Methodology II: The Work of Ideology:
Our Human body gives rise to a Body Politic

Richard Koenigsberg
  1. The "work of ideology," comparable to "dream work," articulates manifest content in a society. Analysis of ideology, therefore, is the interpretation of cultural dreaming, a technique for revealing the shared fantasies of a culture. Metaphors articulate the breakthrough of unconscious material into social reality. The imagery contained with Hitler’s speeches evoked a fantasy that resonated with many Germans.
     
  2. Bodily fantasies give rise to bodily metaphors, which are projected, into ideology.  Nazi ideology is the externalization of fantasies about the body. Hitler's "picture of the world" was based on his experience of the nation as an actual body (politic) containing a "disease" that had to be removed if the nation was to survive. Genocide was activation of a collective fantasy about the body.
  1. "Metaphorical mapping," according to George Lakoff, occurs when "slots in a source-domain schema" get mapped onto "slots in the target domain." Target domains are abstract conceptual domains, whereas source domains are familiar ones, most often of the physical world. The "source domain" for Hitler and the Nazis was the human body. The abstract domain was the nation (conceived as a body politic). The Nazi project grew out of the idea that just as a human body might contract a disease and die, so might a body politic.
  1. Y. F. Khong points to the importance of seeking and finding in the empirical record evidence of the "repeated use of the same set of analogies over time." The identification of "systematic metaphors" in the statements made by decision-makers permits one to be confident that metaphors are playing a truly cognitive function.
  1. Freud’s analysis of dreams, slips of the tongue, and psychosomatic symptoms was guided by the principle of psychic determinism, which asserts that there are no accidents in the life of the mind. Our unconscious mental life is the source of the images we dream at night, the mistakes and blunders of our everyday life, and the pains in our bodies. A psychological approach to the study of culture extends the principle of psychic determinism. We examine belief systems, institutions and historical events assuming that these cultural creations have not come into being by chance.
  1. Analysis of metaphors appearing in texts is the method for perceiving how unconscious phantasies (about the body) are externalized into political and cultural symbols.  Analysis of metaphorical language reveals bodily symbolism that is externalized into ideology, To study bodily metaphors (in texts) is to understand the "transformational equations" (Howard Stein) whereby bodily fantasies are transformed into symbol systems.
  1. Shared unconscious fantasies are externalized into cognitive structures to shape the ideology. These fantasies are about the body.  Bodily fantasies give rise to bodily metaphors projected into ideology.  Nazi ideology externalized fantasies about the body. Hitler's "picture of the world" is based on his experience of the nation as an actual body containing a "disease" that had to be eliminated. Genocide constituted the activation of this fantasy.
  1. My methodology consists of studying the texts of political leaders. This is not the study of the “personality” of leaders. Leaders reveal who they are and what they wish to do by virtue of how fantasies are externalized into their public statements. The words they use embody and reveal the fantasies that are the source of—contain the meaning of--their ideologies.
  1. A leader divines elements of the “collective will” of a people, raising it into public consciousness; discloses it. The leader brings into consciousness—provides a container for—phantasies that had been latent within a people. His words both create and reveal a fantasy. His ideology constitutes the vehicle for articulating a shared unconscious phantasy.
  1. The metaphor of the "body politic" reveals the deep structure of the idea of a society, state or nation. The idea of “national unity” often contains the fantasy of many bodies fused together to create a single, omnipotent body. This body is something other than one’s own body, but contains one’s body (along with many other bodies). The body politic is an omnipotent body with which one’s own body is fused.  
     
  2. Hitler’s fantasy was that of many bodies fused to a single body, the “body of the people.” Hitler imagined himself to be “head” of this body, which he controlled. “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. You are all one, belonging to me.” The German people were “cells” of this body. This is what Hitler saw—and you can see—at the Nuremberg rallies: many bodies crushed closely together to create a single body or mass of flesh. This was Hitler’s idea of the power of Germany: many bodies welded or fused together as if to constitute a single body that could accomplish anything. A single body controlled by Hitler’s will—that could conquer the world.
     
