud's disinterment of the phantom voices of the superego, for example, coincides with the advent of phonographic or radio recording… just as photography and film project and animate those phantoms which, in Totem and Taboo, haunt those who are unable to grant the dead proper burial.
Aberrations of Mourning, 1988
California is where unending mourning achieves its society-wide manifestation (or massification) as sado-masochism, where the death wish yields to death drive (which takes a detour via suicide), and where the femininity of mourning constitutes the group's secret agenda, gender, and desire. The psychohistory that documents the intellectual migrations to the most modern of frontiers cannot but unfold or fold out a psychology of the ultimate idol of Freud's second system: the adolescent or Californian. But the two anchorpersons for this special report on California — Kafka and Thomas Mann — have been selected, according to the bicoastal logic of this case, from among Germanicity's teenagers at heart. In between: television covers the ins and outs of this psychoanalytic investigation of a global conspiracy — the Californian (and German) invention of adolescence.
The Case of California, 1991
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; "Professor Larry Rickels (Santa Barbara- Berlin).")
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; "Literary Theorist & psychoanalyst Larry Rickels with dog Elli.")
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