"Hitler is Germany, Just as Germany is Hitler” is how Rudolf Hess put it. Hitler identified his own body with the German body politic. This little man became gigantic by virtue of his fantasy that he was bound to the entire German nation and people. Hitler became the omnipotent body with which he identified. In his mind, there was no separation between his own body and the body politic. Hitler expanded to encompass the entire nation. The entire German nation existed within Hitler’s body.

This sense of power and self expansion (e. g., Hitler’s role at the Nuremberg rallies) may seem wonderful. However, it is oppressive to have a gigantic body attached to one’s own body. What a burden it must have been for Hitler: to imagine that he was responsible for the entire Germany nation and people. No escape. Hitler was swallowed up by Germany. The nation consumed his existence.

“Oppression” describes the experience of a massive body (politic) attached to the self. One is oppressed by the very body with which one identifies. One seeks to become larger and more powerful by virtue of identification with the symbolic order; but it also weighs one down. “Society” (a mental representation) is experienced as a burden negating the self. That which creates a sense of self-expansion also diminishes the self.

Hitler’s real life—his actual existence as a human being—was drained off into the life of the body politic. The body politic became parasitic upon Hitler’s own body. Hitler was consumed by his struggle for the eternal German Reich—the dream of immortality. He was dominated by the omnipotent object to which he sacrificed his life. 

Hitler proclaimed to his people: “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Hitler was one of those people who became nothing by virtue of identification with Germany. In his passion to become everything, Hitler became nothing. His small body shrunk to insignificance within the massive body politic. What enlarged the sense of self (the symbiotic fantasy of absolute unity) also shrunk the self.

Hitler and the Nazis described Jews as “parasites in the body of the people.” A parasite is a living organism that lives on or in another organism: consuming its substance in order to survive. The Jewish parasite was experienced by Hitler as if lodged within his body: within the German body politic. This parasite was sucking the nation’s blood, just as it was devouring Hitler’s blood. What was this parasite that Hitler imagined was consuming his own life and the life of Germany?

The Jewish parasite was none other than the nation itself—the German body politic—experienced in its negative form. The parasite was the body politic lodged within Hitler’s body. The parasite was Germany consuming Hitler’s life substance: the painful experience of an omnipotent object bound to the self. The Jew symbolized devotion to immortality—experienced as an oppressive burden. 

Germany was a monster—a gigantic, insatiable entity—to which Hitler and many other Germans devoted their existence. Hitler and the German people embraced this monster: held it close to their hearts; sacrificed for it. Two-million German men died in the First World War in the name of this monster. But Hitler would not call Germany a monster. This was his beloved nation: Hitler refused to abandon Germany.

 So the Jew became the monster—the “eternal blood sucker”—symbol of the German nation experienced in a negative, oppressive guise. Jews symbolized an entity that wanted to consume or conquer the world (Germany). Jews symbolized Hitler’s experience of a body existing within his own body. The Jew symbolized negative, parasitic dimension of the omnipotent object: the group as an entity that had invaded the body and was consuming it; draining the human body of life and energy. 

Why couldn’t Hitler abandon Germany? Walk away from this object that was usurping his existence? Because he was already too far gone. Hitler’s body and the national body had come to constitute a single entity. In Hitler’s mind, the two bodies could not be split apart. The German nation had invaded Hitler's body. But Hitler refused to call this invader Germany. He called the invader the Jew: alien of the interior.

Germany was the omnipotent part of Hitler: the King’s second body: a gigantic, immortal body that he  internalized in order to deny the actuality of his small, vulnerable body. He could not acknowledge that it was precisely Germany that threatened to consume him; admit that the object to which he had devoted his life was the source of anguish and oppression. He refused to identify Germany as the monster.

 Hitler split off and projected the idea of the monster onto the Jew. The Jew became the entity inside Hitler that was consuming him; the foreign body within the self. The Jew was identified as a parasite threatening to consume Hitler and the German people. The Jew represented the German nation—devouring the German people.

 Francis Tustin states that awareness of bodily separateness may be experienced as a “loss of part of the body, which leaves a ‘hole’ or a ‘wound’.” The idea of separation from Germany was experienced by Hitler as if a loss of a part of his body: the omnipotent body politic. Separation from the body politic would split Hitler into two: his body politic would  detach from his actual body. What would remain was an insignificant, mortal man.

Hitler experienced separation from Germany as disintegration of himself. To separate from Germany was equivalent to being split into two. Hitler refused to abandon the omnipotent object with which his body had become identified. He refused to let go of the gigantic part of his body: its body politic. He fused to allow the immortal part of himself to die.