This work is masterful, because in a few pages, Leo Löwenthal manages to paint the finest psychological portrait I know, especially for his time, of atomization in a totalitarian period, that is to say, of the role played by terror in transforming the individual into an isolated and desperate cell at the heart of a large mass. This German sociologist and philosopher, linked to the Frankfurt School, who emigrated to the United States to flee Nazism, was aware of the cancellati

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.