Thinking About Denial

NUREMBERG 1946

One evening in May 1946, during the trial of the major war criminals at the International Military Tribunal, the American psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn encountered Hermann Göring in his cell. The prisoner was smoking his long Bavarian hunting pipe. This was the former Reichsmarschall, a man who was for many years an extremely powerful operator in the Nazi Party, centrally involved in German military planning, the commanding figure at the Luftwaffe, and the acolyte whom Hitler had appointed as his successor and deputy. According to Goldensohn, he appeared subdued and low, although on seeing the visitor at the door, the accused ‘smiled forcibly in an attempt to appear cheerful’. Goldensohn asked if he might be feeling depressed about something. Whereupon Göring looked at the wall and replied:

Well, this sciatica has got me down a little bit, but I must admit that in general I don’t feel as cheerful as I might. I don’t understand it myself…. You know, I spend a good deal of my time in fantasy. For example, when things get dull or unpleasant in the courtroom, I can close my eyes behind my dark glasses and I practically live in the past. I think of the many pleasant times that I had. For example, I think of the frequent large parties I had in Karin Hall or of my popularity among the German people, which gives me great pleasure and satisfaction. I am sure that I will go down in history as the man who did much for the German people. This trial is a political trial, not a criminal one. If there were criminal things perpetrated by the party, or the SS, or even the army, as it is charged, I certainly had nothing to do with them. It is true that my position as second-in-command politically next to Hitler makes such a statement seem ridiculous. Maybe I closed my eyes to the real meaning of what was going on in Germany, but it was always for the benefit of the common people that I strived.¹ [Emphasis added]

Göring had no illusions that he would be acquitted. He did not believe denial, in the legal sense, would save him. He even suggests some insight into his own predilection for fantasy, a world of ‘dark glasses’, behind which to ‘close my eyes’. Yet his response is striking, even stupefying, perhaps, for its banal evasion of the deeper import of the question. His refusal to recognize the central reality of vast Nazi war crimes and the part he played in them provides a dramatic example of denial, the concept so much in the news of late, that we hope to investigate in this essay and in the accompanying featured articles in this issue.²

We focus on the Freudian idea of denial in relation to the politics of remembering, forgetting and disavowal. How useful is the concept of denial for historians? It was Freud’s dynamic model of the mind and insistence on the significance of unconscious processes, which brought questions of denial to new prominence. We aim briefly to identify and discuss an individual and collective example of denial, and set out the psychoanalytic meanings and implications of associated key terms. The problem of denial has a particular urgency today.

Ours is a time when statistical evidence about climate change, poverty, inequality, health and immigration is contested daily. ‘Alternative facts’ are flamboyantly conjured, at will, in defiance of all available data, not least by the current US president, and his shameless officials at the White House. Scepticism about scientific authority, a relativist view of ‘truth’, and critique of official news and mainstream cultural representations have been hijacked by climate-change deniers for grotesque and devastating political and economic purposes.³ It is especially relevant now to draw attention to possible psychoanalytic resources for historical and psychosocial analysis of denial, and to consider its possible, conscious and unconscious aspects.

Even the evidence of our own eyes about the relative size of two crowds can apparently be massaged away by spin-doctors.⁴ Denial and disavowal...