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Judith Kestenberg conducted extensive research into child victims of Nazi persecution. She sought not only to understand the psychological effects of the traumatic experiences and persecution experienced by those children but also to understand the psychological processes behind Nazi ideology and behavior. The objective of this article is to present some of her hypotheses about how Nazi ideology acted on both the victims’ and the Germans’ superegos, as well as to address her conception of the psychological motivations for Nazism. The author claims that Nazism managed to invade the superegos of both Germans and some of the victims, which meant that, in the case of the latter, the persecution continued, even after the end of the Nazi regime. She also states that the children of Nazis were also victims of this regime, whose ultimate motivation would be the Germans’ impulse to kill their own children.

After some general considerations on the topic of human rights, an analysis of the problems highlighted by two disciplines, psychoanalysis and ethnology, is attempted. The psychoanalytic viewpoint helps to understand what are the psychological aspects that favor the respect or the violation of human rights; the ethnological viewpoint, instead, by comparing different cultures allows us to answer questions regarding the diversity of human rights in various social structures, their validity across different countries, and the eventual imposition or conditioning, also through the use of force, of rights other than those of a given culture. Discussing with Muhidin Šarić (author of the 1993 book Keraterm. Erinnerungen aus einem serbischen Lager [Keraterm. Memories from a Serbian concentration camp]. Preface by Paul Parin. Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag, 1994), Paul Parin tries to give an explanation of facts that are still unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the psychoanalytic literature and in current usage, the concept of the Superego has obtained a much wider theoretical and clinical space than that reserved for the concept of the Ego Ideal. As is well known, these are instances that are configured in the framework of the Freudian elaboration of the second topic of the psychic apparatus, which outlines the organization and consolidation of the structure. However, this paper does not delve into metapsychological disquisitions, to which many great masters have already given their important contribution. Instead, it focuses on clinical reflections on patients, although very different from each other on the psychopathological level, who undergo intense suffering due to a cumbersome and unrealistic Ego Ideal to which they feel unable to adhere. A conflict, very difficult to handle in the transferencecountertransference relationship, in which the Ego is both the victim and the agent at the same time. Sometimes, the treatment process trips up over these apparently marginal aspects of the Ego Ideal, which are configured as one of the most tenacious resistances to the psychoanalytic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an introduction to the "philosophy" adopted in research on the influence of mental factors in the onset of psychosomatic diseases. The research is oriented to the construction and implementation on a computer of a model that makes it possible to formulate predictions regarding the onset and possibly the classification of the "type" of psychosomatic disease so as to be able to activate an appropriate prophylaxis.

The Authors, taking Andry's hypothesis about the pathogenetic role of the deprivation of father-image during infancy in structuring an inadequate, too rigid or incoherent Super-Ego, assume that could be a possible factor in explaining the social misadaptation of adolescents with prolonged experiences of institutionalisation. The test group, consisted of 163 adolescents and pre-adolescents released from three state institutions in Modena, in the period 1966-1973, it seems to confirm, through the indexes of the socialisation in the family, scholastic and work groups after releases from the institutions, as well as through those of social misadaptation and antisociality, the Author's hypothesis interpreting the social misadaptation as one of the manifestations of the difficulties encountered by adolescents in the adaptation process. These difficulties depend a great deal on a surplus of pathological defenses arising from retarding of the consolidation of the Ego and from developing a negative Ego-Ideal. The deprivation of valid parental images for introjective identifications during latency or adolescence seems a very important factor in influencing these structures of personality.