The White Hotel takes place in central Europe in the years leading up to World War II, during a period when the well-established conventions of bourgeois social order were displaced by the irrational eruptions of national socialist ("nazi") movements. In this situation, the forces of change were felt at the personal as well as the societal level: people underwent severe conflicts between the repressive, conservative drives that resisted awareness of new conditions and the revolutionary, liberalizing impulses that urged them to fervently embrace radical transformation. Those who were unable to fully accept either alternative expressed their ambivalence in the form of psychological problems, for which the psychoanalytic profession offered the best hope of effective treatment.

Many observers of the central European scene during these years have commented upon the conditions which offered fertile soil for the growth of psychoanalysis, but it is Thomas's singular achievement to...