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Dear Colleague,
Below is Part V of the paper I presented for the NEUROPSYCHOANALYTIC ASSOCIATION. This lecture was presented just a little over two months ago (in late April), but already I have thoughts that were not included in the lecture (even though it was two-hours long and my paper consisted of 10,000 words). So here are a few of my reflections that have occurred since.
Please please read the text of my lecture below first first. The ideas in this introductory box grow out of and build upon the ideas I presented in the in the lecture.
(1) Publication in journals (apart from the fact that academics need to publish in journals in order to be promoted) is, essentially, obsolete. The contemporary world and the Internet move at the speed of light. By the time a paper is vetted and accepted by the Board of a journal, many of the ideas in that paper will be outdated.
(2) Hitler used the word "incurable" to describe the Jew. In his mind, they were incorrigible. They could not be cured. What was their problem? They did not understand the "happiness of belonging to the great, inspiring community. They could not "fit in" or assimilate (even though they would have been happy to do so if they had been allowed to do so). Hitler believed that Jews suffered from some inherited "disease" that prevented them from joining a community. This was a metaphysical concept. To say "racism" is to say nothing. The question is: What was the "sickness" that Hitler ascribed to the Jewish race?
(3) Historians write about Germany's desire for "world conquest." What does this mean, the desire to "conquer the world?" Academics nowadays deconstruct nearly every concept. Yet historians live in a world of fixed, unalterable assumptions, as if it is natural or normal for certain human beings to desire to "conquer the world."
(4) In actuality, Hitler's primary objective (the word "conquest" doesn't appear more than a few time in Mein Kampf--check it out if you have the nerve)--was to kill Jews. The Reich moved into Russia so Hitler could find more Jews to kill. He called the Jews of Russia "Jewish-Bolsheviks." Same thing. You can call it war, but it was actually genocide. Many more "Jewish-Bolsheviks" were killed in the Soviet Union than Jews killed in the Holocaust. German Generals called it a "war of extermination." And Lucy Dawidowicz called the Holocaust the "war against the Jews."
(5) The Jewish disease was precisely their desire to be separate from the community. So contrary to those who argue that the Holocaust was a way of "excluding" the Jews, it was the vehicle for bringing Jews back into the fold. The death camps were a community: a community of death. Thus, Jews in the camps became like German soldiers and civilians: dying at Hitler's request.
(4) I also discussed in my lecture the Chinese insistence that Taiwan "return to the motherland." Why the desperate insistence that Taiwan return to the motherland (mommy and child are one)? Economically (realistically), it makes no sense at all. Trade between China and Taiwan is bountiful.
This is another case of the insistence that there be no separation. Taiwan must not be allowed to separate from the Chinese motherland. Why isn't this fantasy deconstructed? Political scientists take political desires for granted. Only psychology can solve problems like this one. Yet most psychologists and psychoanalysts stay out of politics. As if what occurs on the stage of politics functions according to different "laws" than those that govern human behavior in non-political contexts.
(5) The main source of pathology in Nazi Germany was that of attachment. Hitler insisted that each and every Germany had to be attached to each and every other German, and that each individual Germany had to be intimately attached to Germany. Yet some psychologists speak of "secure attachment" as if it is the sine qua non of mental health.
(6) Among the deepest human problems is the human refusal to separate, or one might say the insistence by some people that human beings not be allowed to separate. I immersed myself in Asian culture for six years. In many Asian cultures, there is barely a concept of "separation-individuation." In India, they might kill a daughter if she dares to separate from the family. Or they will insist on an "arranged marriage," which means being passed along from one family to another, not a single moment of separation.
I had a friend, Mahbuber Rahman (Alam) Kahn from Bangladesh. He told me the story of a male friend who got married to a lady over the telephone (the man was in the United States, the young lady in Bangladesh). They didn't trust her to take the boat ride my herself. Who knows what might have happened? Not a single moment of separateness or freedom.
And of course, Hong Kong was one place in Asia where there was a degree of freedom. But China found this unbearable. They began bashing Hong Kong heads. Suddenly, there is no more freedom in Hong Kong. Why do the Chinese find freedom (separation from China) so threatening? Where are the psychologists.
As far as what is occurring in Afghanistan, this remains to be analyzed. However, the main idea is that the Taliban (as fanatic Muslims) do not believe in freedom. The essence of their belief is submission to Allah. The very word "Islam" means "submission." What a delusion to imagine that one could bring "freedom to the Middle-East.
