In this trilogy on Nazi psychoanalysis, a continuation of Rickels' research on psychoanalysis and culture, Rickels not only traces the origin, development, and conclusion of psychoanalysis but also argues that psychoanalysis and Nazism are symptoms of modernity itself. "Psy Fi," the final volume of Nazi Psychoanalysis, takes the Nazi imaginary as its central theme. Rickels situates the ineluctable place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thought by demonstrating the ways in which the Nazi imagination continues to haunt modern life.

The core thesis of volume three posits one fundamental impulse behind both psychoanalysis and science fiction, which can be found alongside and within the Nazi canon. To support his claims of continuity between modern life and Nazi Germany, as well as of the effects of psychoanalysis on the present age (a project about which he began writing in 1991), Rickels synthesizes a dense collection of supporting material such as literature, films, case studies, psychological warfare manuals, psychoanalytic journals, advertisements, and popular science fiction. Rickels' theoretical edifice is equally diverse, employing Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. The bulk of his references are to psychoanalytic texts from WWII and the immediate postwar period. In addition to a wide-range of literary writers such as Goethe, Döblin, Benjamin, Hitchcock, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Huxley, and H. G. Wells, figures such as Daniel Paul Schreber (made famous through Freud's monograph on paranoia), Hans Dominik, a popular German science fiction author who died in 1945, and Paul Nipkow--the Nazis 'adopted' father of television--provide the case studies for this book. As a result, Rickels successfully traces the convergence of psychoanalysis and Nazism and its far-reaching effects on modernity.

[H-Net Review: Jill Gillespie on Nazi Psychonalysis Volume 3: Psy Fi]