A Contribution from Film to a Psychoanalytic Explanation of Large Consequence - Haneke's Affirmation of Historical Antecedents to Nazism

ABSTRACT In his masterpiece, The White Ribbon, writer and film‐maker Michael Haneke creates a tale that jars the viewer with his portrayal of life in a (German) village at the threshold of World War I. But he also gratifies this psychoanalytic viewer in two ways: (1) in the historically documented realistic portrayal of harsh child rearing and its then‐unrecognized potential highly destructive consequences; and (2) in the psychoanalytic cogency of his portrayal, given that established psychoanalytic and psychological theorizing compelled by evidence‐based findings asserts just what Haneke tells us: that abuse (and neglect) of children generate the hostile‐destructive‐laden psychodynamic that underlies the formation of delinquent and criminal characterology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.