Totalitarianism conceives of nations as omnipotent bodies encompassing everything within. In Hitler’s fantasy, the German people were united within a gigantic body politic as if a single mass of flesh. Insofar as each individual was fused with this body, therefore there was no such thing as separation or separateness.

Hitler did not believe—refused to acknowledge—that there was a domain of reality separate from the nation-state. Each human body could survive only bound to a body politic.

Norman O. Brown in Life against Death: the Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959) states that “New objects must substitute for the human body and there is no sublimation without the projection of the human body into things” (p. 281). Hitler and the Nazis sought to recover the infantile fantasy of an omnipotent body through creation of an omnipotent body politic. The fantasy of an omnipotent body was rediscovered in a projective container: the German volk.

Nations are imagined to be entities contained within a vast, geographic space. "America the Beautiful:”

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

To the extent that one identifies with one’s nation, one becomes this vast, geographic space. The boundaries of one’s ego expand so that one imagines that what is contained within the space of one’s nation is contained within one’s self. The wound of separation from the fantasy of infantile omnipotence is healed by connecting to a new omnipotent object. The ego fuses with a gigantic body of territory in order to imagine that it is powerful and immense.

According to Freud in Civilization and Its Discontent (1929, p. 15):

Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing feeling which corresponds to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.

The infantile ego imagines that the entire world is contained within or attached to it. A trauma occurs when the ego recognizes that it is separate from the world. The ego splits off from the world. One comes to perceive one’s smallness and insignificance: the world is no longer bound to the self. Identification with one’s nation represents an effort to recover the all-embracing ego-feeling. The entire world (the portion of it contained within one’s nation) is re-incorporated into the ego.

Identification with one’s nation implies equating one’s ego with everything that exists and occurs within the boundaries of one’s nation. The ego expands by projecting itself into or incorporating everything that exists “out there.”

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (in The Ego Ideal) states that the individual’s megalomania finds its expression when each person’s ego is “extended to the whole group.” The group allows each member to feel himself to be, not a minute, undifferentiated particle of a vast whole, but on the contrary “identified with the totality of the group, thereby conferring on himself an omnipotent ego, a colossal body.”

The nation is the fantasy of an omnipotent ego, projected into the world. Nations are symbolic objects permitting us to recapture our lost omnipotence—curing the wound of separation. The tendency to identify with one’s nation and culture seems so natural and normal that we rarely take note of the fact that a psychological mechanism is involved. The unconscious fantasy of being fused with the symbolic order constitutes the basis of the individual’s relationship with society.

To internalize one’s nation into one’s self is to incorporate: its entire history, especially its wars; its political leaders; its artistic achievements; it’s natural wonders and monuments; its scientific achievements; its cities and buildings; its economic development; its crimes and criminals; its music and movies; its sporting events and athletic heroes. What is actually a great distance from the self comes to be experienced as very close to the self. One’s nation and its national life become intimate companions.

People make statements like “we” won (or lost) the war; or that “we” sent a man to the moon; or that “we” won a gold medal in the Olympics. People make these extraordinary statements, but it doesn’t seem extraordinary when they do so. The fact that one is a citizen of nation gives one the right to make such statements. Nationalism means that everything that occurs within the boundaries of a certain geographic space is imagined to relate or belong to the self.

The individual’s sense of smallness and limitations is overcome or denied through a psychic mechanism whereby one equates one’s ego with an entire nation. Freud theorized that the ego is ultimately a body ego. Insofar as this is the case, incorporation of the nation into the self-possesses a psychosomatic meaning. The entire nation becomes a part of one’s body. One’s body becomes a body politic.

The wound or loss of self that occurs upon separating from infantile love objects leads to identification with one’s nation and culture as a means toward healing the split within the self. Separation means that the ego has been severed into two: one has lost a part of the self. One overcomes the sense of separateness, frailty, incompleteness, helplessness, and insignificance—by attaching to an omnipotent body politic.