post-World War II West Germany:"In no other national context would the attempt to make sense of aggression become such a core preoccupation specifically for psychoanalysts and allied professionals" (124)"On Aggression, … was a vigorous defense of aggression … It had two main components: aggression was ubiquitous in animals and in people (i.e., it was not just a German specialty). And more importantly: aggression was a force for good." (126)"By the later 1960s and early 1970s, at least three new versions of Freud were circulating in the West German media and wider public discussion. One was a sex-radical version, which restored to public attention Freud’s own erstwhile commitment to seeing libido as the force that explained almost everything in life. Another was the far more conservative Freud who had insisted that humans were not by nature good; this version, however paradoxically, was a co-production of Lorenz’s supporters with those of his critics who could not accept the idea of aggression as a drive at all and instead proposed alternate models of human behavior which more strongly emphasized social and political factors. And the third was the complex effort at compromise that the physician and psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich formulated." (126-127)"The human animal differed from the others because it was not just aggressive but cruel. At the same time, Mitscherlich held fast to his conviction that 'the only psychological theory that, neither moralistic nor anxious, keeps in focus the time-transcending phenomenon of cruelty, is Freud’s death-drive thesis.'" (139-40)Cruelty as work: "Yes, this 'destruction-worker' might well experience pleasure, but it was in very few cases a sexual pleasure. Instead – and here Mitscherlich borrowed both from the survivor of Gestapo torture Jean Améry and from the narcissism theories of the Austrian-American analyst Heinz Kohut – it was an 'unhindered omnipotence-experience' – 'the realization of fantasies of a ‘grandiose self.’' These were the dynamics, Mitscherlich believed, that had been most in evidence at Treblinka and Auschwitz, but also in the forest at Katyn (where in 1940 the Soviet secret police had massacred more than 14,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia and officer corps), among the Brazilian death squads (paramilitary forces employed by the dictatorship), at Con-Son (the penal colony at which US soldiers tortured Communists), and at My Lai (where in 1968 US soldiers murdered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers)." (140)"... fourth way to conceptualize aggression in West German debates about psychoanalysis and human nature. It emerged predominantly out of a perceived need, especially among younger analysts and trainees, for improved approaches to their most recalcitrant patients … ultimately this fourth conceptualization was also applied for political analyses … influenced by the work of Melanie Klein" (140-41)"... it was – irony of ironies – an ex-Nazi who succeeded in provoking the conversation that initially brought psychoanalysis back to post-Nazi Germany." (148)
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