Description

REVISED, EXPANDED EDITION

The first manuscript of this book was thrown into the fire just minutes before a secret police raid in Communist Poland.

The second copy was personally delivered to a contact inside the Vatican, only to mysteriously vanish.

The third was pieced together in 1980s New York by the last surviving member of an underground research team, only to be banned from publication . . .

Until now.

Forged in the crucible of totalitarianism, Political Ponerology is written by psychiatrist Dr. Andrew M. Lobaczewski, who draws on his experience and clinical insight during the decades he spent under the crushing heel of the Nazi and Communist regimes.

Decades ahead of its time, and brimming with unique insights and depth of vision, Political Ponerology explores a genus of highly adapted and charming psychopaths who bend political parties, institutions, and media to their depraved worldview, dividing and hypnotizing entire populations, and paving a virtuous path to genocide, mass repression, and gulags.

From the darkness of past regimes, Political Ponerology brings you the keys to understanding and protecting yourself from today’s spellbinding ideologues, and tomorrow’s dictators.

This new edition has been extensively revised and expanded, the translation improved and annotated with the latest supporting research, examples, and new material previously unavailable in English

Essential reading for concerned thinkers and all sufferers of past and present totalitarianism.” —Michael Rectenwald, author of Google Archipelago and Springtime for Snowflakes

Fascinating, essential reading.” —Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford University, and author of The Lucifer Effect

 

About the Author

Andrew M. Łobaczewski

Andrew M. Łobaczewski was born in 1921 and grew up on a rural estate in the beautiful piedmountain region of Poland. During the Nazi occupation, he worked on the farm and as an apiarist, then as a soldier of the Home Army, an underground Polish resistance organisation. After the Soviet invasion of Poland, the authorities confiscated the estate and evicted Łobaczewski’s family.

While working for living, he studied psychology at Yagiellonian University in Cracow. The conditions under ‘Communist’ rule turned his attention to the matters of psychopathology, especially to the role of psychopathic persons in such a governmental system. He was not the first such researcher; the work was begun by a secret understanding of scientists of the older generation, which was destroyed shortly after by the Red security authorities. Łobaczewski then later became the one who succeeded in accomplishing the work and putting it down on paper.

Working in mental and general hospitals, and in the open mental health service, the author improved his skills in clinical diagnosis and psychotherapy. Finally, when suspected by the political authorities of knowing too much in the matter of the pathological nature of the system, he was forced to emigrate in 1977. In the USA he became engulfed by the activity of the long paws of the Red diversion. The work presented now was written in New York in 1984. All attempts to publish this book at this time failed.

With broken health, he returned in 1990 to Poland and went under the care of doctors, his old friends. His condition improved gradually, and he became able to work and publish another of his works in matters of psychotherapy and socio-psychology. Andrzej M. Łobaczewski passed away in late November of 2007.