| The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism. Richard A. Koenigsberg
"A truly bold and provocative treatise."
—Political Psychology
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III. What Do Ideologies Do?
In his essay, "The Jewish Parasite," Alexander Bein notes that in Nazi ideology words "assume a definite biological aspect." The original character of the word "parasite," for example, as a mere simile and comparison, gradually is effaced and replaced by "the word parasite in its actual meaning as a biological organism," establishing the identity of Jews with parasites.
Hitler described Jews as parasites, but also as bacteria and viruses. Nazi ideology was constructed based on the fantasy of Germany as a "living organism" containing the Jew as a disease that threatened to cause the death of the nation. Bein observes that the language inherent in the images and similes used to describe the Jew gained such power over the German people to make "image and reality one."
The rise of Nazism is an example of the "social construction of reality." Upon what foundation, however, was Nazism constructed? Hitler's Nazi ideology revolved around the fantasy of Germany as a living organism containing virulent Jewish microorganisms. Genocide was undertaken as a form of immunology: a struggle to kill off pathogenic cells to save the organism.
Bein observes that Nazi ideology presented Jews as corroding and poisonous parasites, as vermin, bacteria and bacilli, everywhere infesting and striving to "destroy the body of the German people, and each individual German with a demonic power, driven by their law of existence as parasites, bacilli and vermin." This depiction of the Jew, Bein says, "paralyzed to a large extent any internal resistance on the part of the masses." The metaphor of the Jew as a "bacilli not to be negotiated with, but to be exterminated," could in the atmosphere of Bio-Mythology, "become a horrible reality."
However, what does it mean to say that Germany is a "body containing Jewish bacteria?" This metaphor is manifest content containing a latent meaning. Analysis of recurring images within a leader's rhetoric allows one to uncover the unconscious fantasies that are the source of the ideology. To discover the meaning of an ideology is to seek to know why it exists.
Social theory rarely addresses the reasons why certain ideologies exist. Scholars write about "dominant discourses," but the question is why particular discourses become dominant. To answer the question of why particular ideas are embraced and perpetuated, I suggest a psychological approach: What does this ideology do for the people who embrace it? What role does the ideology play in the psychic life of its adherents?
Culture is not a domain separate from human beings. Ideologies exist to the extent that people produce, espouse and perpetuate them. Ideologies are created by human beings for human beings. Ideologies perform psychic work, allowing people to encounter, work through and attempt to master fundamental desires, fantasies, conflicts and existential dilemmas.
To comprehend the rise of Hitler one must uncover the sources of the appeal of Nazism. Why did millions of Germans become hysterical when Hitler spoke? Why were men like Goebbels and Himmler mesmerized by Hitler's words? Hitler's ideas touched a deep chord. His ideology drew forth and crystallized latent desires and fantasies, allowing them to manifest as social reality.
IV. The German Body Politic and the Denial of Death
Hitler's ideology was a radical form of nationalism—revolving around the fantasy of the German body politic in a state of disintegration. Insofar as Hitler identified profoundly with his nation, he experienced Germany's disintegration as the disintegration of himself. Hitler was unable to separate political ideas from his inner state of being. He articulated inner states of being through his ideology.
What is this ideology of nationalism, still so powerful that we barely recognize it as or call it an ideology? The song, America the Beautiful: "Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesty above the fruited plain!" Nationalism revolves around the quest for narcissistic omnipotence. The ego of the nationalist seeks to expand by imagining that it is fused with a vast geographical territory; the entire "space" of national life.
The ideology of nationalism suggests that the entirety of one's country—it's history, people and accomplishments—exist within the self. Nationalism implies the absence of a boundary between self and country. According to this ideology, self and nation are inextricably bound. To be a "man without a country" seems inconceivable.
However, if the ego's wish for narcissistic expansion is projected into the idea of one's nation, so is the ego's vulnerability and tendency toward fragmentation. Hitler externalized anxiety into the idea of Germany and believed his nation was in danger of disintegrating. He experienced the idea of death (his own death) as a perception that Germany—the body politic with which he identified his own body—was falling apart.
Language shapes the mind and structures thought, but also constitutes a vehicle for externalizing mind and thought. Each of us possesses a force of disintegration operating within our mind/body. Each of us is in the process of moving toward our demise. Hitler experienced and articulated the idea of death in the form of a belief that his nation was disintegrating. The Nazi project was to defeat Germany's force of disintegration: to overcome death by creating a body politic that could live forever.
One of the ways human beings deal with the issue of mortality is through the creation of nations or "omnipotent bodies politic:" entities that seem to exist in a dimension separate from organic existence. We project the idea of our small, frail bodies into the idea of these imaginary, omnipotent bodies, then imagine that we will "live on" as if contained within these immortal bodies.
Hitler’s ideology revolved around the denial of death, suggesting that the bodies of individual Germans could fuse into one to create a single, immortal body. In Hitler's fantasy, the German people were united (massed together as cells of an organism) to create one, indestructible body that could live forever. In this typical nationalist fantasy, the country or body politic is imagined as an entity that exists above and beyond the lives or bodies of individuals.
In spite of his effort to embrace Germany as "vesture for the eternal" (Fichte), Hitler's sense of the reality of death continued to return in the form of a perception that the national body was in the process of disintegrating or decomposing. Hitler projected the idea of death into the idea of the Jew. The German body politic could become immortal if it were not for the Jewish principle of death operating within it.
The purpose of Nazi ideology was to split off the idea of death and to locate it in a symbolic representation, the Jew. Hitler and the Nazis then committed themselves to a struggle against death. This struggle against death took the form of an effort to "kill off" the symbolic object into which the idea of death had been projected. If only the Jew could be eliminated, then Germany would live forever.
Hitler promulgated the ideology of anti-Semitism in his struggle to overcome or defeat death. The idea that bodies become diseased and die was projected into the Jew. Hitler then committed himself to a monumental (futile) "struggle" (Mein Kampf) that took the form of attempting to "kill off" death. Hitler aspired to destroy that symbolic entity (the Jew) into which the idea of death had been projected.
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