The Unconscious and Others: Rescue, Inclusivity and the Eroticisation of Difference 1930s Vienna

This chapter, which is part of an edited volume on culture and the unconscious, explores the psychic and socio-political determinants of altruism, antiracism and the attraction of cultural and racial difference. Using as a case study the story of a group of non-Jewish foreign activists in Vienna who risked their lives doing clandestine work for persecuted socialists and Jews in 1930s and who formed sexual relationships with Jews and other 'others', it describes the phenomenon of being 'pro-Jew emotionally…as part of anti-Fascism' as MP Dick Crossman put it a few years later. The chapter draws on psychoanalytic theories in an attempt to make sense of the dynamic underlying positive and inclusive perceptions about others and 'elsewhere'. This emerging affective culture is located in relation to a broader visceral cosmopolitanism that was to take shape over the course of the twentieth century.

Citation:
Nava, M. (2006) 'The Unconscious and Others: Rescue, Inclusivity and the Eroticisation of Difference 1930s Vienna' Published in C. Bainbridge, S. Radstone, M. Rustin and C. Yates (eds) (2006) Culture and the Unconscious, London: Palgrave pp 41-57 reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.