Yet crackpots like George Bush and his speechwriter and Norman Podhoretz and his wife insisted this was possible. "The people in the Middle-East want precisely what we want," this was the mantra. Massive ignorance dominates the public domain; the domain of politics. Yet people look toward the political world--focus on the political world--as if some sort of goodness or truth can be found there.
Ignorance about Vietnam. Ignorance about Vietnam. This is what we call the repetition compulsion.
(7) Of course, we all say that Hitler "lost" the Second World War. But at the very end in his Political Testament, he declared: "We have lanced the Jewish ulcer and the world will be eternally grateful." From the beginning of his career to the very end, Hitler did not abandon his belief that Jews were the source of a "disease" that had to cut out of the German body politic.
Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg, Director
Library of Social Science
PS: Please click here for information on viewing the video of this event and/or joining the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society.
PPS: Please scroll to the bottom of the page for an abstract of the lecture.
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PART V: of GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY
In a speech of May 10, 1933, Hitler declared:
Our aim is the dictatorship of the whole people, the community. I began to win men to the idea of an eternal national and social ideal—to subordinate one's own interests to the interest of the whole society. There are, nevertheless, a few incurables who had never understood the happiness of belonging to this great, inspiring community.
The term “incurable” was equated with inability to understand the “happiness of belonging to the community.” This was the Jewish illness. To be “sick” was to lack the ability to enjoy and integrate into a national community; to be incapable of subordinating personal interests to the interests of society. This inability to assimilate, the Jewish disease, was one that could not be cured.
What Hitler considered a disease, psychologically speaking, was the desire to exist in a condition of separation or separateness from a national community. We may be able to understand what this means by taking note of a similar dynamic operating in mainland China today. While many Taiwanese are ethnically Chinese, the country of Taiwan is separate from the Chinese nation—has a separate government and political system.
Taiwan has its own laws, culture, and economy. The leaders of China, however, refuse to entertain the possibility that Taiwan is a separate country; to consider the idea that Taiwan could ever be a separate country. Violently opposed to the idea of an independent Taiwan, China threaten to wage war when Taiwan asserts it is a separate nation. Taiwan must “return to the Chinese motherland.”
Historians write about Hitler’s idea of “world conquest.” What does this mean? Hitler’s fantasy was that Germany should swallow up every single nation. Conquest meant that the Reich would encompass everything in the world—except Jews, of course who could not be incorporated into any community. Killing Jews, the final solution, was a vehicle for bringing Jews back into the fold; incorporating them into the German nation-state; denying their existence as separate individuals.
Psychoanalysis has not focused sufficiently on this profound dynamic: The rage against separation—will to deny that an other possesses a separate existence. As a defense against this terrifying dynamic—denial of separateness—psychoanalysis has developed elaborate theories of “attachment,” as if it is self-evident that attachment is beneficent.
Yet attachment to a nation-state and refusal to conceive that human beings within a nation can exist separately from the nation-state—is the essence of totalitarianism. The totalitarian ideal is that all citizens bind together within the nation as one body.
According to Nazi ideology, there could be no such thing as a German citizen existing separately from Germany. Each and every German was considered part of—attached to—Germany. Jews, on the other hand according to Hitler, insisted on being separate from Germany; refusing to assimilate. The Final Solution was a way of saying, “This is the fate of anyone who dares to claim they are separate from the nation.”
Whether Jews wished to be separate from Germany or did not wish to be separate, this didn’t matter. Hitler thought they were incapable of being attached to Germany—or any nation. The inability to attach to a nation—become assimilated within a nation—was thought by Hitler to be genetically given.
This may seem strange, to think that a complex form of behavior is inherent within one’s genes. Yet this is how Hitler thought. The Jew was incapable of being assimilated into a nation—or civilization itself—by virtue of his or her genetic nature. From this perspective, the Jews had no choice. There were anti-social criminals by virtue of their very nature.
After the Second Opium War, China in 1898 ceded Hong Kong to Great Britain for 100 years and became a British colony. In 1997, Hong Kong was transferred back to China and given status as a “special administrative region” (SAR). Hong Kong would become part of the Republic of China, but would be allowed for fifty years to govern themselves under the “One Country, Two Systems” doctrine.
For a time, the Chinese government honored this agreement. But soon the idea of an autonomous Hong Kong became unbearable. The Chinese insisted that Hong Kong had to return to the Chinese motherland. Separation was intolerable.
Some of you have seen videos in which the police smash the heads of Hong Kong yan protesting or asserting their desire for freedom. These violent actions are authorized—demanded is a better word—by the Chinese government, enacting the conviction: “Hong Kong cannot be permitted to separate from the motherland.”
