Daniel Pick, PhD, 2023
/Professor Daniel Pick’s engaging and interdisciplinary work has investigated how psychoanalytic thought has been mobilized to face some of the most dire political challenges of modern times. Drawing on clinical experience and humanities studies expertise, his projects have mapped the extent and impact of clinical involvement in wartime intelligence, debates on denazification and the Cold War, and the consolidation of post-war liberal democracy. Over the last decade, his work as an historian and a psychoanalyst generated new information and discussion about unconscious processes inside the mind, and at work between people. Moreover, it has illuminated how demagogues and other mind manipulators harness the passions of crowds (on the street and online).
In an era of political catastrophes, his research has helped underscore how psychoanalysis is shaped by history and can deepen interpretations of historical processes. Ranging across debates on fascism, brainwashing, totalitarianism, populism, groupthink, conspiracy theory, online radicalization, and advertising, Pick’s findings are communicated through non-traditional pathways integrating film, books, radio documentaries, podcasts, and more. His work delves into unfamiliar sources and considers afresh the historical consequences of Freud’s “revolution in mind.” Through his books Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control (2022) and The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (2012), he shows how psychoanalysis and the serious study of history can engage with each other. Pick’s work is part of a wider endeavor by historians exploring, explaining, applying, and/or historically contextualizing psychoanalysis.
A professor emeritus of history at the University of London and practicing analyst, Pick also teaches and conducts research at Birkbeck College, University of London Department of History, Classics and Archaeology.