By applying a psychopathological key to the phenomenon of totalitarianism, Ariane Bilheran has undertaken pioneering work and considerably deepened our knowledge of this phenomenon, which until now had been confined to sociopolitical analysis. As her original vision gradually established itself as an essential approach, it seemed useful to her to return to the origins and inspirations of her idea.

Nothing can replace, for the traveler, that feeling of arriving at the end of the world when he sets foot on Providence Island, located in the Caribbean Sea, off the eastern coast of Nicaragua.

Nothing is given, everything is to be conquered, and the aspiration to the sublime is what we are allowed to experience in Florence: time has stopped there on good taste, on beauty "universal and without concept", as Emmanuel Kant would later say.

"In the spring, which suits this city so well that speaks to us of flowers, I decided to come from South America to finally realize an old dream: to reopen, with a group of apprentice philosophers, the Neoplatonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino."

The October Revolution in Russia officially plunged the world into the totalitarian era. It was preceded by an intense political, social, and ideological struggle, spearheaded by terrorism. A "witness to history", imagined by a Russian novelist, revealed the psychology of the young activists who sacrificed themselves to establish a dream of freedom that ended in nightmare. Is it a coincidence that the novel was subtitled "the book of endings"?

The religious fanaticism of adolescents is the hallmark of a societal and political system that has become paranoid, in which the logic of power is harassing and no longer governed by authority. In the suburbs of France, recruitment has been rather successful. It reveals the deep social, familial, and spiritual flaws in the society in which these adolescents grew up.

If terrorism is about terrorizing others, the question arises: who are the real terrorists? And what are they really motivated by?

Hippocrates reminds us that medicine is an art. Confusing medicine, which presupposes an empirical relationship between patient and doctor, with hard science is a misunderstanding that leads to the objectification of the other. Totalitarianism, which precisely seeks to objectify the human, necessarily engenders an ideology of "scientific" medicine bordering on sectarian blindness.

Marie Antoinette is both the most famous and the most misunderstood queen in the history of France. Born on November 2, 1755, in Vienna, Austria, she died by guillotine on October 16, 1793, in the Place de la Révolution in Paris (now Place de la Concorde). She reigned over France and Navarre from 1774 to 1791 and was Queen of the French from 1791 to 1792, the last queen of the Ancien Régime, Archduchess of Austria, Imperial Princess and Royal Princess of Hungary and Bohemia,

The establishment of the Covid dystopia has led to profound ruptures within our societies. Groups have formed to resist the reign of the absurd and the health dictatorship, new media have emerged, and also, of course, opinion leaders and charismatic figures.

Literature trumps psychology in that it allows us to explore many souls, not just our own. This is Faulkner's proposition, which he illustrates with a captivating and hideous dive into the depths of human nature.

The art of seizing the opportunity is not an exact science. It is not transferable or reproducible according to external criteria, because it calls more on intuition than reason, that quality which creates geniuses, great men, fine strategists, good doctors or even great seducers.

The author of The Language of the Third Reich was a firsthand witness to the German totalitarian drift. Here we continue reading his diary, rich in poignant descriptions.

Victor Klemperer's study of the rhetoric of Nazism is a text of universal scope that allows us to understand the inner logic of all totalitarian phenomena. Ariane Bilheran undertakes here a detailed portrait of this great witness of the 20th century.

Feelings are shrinking like shagreen leather; no one opens up about their feelings anymore, love is relegated to the cellar, even inner life is no longer of interest. This is Günther Anders's sad observation of the generations before the post-Covid dehumanization...

Gabriel García Márquez was not only the brilliant novelist of One Hundred Years of Solitude and other great works. He wrote many stories, some of which have been published. Among these stories, one has, to my knowledge, never been included in a book. It is entitled Algo muy grave va a suceder en este pueblo: "Something very serious is going to happen in the village."

Can love be commanded? Can it be decided? Gabriel García Márquez has attempted to answer these enigmas, the most bitter of a human life, with a flamboyant novel of almost unbearable passion.

This sentence, taken from his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, seems to have been predestined by Gabriel García Márquez for his novel about the last moments of Simón Bolívar's life, The General in His Labyrinth.

Our era is suffering from an impoverishment of the imagination. The totalitarian drift narrows our relationship to space (e.g., confinements, reductions in travel, under the cover of different ideologies) and to time (e.g., explosion of our relationship to immediacy, under the influence of consumer capitalism and screens). On the contrary, the imagination is this psychic function that allows us to open new horizons and navigate through the centuries.

Is it still possible to educate children? We increasingly doubt it—and we also sense that this is an unprecedented catastrophe. Ariane Bilheran returns here to what constitutes the pillars of education, in other words, the fundamental criteria of a civilized society.