In the cases of both Taiwan and Hong Kong, issues surrounding separation-individuation are played out on the stage of reality. More precisely, the fantasy of symbiosis and refusal to allow separateness—are played out as foreign policy.
In Germany, 1933-1945, similarly, each and every human being was required to be “part of” the German nation; to “fuse” with Germany. Totalitarianism means no one is permitted to exist in a condition of separateness from the nation-state. Symbiosis is required. As the SS-man put it, “You will be a Nazi, or we will bash your head in.”
Jews, however, were defined as a people who lacked the ability to fuse with Germany—or with any other nation. In contemporary language, Jews were conceived as “globalists,” people who wander everywhere, reside anywhere, but settle down nowhere. They lacked the ability or desire to assimilate—become part of a national community. This anti-national or anti-social impulse was conceived by Hitler as criminality.
Jews, Hitler declared, “lacked the conception of an activity which builds up the life of the community.” It thus was beside the point whether a particular Jew was “decent or not.” He carried within himself ”those characteristics which nature has given him.” Because of this “inherited” unwillingness to assimilate, there could be no solution to the Jewish question. A true understanding of Jews and Judaism, Nazi scholarship declared, “insists on their total annihilation.”
Hitler’s anxiety about Jews was present from the beginning of his career as a politician in 1922 to the very end. A paranoid delusion was the foundation of Nazism. Terrified that the existence of Jews would lead to the downfall of Germany, indeed of all nations, the central dynamic of Hitler’s career was a rescue fantasy: to save Germany and Western Civilization by killing Jews everywhere.
Historians write about Germany attacking the Soviet Union as part of the quest for “world conquest” and “living space,” fitting Hitler into conventional historical narratives. I’ve searched Hitler’s texts—and the term “conquest” never appears. Hitler’s central project was to kill every Jew in the world. The Holocaust was just a beginning—the template for mass-murder.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union in July,1941. Abandoning the Battle of Britain, Hitler told Goebbels he simply was being “true to himself;” returning to the fundamental mission of National Socialism. For Hitler, the terms “Jewish-Bolshevism,” and “Jew” meant the same thing. The Holocaust and the war against the Soviet Union were the same war. There was only one war: The War against the Jews (Lucy Dawidowicz). There was only one enemy: The Jewish Enemy ( Jeffrey Herf).
Attacking the Soviet Union—operation Barbarossa—was senseless strategically. If Germany had continued waging war again her, Great Britain would have fallen. But Great Britain possessed Ayran qualities; Hitler didn’t hate her enough. So he turned to war against the Soviet Union, source of Jewish-Bolshevik bacteria.
Had Hitler been victorious against the Soviet Union and the nations of Europe and the Middle East, war would have continued endlessly. This is the nature of paranoid psychosis. Hitler’s ambition was to save the world by killing Jews everywhere. A psychotic delusion generated world history, 1933-1945—resulting in fifty-million dead human beings. Did Hitler “lose?” At the very end in his Political Testament, he declared, “We have lanced the Jewish ulcer and the world will be eternally grateful.”
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Richard Koenigsberg, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT OF LECTURE: "GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY." Presented on April 23, 2021
I present a method for studying the language of political leaders to reveal the unconscious fantasies that generate destructive forms of societal behavior like war and genocide. I focus on Hitler, who conceived Germany as a body politic consisting of the German people as cells of this body. Jews were pathogenic organisms—source of a “disease within the body of the people”. Hitler claimed that Germany possessed an immune system that automatically destroyed alien or not-self cells. Jews were conceived as bacteria, virus and parasites—cells whose continued presence within the German organism would lead to its death.
The Final Solution was as a struggle to destroy Jewish pathogens, thus to save the life of the German nation. I examine the case of Donald Trump, who similarly asserted that the presence of a certain class of people within the body politic would lead to national destruction. Trump identified “Mexican rapists” as the primal danger, requiring construction of a “wall” to prevent these alien cells from entering the body politic.
hy have psychiatrists not developed a concept of collective psychopathology? Over 200 million people died in the 20th century as a result of war and genocide. One would imagine that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts would enter the arena to explore the causes and meanings of collective forms of violence and mass-destruction. There is profound resistance toward exploring pathological behavior that is “normative.” This resistance perhaps stems from our attachment to countries as sacred objects. Political mass-murder is undertaken by nations. We seem unable to face the reality that the most extreme forms of violence are performed in the name of a beloved object. If we wish to “awaken from the nightmare of history”—we need to go where human beings have not gone before by exploring the relationship between violence and love. Why are the most self-destructive forms of human behavior undertaken in the name of mother-countries?
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