When Hitler writes of his 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”—we witness the astonishing directness with which he projects fantasies into his ideology. We are astonished to see how primal fantasies are woven so deeply into Hitler’s political ideology and to realize that these fantasies were the source and bedrock of history.

Why do we imagine that fantasies observed within clinical settings are not expressed and enacted by human beings at all times and in all places? According to Herman Nunberg, “Transference is a projection,” meaning that the patient’s “inner and unconscious relations with his first libidinal objects are externalized.” Nunberg goes on to say that patients “displace emotions belonging to an unconscious representation of a repressed object to a mental representation of an object in the external world.”

Freud maintained that processes within the ego can be perceived (with few exceptions) only with the help of projection. Nunberg observes that the tendency to transfer infantile experiences into reality—and to act them out—can be observed “not only in the transference situation, but also independently of it.” An urge to establish identity of perception through repetition of past experience is “undeniable.” Nunberg suggests that projection helps individuals to “find the lost object in the outside world.”

Rudolf Hess often introduced Hitler at mass rallies declaring, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” The fantasy of symbiotic union or identification with an omnipotent object had been transferred into external reality. The dream of dual-unity was replicated or recreated in relation to a cultural object. In Hitler’s fantasy, his own body was co-extensive with the German body politic.

Ideologies constitute transference vehicles that act as a centrifugal force, sequestering libido or psychic energy bound to an infantile fantasy—making this energy available for reality-oriented action. Only a small fraction of people in history have developed a transference within the psychoanalytic situation. It may be that culture itself functions in a manner analogous to the transference, working to allow fantasies, anxieties and conflicts to be projected into symbolic structures.