[The future of a nation. Political and psychoanalytic reflections on German re-unification]

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 centering 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.