THE FUTURE OF A NATION - POLITICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC ASPECTS OF GERMAN REUNIFICATION

Taking a lead from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's psychogram of post-war German society in The Inability to Mourn and Heinz Kohut's remarks on a theory of narcissism, the authors interpret the over-hasty reunification process and the liquidation of the GDR as an attempt to remedy the precarious nature of the collective narcissistic equilibrium. As in the post-war period, when concern with the immediate past was stifled by >>reconstruction<< and the >>economic miracle<<, so the advent of >>deutschmark nationalism<< after 1989/90 was marked by the central role played by money. In the emotional cathexis centring around money the authors identify a collective tendency to restore a lost self-object and revive an archaic megalo-self that-was thought to have been abandoned for good with the downfall of Hitler.