Methodology I: Political Ideologies Exist to Allow Unconscious Fantasies to become Articulated as Social Reality

Richard Koenigsberg
  1. The Nazis projected a fantasy into their ideology—allowing us to perceive the deep structure of their ideology. My method allows one to perceive the unconscious fantasies contained within an ideology. Ideologies are constituted by shared fantasies.
     
  2.  Metaphors and images contained within ideological language articulate the fantasy contained within the ideology. These are bound in consistent ways to the central symbolic objects constituting the ideology, such as “nation” and “Jew.” The recurrence of certain words, metaphors and images testifies to the fact that a consistent fantasy is being projected into the ideology.
     
  3. It is through the medium of ideology that a shared fantasy becomes part of the world. The ideology constitutes the modus operandi for the projection of a shared fantasy. "History" enacts shared fantasies. An ideology is believed, embraced and perpetuated--achieves status and power as an element of culture--insofar as it resonates with a fantasy and permits this fantasy to be articulated and activated upon the stage of society.
     
  4. Hitler described the desire for political reunification of Germany with Austria as the "elemental cry of the German-Austrian people for union with the German mother country," a longing that slumbered in the heart of the entire people to "return to the never-forgotten ancestral home." One cannot separate political aspirations from unconscious desires or fantasies. If Hitler had not projected his symbiotic fantasy into politics, the idea of uniting Austria and Germany would have had no meaning for him.
     
  5. Hitler's attachment to his political ideology derived from the fantasy he projected into it. When Hitler writes of the desire to reunite Austria and Germany as a longing that "burns in the hearts of children separated from their mother country" and as a wish to "return to the heart of their faithful mother," it sounds as if he'd been reading Margaret Mahler. How astonishing was the simplicity and directness with which he projected unconscious desires and fantasies into his ideology.
     
  6. Hitler created and embraced his ideology as the vehicle for articulating his fantasies. These fantasies constituted the motive for attaching to the symbolic forms.  Culture provides a framework or container into which unconscious fantasies are projected or externalized. 
     
  7. Language does not create the unconscious. Rather, language is a tool or vehicle allowing us to express or externalize unconscious fantasies or desires. Discourses are established and perpetuated to the extent that they fuel or sustain (shared) unconscious fantasies.
     
  8. Psychic determinism: The words, phrases, images and metaphors that appear in the writings and speeches of Nazi leaders do not occur by chance. Rather, these symbolic constructions express ideas, desires and fantasies present in the minds of Hitler and other Nazis. Hitler conveyed his messages through the medium of specific words, phrases, metaphors and images.  The ideology transforms latent desires and fantasies into a collective will to act. The will to act is generated by the wish to actualize or bring into reality the fantasy contained within the ideology. 
     
  9. The Final Solution grew out of a fantasy present in the minds of Hitler, Nazi leaders and many other Germans. This fantasy revolved around the nation as a body politic confronted with a threat to its existence in the form of a deadly disease, the Jew.
     
  10. Just as Freud interpreted jokes and slips of the tongue, so we may interpret societal discourses in terms of the unconscious meanings that they contain. One cannot escape the unconscious meaning of a discourse any more than thought can be detached from the body.  Nazism grew out of Hitler's fantasy (shared by many others) that his own body and the bodies of all other Germans could be fused into one gigantic body politic. The fantasy of a single, omnipotent body was the basis for Nazism. The wish (and belief that it was possible) to fuse one's body with this omnipotent body—constituted the foundation and motivation of everything that occurred.
  1.  Common imagery associated with central elements of an ideology reflect the striving to express a specific unconscious fantasy: make this fantasy manifest on the stage of social reality. We hypothesize that the recurrence of certain patterns of language among the Nazis, constant recurrence, reflected the fact that the Nazi ideology is expressing a shared unconscious fantasy.  An ideology constitutes the vehicle that permits the unconscious fantasy to be expressed as shared social reality.
     
  2. The Nazis were involved in the unconscious construction of social reality--and the specific social reality they constructed, their culture, was built on the foundation of a shared fantasy made manifest by virtue of certain common patterns of language.
     
  3. Language constitutes the vehicle whereby certain images and fantasies are attached to cultural objects--symbolic objects such as the nation and the Jew. Common patterns of imagery used in relationship to these cultural objects reflect the fact that a common fantasy is being projected into these objects. The shared patterns of language reflect a shared fantasy projected into social reality. To uncover the unconscious meaning of an ideology, observe consistent patterns of imagery in relationship to the ideology's central symbols.
     
  4. The metaphorical terms connected to the symbols reveal the meaning of the symbol; what it represents in the minds of people who attach to it. Imagery attached to manifest elements reveals the latent or unconscious meaning. By observing the imagery associated with elements of an ideology, one can determine the unconscious meaning of these elements. Consistent patterns of imagery in relationship to central symbols (e. g., the Jew, Germany, the people) permit one to understand the latent content of the ideology. We look for consistent patterns of imagery in the writings and speeches of leaders, government agencies, government officials, etc. Political ideologies exist to permit the articulation of a fantasies.