SOURCE: “Bringing the Holocaust Home: The Freudian Dynamics of Kubrick's The Shining,” in The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 78, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 103-25.

In the following essay, Cocks contends that Kubrick's aim in The Shining is to personalize the Holocaust for the viewer.

World War II has relatively recently begun to take on a dark mythopoeic aspect for the artists of the postmodern age. Unlike World War I, whose horrors preoccupied European society and art right from the armistic of 1918, for a generation afterward the second “Great War” of the twentieth century was generally celebrated as a “good war” by the victorious Allied nations. The former Axis powers converted to the ideologies of their conquerors and, with them, concentrated on economic recovery, the rigors and responsibilities of the Cold War, and the repression of the horrors of the previous conflict. These preoccupations were challenged beginning in the sixties. The Holocaust...