  3. Melanie Klein interpreted by Thomas Ogden: Biological processes are mirrored in activities of the mind called unconscious phantasies. Phantasy is the psychic representation of biology. Phantasy never loses its connection with the body. Phantasy content is always ultimately traceable to thoughts and feelings about the working and contents of one's own body in relation to the workings and contents of the bodies of others.
     
  4. SYMBIOTIC FANTASY is the essence of Nazism: The feeling that one's own body is bound to a larger body. The idea of “obedience to authority” is not an abstract, mental state. This desire is constituted by the desire to be at one with a larger body. One does not wish to separate from the societal body. To submit to this body—to be obedient—is to lose one’s own willing function—to internalize the will of “society” embodied in a leader or leadership group.
     
  5. The coherence of an ideology reflects the coherence of the fantasy that an ideology embodies and makes manifest.  An ideology is a part of culture—embraced by members of a population—insofar as it permits the expression of a shared fantasy. Cultures are held together by the fantasies that they share. Hitler spoke continually of the “disintegration” of society, which meant loss of the fantasy that held the German people together. The disintegration of the body politic; disintegration of his own body. The Jew was the “force of disintegration,” death instinct within the body politic. German unity was opposed by the Jewish force of disintegration: the wish for separation from society.
  6. Each of us exists in a dialectic between the wish to fuse with society and desire to separate from it. Symbiosis and separation. Symbiosis may be experienced as oppression, a gigantic body politic weighing down upon one’s self. We all feel this burden of society within us, symbol of an omnipotent object within the self. Separation means isolation, disconnection with society, freedom; fear of running amuck.
  7. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf of the "elemental cry of the German-Austrian people for union with the German mother country." An Austrian, Hitler felt he had been separated from his mother (country), and was in a state of despair. “The heart and memory of German Austrians never ceased to feel for the common mother country." Separation was unbearable. Those who knew what it meant to be German, Hitler wrote, felt and understood the "deep longing which burns at all times in the hearts of children separated from their mother-country." And finally, Hitler did unite Austria with Germany, so astonishing that Hitler could have brought this infantile fantasy into the external world--to shape political history.
  8. The images and metaphors used by Hitler—bound to the central terms of his ideology--reveal the nature and shape of the unconscious fantasy and source of the ideology's appeal. Hitler created and embraced his ideology as  vehicle for articulating his fantasies. The fantasies constitute the motive for attaching to the symbolic form. Ideology provides a framework: a container into which unconscious fantasies are projected.
  9. Words or symbolic constructions like "Austria" and "Germany" had meaning for Hitler to the extent that he projected his unconscious fantasies into them. Language does not create or define the unconscious. Rather, language is a tool or vehicle that allows us to express or externalize the unconscious. Discourses are perpetuated to the extent that they are fueled or sustained by (shared) unconscious fantasies. We project our fantasies outward into culture.
  10. Norman O. Brown said: “Culture exists in order to project the unconscious phantasies into external reality—where they can be seen and mastered.” Culture as the dependent rather than independent variable. Culture as the fulfillment of our wishes. The desire to fly came before the invention of the airplane. The desire for an omnipotent father-figure came before God. Fantasies are the source of cultural creations or inventions. Then we pretend it’s all coming from out there: that “somebody up there” is sending us messages.
  11. But with the advent of the Internet (the most profound wish-fulfillments of them all), we begin to understand the meaning of “uploading.” We can create culture ourselves. I’m doing it write now. Everything that appears on the Internet was “uploaded” by some human being at one time or another. In fact, everything that exists in the world was created or uploaded by some human being. We forget the human source. We want to forget the human source. Wars happen because of “historical forces.” It’s considered sophisticated to “contextualize” things, as if “culture” has nothing to do with us. “Monsters from the Id.” Imagining the monsters out there. As if we did not create those monsters from the substance of our being.