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Essays/Papers by Richard A. Koenigsberg
Through Feb. 22, 2019, revised 8/4/2024
Dear Colleague,
As we move into direct interaction and dialogue with many of you who have been receiving this Newsletter, you may wish to read some of Koenigsberg's papers and essays, which constitute the bedrock of the theories we have been publishing here.
Many of these were originally published in journals, others directly online.
I think you will benefit from reading these longer research documents, which are the foundation for the shorter pieces which you have been receiving through this Newsletter.
To access any paper, simply click the link in red.
Thank you,
Andrew Hammer
As the Soldier Dies, so the Nation Comes Alive (Newsletter)
- Awakening from the Nightmare of History (Paper). A psychological approach to the study of identifies the sources and meanings of its cultural formations. For any ideology or institution, I pose the question: “Why does it exist?” To understand an element of culture requires uncovering the psychic function it provides or performs. An ideology or institution comes into being—is embraced and perpetuated—insofar as it does something (psychologically) for individuals within that society.
- Aztec Warriors/Western Soldiers (Newsletter)
- Aztec Warriors/Western Soldiers: The Body Politic Feeds Upon Human Bodies (Paper). The First World War was undertaken and perpetuated under the assumption that the “lives” of nations were more significant than the lives of human beings. Germany, France and Great Britain were fed with the bodies and blood of soldiers—sacrificial victims—to keep these entities alive. “The individual must die so that the nation might live” is a phrase that has been uttered throughout the history of warfare. What does this mean? The First World War enacted this proposition: the nation was imagined to come alive insofar as individuals died—was fed with the bodies and blood of sacrificed victims.
Buddhism is a practice revolving around the idea of “non-attachment,” proposing a method allowing the self to develop distance from society. This methodology is applicable to the study of political ideology: Buddhist practice cultivates a psychic space of distance or separateness from cultural ideals and values. By virtue of Buddhist practice, one nurtures and expands a part of the self that is separate from ideologies with which one might identify. The objective is to develop a psychic place or space that has not been colonized by the symbolic order.
The evidence indicates that Hitler waged war in order to sacrifice the German people. His was an ideology of death: kill others (the nation’s “enemies”), then act to bring about the destruction of his own people. There is not a single sentence in Mein Kampf about “conquest.” Most people, of course, embrace the fantasy of Hitler as a failed conqueror. It also seems as if the sun revolves around the earth.
The phrase “Death to the non-believers” conveys the central meaning of collective forms of violence. Members of one group seek to dominate or kill members of another group that do not bow down to the sacred object worshipped by one’s own group. Terroristic violence is intended to compel belief by forcing members of another group to submit to the same sacred object to which members of one’s own group have submitted.
The Holocaust depicts the ugliness, futility and meaninglessness of submission to the nation-state, sacrificial death stripped of words like honor, heroism and glory.
The ideology of nationalism is constructed based on a binary. On the one hand is one’s own country, conceived as absolutely good. On the other is the enemy, conceived as absolutely evil. Absolute goodness is imagined to be threatened by absolute evil. To rescue goodness from evil, the source of evil (the enemy) must be destroyed. Collective forms of violence grow out of this myth or fantasy projected into reality.
The creation of ‘History’ requires: (1) Political leaders who persuade human beings to perform acts of violence. (2) People (journalists and historians) who record performances of political violence. It is not as if the violent acts that constitute history are separate from the recording of these acts. Journalists and historians are active participants, not bystanders. Their role is to ‘witness’ violent political acts, thus to create ‘history’ by recording them.
Through systematic analysis of images and metaphors, it is possible to reveal the deep structure of an ideology. Based on analysis of the images and metaphors contained within Hitler’s writings and speeches, I found that his ideology revolved around a fantasy about the body, more precisely, about the German body politic. The actions of the Nazis represented the enactment of a bodily fantasy.
The revolutionary objectives of Hitler and Lenin were identical: to remove or cut out or amputate the source or cause of a deadly disease within the body politic in order to prevent the national organism from decomposing or dissolving. Violent political acts become necessary and unavoidable: If the disease within the body of the people was not eliminated or destroyed, the nation would die.
Hitler created the Holocaust based on his understanding of warfare as the occasion when nations sacrifice their soldiers. “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without the slightest regret for the spilling of precious German blood,” he declared, “then I naturally also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.” The Holocaust grew out of Hitler’s insight into the meaning of warfare. If he as a national leader had the right to order German soldiers to die, why did he not also have the right to require Jews—mortal enemies of the German people—to die?
- I Move, Therefore I Am: Elvis Presley, Rock ‘n’ roll, and the Liberation of the American Body (Paper). In 1957 Jerry Lee Lewis sang, “You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain. Too much love drives a man insane. You broke my will, but what a thrill. Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire.” Rock ‘n’ roll was the force that split the atom and shattered the American ego: a nuclear explosion releasing vast quantities of heat and energy. We live today in the aftermath of a blast that occurred over seventy years ago. The great ball of fire continues to simmer. Everything is still “hot,” and we have yet to terms with the radioactive fallout.
