How could the Holocaust have happened? How can people do such things to other people? Questions such as these have animated discussion of the Holocaust from our earliest awareness of what had happened. These questions have engaged the lay public as well as academics from many different fields. Psychologists have taken an active role in trying to understand and explain the motivation, thinking, and behavior of all those involved in and affected by the Holocaust. The present volume is, in part, an attempt to provide a kind of historical roadmap to the diverse psychological explanations and interpretations that have been developed by psychologists over the last several decades. While many psychological discussions of the Holocaust dismiss or diminish the significance of work that antedates the Milgram obedience experiments in the early 1960s, this book engages some of these earlier formulations in detail. It strives to be, in this sense, a more complete history of psychological thought on the Holocaust. As many psychologists now accept the idea that a comprehensive psychology of the Holocaust must include more than social influence, the book addresses the question, "What, then?" The answer can be found by looking both backward and forward in time. Gordon Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice remains one of the best psychological attempts to grapple with the Holocaust written, though that was not its primary purpose. In this volume, the reader will find both echoes of Allport and new ideas for ways psychologists can engage this profoundly important subject.

About the Author
George Mastroianni was trained as an experimental psychologist and conducted empirical research in a variety of areas related to human performance as an Army scientist. He taught a variety of subjects in psychology at the US Air Force Academy in twenty years of classroom teaching, and now teaches leadership in the Psychology of Leadership Program at Pennsylvania State University.

Reviews
In Of Mind and Murder experimental psychologist George Mastroianni produces a detailed and insightful account of the voluminous psychological literature on the Holocaust...an excellent wide-ranging examination of the vast psychological literature on the Holocaust and as such represents a significant step to a fuller understanding not only of the Holocaust in particular, but of the history of genocide in general. * George R Mastroianni, Holocaust and Genocide Studies *
At once a riveting critical history of the discipline of psychology and a masterful nuanced analysis of the most important psychological theories about Nazism and the Holocaust, Of Mind and Murder is consistently lucid and hugely informative. The deleterious consequences of long-term exposure to lies, the role of threatened narcissism, the impact of prejudice and the management of cognitive dissonance, the routinization of cruelty and the self-interested distortions of memory: all of these issues remain painfully urgent, and Mastroianni's book provides a superb, indispensable guide. * Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author ofCold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190638238
Author George R. Mastroianni
Format Hardback
Page Count 456
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 703g
Dimensions(mm) 145mm * 239mm * 36mm