The politics of “gods” and arms

Abstract

Based on a document from the Nuremberg Court on the death of Rosa Graf, Sigmund Freud’s sister, in a Nazi extermination camp, Treblinka, on the concepts of anxiety and helplessness (Hilflogiskeit), and on the notion of the longing for the father, the author defends the idea that “Group Psychology and the analysis of the ego” (Freud, 1921) is a premonitory text of the catastrophe that meant the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century.