Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology For information on ordering, please click here. “The best critical analysis in English of Hitler’s thought.” —Colin Day

This issue of the LSS Newsletter is a response to the Newsletter posted earlier today about Jordan Peterson's thoughts and reflections on the "Jewish disease" and my book, Hitler's Ideology. The flaw in Peterson's thinking is to have taken Hitler's metaphors or bodily images literally. Hitler's metaphors contained a profound symbolic meaning.
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(1) The Nazi response to the Jew had nothing to do with "disgust." Neither Hitler, Himmler nor Goebbels ever used a term like this or responded to the Jew in this way. The primary reaction of the Nazis to the Jew was rage. The Nazis were not reacting to the physical appearance of the Jew. They were reacting to the symbolic meaning of the Jew.

(2) What was the nature of the "disease" from which the Nazis imagined the Jews were suffering?  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.

To be "incurable," from Hitler's point of view, was to be possessed by an illness. This illness was an unwillingness to belong to a community. This the Jewish "sickness" in Hitler's mind. This Hitler's definition of the Jew. He conceived of the Jew as a individual who could float around the world, here, there and everywhere. Hitler hated the Jew because he could not bear the idea that there could be such a thing as an individual who not bound to a  national community. "You are nothing, your nation is everything."

(3) So what does it mean to talk about Nazism as an "embodiment movement" ( as Peterson does)? Hitler experienced the German nation as if a real body. This was his fundamental fantasy (see Table 6 directly below). He equated his own body with the German body politic (the "national organism"). Hitler imagined Jews were incapable of living within a nation or body politic. This was their disease. 

(4) Hitler conceived of himself as a medical doctor. His task was to diagnose and cure Germany's disease. The “cure of a sickness,” Hitler declared, can be achieved "only if its cause is known;” and the same was true of “curing political evils.” He stated that if one wanted to “cure this era which is inwardly sick and rotten,” one had to summon the courage to “make clear the causes” of the disease. The only way to cure diseased conditions was to “disclose their causes.” Hitler identified Jews as the cause of Germany's disease, requiring radical surgery: the Final Solution.

(6)This was the core of Hitler’s ideology—the idea that Germany was suffering from a potentially fatal disease, the continuing presence of which would lead to the death of the nation. Recurring images and metaphors in Hitler’s writings and speeches reveal the fantasies that were the source of Hitler’s attraction to his ideology (see Table below). 

7) Many Germans resonated with Hitler's belief that Germany was suffering from a disease. Thus, the Final Solution, a monumental effort to cure Germany's disease. The enactment of this fantasy was the history of Nazism.

Table 6. The National Body is Diseased