- Ideology, Metaphor and Unconscious Fantasy (Paper). Ideologies contain and articulate psychological meanings. How is it possible to decipher the latent content of ideological texts? My method, analyzing metaphor, consists of identifying recurring images and figures of speech in the writings and speeches of individuals who have been significant in defining and promulgating these ideologies. Through this method, I reveal the fantasies that the ideology seeks to express.
- Ideology, Perception, and Genocide: How Fantasy Generates History (Paper). I have developed a method for uncovering the sources of ideology by examining ideological statements as if manifest content to reveal an ideology’s latent meaning. I place emphasis upon specific words, phrases, images and metaphors bound to central terms of an ideology. In the case of Nazism, terms or phrases like “the German people,” “the Jew,” etc. Hitler’s Ideology (1975) presents recurring images and metaphors contained within Hitler’s writing and speeches to reconstruct the central fantasies that were the source of Nazism.
War is loved because it provides the occasion for sacrificing lives to rescue a sacred ideal. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.. If sacrificing one’s life for a sacred ideal is good, how can war be bad?
Hitler projected a symbiotic fantasy into political units. Austria symbolized Hitler’s body, and Germany the body of his mother. Hitler’s political ideology aimed to destroy the boundaries separating Austria and Germany so that the two separate bodies politic could fuse to become one. The actualization of this fantasy would mean that henceforth the “twofold destinies of Austria and Germany” would be eternally one.” If Hitler had his way—fulfilled his dream—there would be “no separation of history into Germany and Austria.”
The Nazi movement grew out of an ideology embraced and shared by millions of people. The actions of the Nazis enacted their ideology; the propositions or theorems contained within this ideology. I delineate the underlying structure of this ideology by identifying the coherent fantasy that gave the ideology its shape and was the source of the energy invested in it.
The Nazi dream of unity was rooted in a fantasy of the nation as a enormous “body politic” consisting of the German people as flesh and blood of this body. Margaret Mahler defined symbiosis as the fantasy of “somatopsychic omnipotent fusion:” delusion that two separate organisms are “contained within a common boundary.” Nazi ideology recreated the delusion of symbiosis in the individual’s tie to his nation. Nazism imagined that individual German bodies were bound to a national organism. The fantasy of fusion was enacted in mass rallies when tens-of-thousands of human beings massed together to create the illusion of a single body acting in unison.
I hypothesize that metaphors used by revolutionary political leaders contain the causes or reasons for the violent actions they undertake. These leaders experience certain classes of human beings sources of pain, suffering and disease. They these human beings as if they were present within their own bodies. In seeking to cure the disease within the body politic, the revolutionary or genocidal leader is struggling to come to terms with a disease present within his own body.
Well over 200 million people were killed in the Twentieth Century as a result of political violence generated by nations. Episodes of mass slaughter are given names like war, genocide, democide, social annihilation and murder by government. The world lived through a ghastly epidemic; a grotesque disease.
I hypothesize that the psychic mechanism that compels us to link ourselves with godlike political leaders today is the same mechanism that generated attachment to Pharaohs during the time of the Pyramids. In each case, some extraordinary force or power is imagined to emanate from a place in society outside and above the self. This place is separate from the existence of individual human beings and conceived as the center of society.
There is a profound connection between the idea of one’s nation and the idea of an enemy. The enemy is the Siamese twin of one’s nation—what must be destroyed if one’s nation is to survive. The enemy is the source of death. Nationalism revolves around saving the country from death.
Review Essay of Steven E. Miller, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Stephen Van Evera’s Book Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (need location of link).
For the Western Allies, the ideology of the “offensive at all costs” grew out of the desire to demonstrate the profound moral courage and will of one’s troop. This strategy, however, invariably failed; rarely resulted in breakthroughs. Troops were slaughtered continually throughout the war.
Review Essay of Walter A. Skya’s Book Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (need location of link). Skya articulated the ideology of nationalism which was the source of Japanese participation in the Second World War. To achieve the state of “one heart, same body,” the individual had to discard or annihilate the self. Any consideration of one’s own personal needs was wrong: one had to entirely submerge the self into the collectivity. When a key thinker, Kakehi Katsuhiko (1872-1961) spoke of the bad aspects of Western culture that had entered Japan, he was referring to the evils of Western secularism and individualism. He believed that the Western focus on the value of the individual was the “greatest threat to the Japanese nation.”
- Sacrifice (Table 18 in Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology)
During the First World War, soldiers’ bodies were fed into the jaws of battle under the assumption that the “life” of the nation was more significant than the lives of individual human beings.
The Human Body Becomes a Body Politic (Newsletter)
The individual’s sense of smallness and limitation is overcome or denied based on a psychic mechanism equating one’s ego with an entire nation. Freud said that the ego is ultimately a body ego. Incorporation of the nation into the self, therefore, carries a psychosomatic meaning. The entire nation becomes a part of body. One’s body becomes a body politic.
