The Final Solution was Hysteria, Paranoia and the Functioning of the Immune System: Struggle to Evict a "Foreign Object" from within the National Self
Richard Koenigsberg
  1. HITLER: “Our Nation is not just an idea in which you have no part; you yourself support the nation; to it you belong; you cannot separate yourself from it; your life is bound up with the life of your whole people; the nation is not merely the root of your strength, it is the root of your very life.” (Baynes, p. 1117)
     
  2. 134--Himmler speech to the SS: “Alien bloodlines merged into this people; yet this people in the essence of its blood has had the strength to win through.  Against and again we have sifted out and cast aside what was unfit, what did not belong with us.  As long as we have the strength to do so, this brotherhood will be healthy.  If we were to forget for one moment the law of our basis as a people and the law of selection and of severity toward ourselves, in that moment we would have the seed of death in us; in that moment we would perish just as every human organization, just as every blossom in this world perishes at some time.
     
  3. 14--Lorenz--Draws analogy between “bodies and malignant tumors, on the one hand, and a nation and individuals within it who have become asocial because of their defective constitution, on the other hand.  The elimination of such elements is easier for the public health physician and less dangerous for the supra-individual organism, than such an operation by a surgeon would be for the individual organism.”
     
  4. 177--Himmler, in his 1935-6 propaganda booklet about the SS as an anti-Bolshevik battle organization: “This battle against peoples conducted by Jews has belonged, so far as we can look back, to the natural course of life on our planet.  One can calmly reach the conviction that this struggle of life and death is quite as much a law of nature as man's struggle against some epidemic, as the struggle of the plague bacillus against the healthy body.”
  5. The "disease" within the nation is the psychosomatic experience of a "foreign body" (the symbiotic mother) contained within the self. The experience of an internal foreign body is projected outward, leading to the wish to reject or kill objects in the external world that symbolize the foreign or "not self" object within one's body. 
  6. Paranoid rage is externalization of the immune response, the wish to destroy a painful object or experience within the self now externalized and directed toward an object outside the self  “in reality” that stands for or symbolizes the painful inner object.
  7. The internal object is an "irritant," like an allergen or an antigen that causes pain, which stimulates a reaction within the body whose purpose is to "eject" the object from within the boundaries of the body.  Hysteria and paranoia are the mental equivalents of the immune response, whose purpose is to free the psyche of alien mental representations, alien objects which are felt to "not belong" within the ego.
  8. The SS are the killer cells, biological soldiers who function as the immune system of the nation—destroying the pathogenic element. The “poison gas” was as if a chemical compound released by white blood cells. Nazism was treating the nation as if a real body suffering from a disease. The Nazis strive to make the nation into an immortal body not subject to death and decay. The Jew, however, is the principle of death, the reality principle—constantly reasserting, affirming that death must occur.
  9. The inner object is also the source of psychosomatic attacks within the muscular. The other within the self-evokes rage, and the wish to evoke this body from within one's own territory. This is the identification with the woman inside the self—two bodies contained within one body. The individual can become usurped by the other body within the self. This is the source of the struggle against oppression, the immune response, as well as the desire to “kill Jews.” Kill Jews means kill the other body inside the self, the destructive body, the immortal body that will “live on” within you forever (“my heart will go on”).
  10. THE FUNCTION OF THE INTERNET IS TO PROVIDE QUICK GRATIFICATION SO THAT YOU DON’T NEED AN OBJECT INSIDE THE SELF: THE MASTURBATION FANTASY IS EXTERNALIZED: ONE IS “EMPTIED OUT.” No more “inner world:” the self has been externalized into the Internet. The Internet becomes a new self: the projection of inner contents, splattered throughout the world.
  11. The experience of disease or oppression is feeling possessed, having one’s body taken over by a mental representation of an object that is not actually one’s self. It is not, really, a mental representation—or one would not feel oppressed. The object possesses the self in a psychosomatic way, and this is why there is the experience of such danger, eliciting paranoia and the “immune response.” The rage is the means to ward off the object--one’s own attachment to it—feeling that the object is part of one’s body—controlling it: INVASION OF THE BODY-SNATCHERS.
  12. The body rebels against objects psychosomatically experienced as a part of the self. This is why one may call the rejection of the object and effort to destroy it an “immune response.” One is struggling to free oneself from an object that is experienced as bound to one’s body. The immune response works to kill the enemy within. The organism struggles for freedom from an alien object. The Nazi destroys the Jew as a symbol of the malignancy within his own body (politic). The malignancy is both internal and external because the Nazi does not separate his own existence from the life of the nation.
  13. The SS are the killer cells, biological soldiers who function as the immune system of the nation—destroying the pathogenic element. The “poison gas” was as if a chemical compound released by white blood cells. Nazism was treating the nation as if a real body suffering from a disease. The Nazis strive to make the nation into an immortal body not subject to death and decay.
  14. The Jew, however, is the principle of death, the reality principle—constantly reasserting, affirming that death must occur. Goebbels, Hitler, and Himmler struggle to prevent this reality—as long as you continue to kill the source of death, the Jews, then death cannot occur. “Kill Jews,” this endless, obsessive effort to kill the idea of death, to maintain the life of the nation. Hitler plugged into the basic fantasy of nationalism—the country as an immortal body politic. It derived from St. Paul.
  15. The object is on and within the self, and this leads to the paranoid (immune) response that is the hysterical struggle to get rid of the foreign object within the self. Thus, all politics, which we perceive as emanating from “out there”, derive from mental representations that are actually bodily experiences, mentally represented.
  16. 33--Hitler speech before the Reichstag on Jan. 30, 1937, explaining the anti-Jewish policy he had inaugurated in NS Germany: “We endeavor, as well as we can, to make the German people immune against this infection. A part of our measures is the avoidance of any close relationship with the carriers of this poisonous bacillus.”