SS-men have been viewed as the epitome of masculine aggression and virility. In actuality, the state-of-being of the SS-man was precisely the opposite: These men were compelled to submit absolutely, becoming slaves of Hitler and Himmler; dying when the Nazi leadership asked them to do so.
Nazi ideology was based on profound attachment and devotion to Germany, Jews symbolizing the opposite of attachment and devotion to Germany. The metaphor appearing with greatest frequency in Hitler’s speeches to describe Jews was Zerzetzung, “force of disintegration.”
The drama of Nazism and the Holocaust constituted enacted a fantasy. The Nazis sought to forge Germany into a body politic not subject to death and decay. If Jews could be removed from within the nation, Hitler believed, then the body politic could live forever. In spite of prodigious efforts, however, Hitler could not escape the feeling that Germany was disintegrating.
Nazism constituted a pure culture of nationalism: distillation or crystallization of its central fantasies. Deutschland über alles (Germany above all): The nation would reign supreme, swallowing individuals, consuming everyone and everything.
The Psychological Interpretation of Culture and History
Unlike theorists who view culture or the symbolic order as a thing unto itself—separate from human beings—Peter Berger the social order as an “ongoing human production” that exists only as a “product of human activity.” Once objectivated, however, the symbolic order confronts us as an “objective facticity” external to us—persistent in its reality whether we like it or not.
My initial effort to develop a psychological approach to the study of culture and history began with two papers, “Culture and Unconscious Fantasy: Observations on Courtly Love (1967)” and “Culture and Unconscious Phantasy: Observations on Nazi Germany (1968).”
the Tables that appear in Hitler’s Ideology constitute the bedrock of my theorizing. Based on Mein Kampf and Hitler’s speeches, I discovered that organic metaphors defined Hitler’s ideology. These images, phrases and metaphors contained within Hitler’s rhetoric reveal the central phantasies that shaped his ideology which, in turn, were the sources of his actions on the stage of history.
An ideology is a system of beliefs held in common by a group of people within a society. Once having identified a society’s “dominant discourses”—its prevailing narratives—the question remains: Why are certain ideologies or belief systems present and embraced within a given society? Why have certain ideas—among all those put forth in a society—been embraced and perpetuated? A psychological approach to the study of culture poses and seeks to answer the question, “Why?”
The Psychosomatic Meaning of Nationalism (Newsletter)
Nazism was nationalism carried to the nth power. Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Totalitarianism meant that the German nation encompassed everyone and everything. And that each individual German would be required to abandon everything—his own desires, needs (and his own body)—for the sake of the nation.
The Sacrificial Meaning of the Holocaust (eBook)
A sign at the entrance to Auschwitz read, “I bid you welcome. This is not a holiday resort but a labor camp. Just as our soldiers risk their lives at the front, you will have to work for the welfare of a new Europe.” Just as German soldiers were suffering and dying at the front, so Jews would be required to undergo an even more extreme form of suffering and dying.
Plenary lecture. Annual Conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R), Emory University, Atlanta, June 4, 1999.
Presented at the 20th Annual Holocaust Conference at Millersville University: “The Holocaust in the Context of the Twentieth Century,” April 3, 2000
Hypocrisy lies at the heart of the institution of warfare. People plug into the spectacle and revel in the fantasy of their nation’s power and glory. They embrace war as a righteous struggle between good and evil. However, most people do not wish to be put into harm’s way. War is enjoyable to the extent that killing, suffering and dying are delegated to someone else.
Understanding War (Keynote Address, United World College, Feb. 2, 2007) Promotion Piece.
What does the development of the Internet tell us about the nature of culture or the symbolic order? Thinking about it deeply, we come to realize that each and every element of culture was “uploaded” at one point or another by a human being or group of human beings. Reality is a human creation. A discourse that becomes an element of culture because it has resonated with large numbers of people. It goes viral and remains viral, spreading and taking hold of human beings within a given society.
The destruction of the male body in the First World War occurred in the name of objects with names like France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, etc. These entities required abject submission.
The proclivity toward political violence is contained precisely within the need to maintain belief in the omnipotence of a particular cultural object. Hitler and Bin Laden were people who believed in the omnipotence of the object they worshipped (“Germany” or “Allah”) and who reacted with rage contemplating the idea that others did not worship the object they worshipped. The “Other” symbolizes disbelief, an “infidel” whose existence calls into question the absolute truth of one’s own belief.
- Why do Ideologies Exist: The Psychological Function of Culture (Paper). According to Hitler, each German constituted a cell forming a gigantic “national organism.” A “force of disintegration” within Germany was working to cause the cellular structure of the nation to fall apart. Hitler persuaded the German people to come together to constitute a unified, cohesive body. If the people could “hold together like a single block of steel,” then the national body would not succumb to the force of destruction.
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