Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology

Richard A. Koenigsberg

Library of Social Science

Through analysis of the images and metaphors contained within Hitler's writings and speeches, Koenigsberg reveals the deep structure the unconscious meaning of Hitler's belief system. He demonstrates that Hitler s actions the history he created followed as a logical consequence of the ideological fantasy that he conveyed to the German people. Hitler is studied in this work acknowledged as a classic not in terms of the idiosyncrasies of his personality, but as a political leader who embodied and enacted ideologies that dominated the Twentieth Century: nationalism, racism and war.

History

Europe

Koenigsberg examines the idea of the nation as a sacred object saturating our day-to-day reality. Through analysis of the writings of Hitler, Lenin, Sri Aurobindo and others, Koenigsberg articulates core fantasies underlying the ideology of nationalism. What racists and revolutionaries have in common is belief that a particular class of people constitutes a "disease" within the body politic--that must be "removed" if the nation is to survive.  In the final chapter, Koenigsberg examines the dynamics of totalitarianism--an extreme form of nationalism promising omnipotence through identification with a "great human community." Refusing to abandon the dream of omnipotence, radical nationalists, racists and revolutionaries are willing to sacrifice freedom and individuality.   Table of Contents  I. The Country, the Mother and Infantile Narcissism 1. Introduction 2. The Country as Suffering Mother 3. The Country as Omnipotent Mother 4. The Country as a Projection of Infantile Narcissism  II. The Country as a Living Organism 1. Racism and Revolution as a Wish to Eliminate the "Disease" from Within the Body of the Nation 2. The Disease Within the Nation as a Projection of Malignant Internal Objects  III. Revolution as a Struggle against Passivity 1. The Struggle Against Passivity: Hitler 2. The Struggle Against Passivity: Lenin 3. The Struggle Against Passivity: Aurobindo  IV. The Social Psychology of Nationalism 1. The "National Community" 2. Totalitarianism 3. The Renunciation of Personal Gratification in the Name of a Devotion to the Collectivity

The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

From the sixteenth century on, British involvement in Africa was reflected in an immense volume of writing. Inherent in this British literature--ranging from works of great literary merit to sheer trash--was a remarkable consistency in its inaccurate depiction of Africa and its people, mirrored in literary responses to the slave trade, the acquisition and subsequent loss of an empire, and the rise of independent Africa. But throughout four centuries, the literature centered upon one main theme: the confrontation between civilized Britain and savage Africa. Through a retrospective analysis, The Myth of Africa demonstrates that the literary image of Africa is a fantasy of a continent and a people that never were and could never be.

The Myth of Africa

Dorothy Hammond

Alta Jablow

Social Sciences

Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (Second Edition)

FROM HOWARD F. STEIN S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF DEVELOPMENTAL TIME, CULTURAL SPACE: STUDIES IN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY Psychogeographic scholars address the questions: Where does culture come from? What keeps culture going? What are the causes of cultural change? Traditional Western science has long contended--tautologously--that culture comes from culture; current history comes from what happened before, and so on. Scholars of psychogeography trace the unconscious roots of societies. We view people's metaphors and other cultural images as a royal road to the unconscious lives of people. Put another way, the unconscious can be explored in the world of ordinary symbols and ritual (i.e., in large groups)--not just in psychoanalytic psychotherapy (i.e., in individuals and therapeutic dyads). Far from being superorganic and automatically internalized, much of culture proceeds from the inside out. Ideas and fantasies are externalized, cognitively reified, and then re-internalized. Culture is a projective screen and stage on which unconscious dramas are enacted, and experienced as being located out there.

Howard F. Stein

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF DEVELOPMENTAL TIME, CULTURAL SPACE: STUDIES IN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY  Psychogeographic scholars address the questions: Where does culture come from? What keeps culture going? What are the causes of cultural change? Traditional Western science has long contended--tautologously--that culture comes from culture; current history comes from what happened before, and so on. Scholars of psychogeography trace the unconscious roots of societies. We view people's metaphors and other cultural images as a royal road to the unconscious lives of people. Put another way, the unconscious can be explored in the world of ordinary symbols and ritual (i.e., in large groups)--not just in psychoanalytic psychotherapy (i.e., in individuals and therapeutic dyads). Far from being superorganic and automatically internalized, much of culture proceeds from the inside out. Ideas and fantasies are externalized, cognitively reified, and then re-internalized. Culture is a projective screen and stage on which unconscious dramas are enacted, and experienced as being located out there.

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO ABANDON ONE'S TIE TO THE SYMBOLIC ORDER?Following the path Freud laid down in Civilization and Its Discontents, M. D. Faber presents a profound analysis of the relationship between the individual and society. Faber contends that "ordinary consciousness" serves a defensive purpose: Even as we struggle to become separate individuals, we ceaselessly project the objects of our internal world into the environment. Our ordinary way of being is "transitional awareness," a perceptual condition in which we strive to maintain our tie to the inner world by discovering substitute objects in the reality of our cultural realm. The symbolic sphere is a magic system of support whose purpose is to protect human beings against the danger of object loss. 
 Exploring alternatives to ordinary consciousness, Faber turns to Buddhism, which provides practical techniques for moderating our tie to objects and liberating us from the symbolic order. In proposing emptiness of mind as the essence of mind, Buddhism offers an alternative to the Western attachment to (and glorification of) the cultural sphere. Resting within the space of emptiness, one is freed from tormenting internal objects and the oppressive universe of symbols. 
 Faber's book presents a vision of culture as a vast transitional space. In our flight from separation and death, we project existence into symbolic objects, quelling anxiety and releasing ourselves from a sense of smallness and aloneness. As we feel enhanced by the objects with which we identify, we simultaneously are oppressed by them. Faber poses the question: What type of human being (and society) might emerge if people no longer clung so desperately to the symbolic order? 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 Foreword by Richard A. Koenigsberg 
 Acknowledgements 
 Part One: The Transitional Nature of Ordinary Consciousness 
 The Process of Mind-Body Conversion From the Cradle The Internalization of the World The Mirror The Dark Side of the Mirror: Splitting The Agony of Differentiation The Sands of Time and the Container of Space The Stimulus Itself The Ward The Tie to the Culture The Oedipus, and After Notes and References Part One 
 Part Two: The Cultural Sphere 
 Some Background The Religio-Economic Realm Money and Magna Mater The Sacrificial Way to the Object Sacred Lucre Psychodynamic Extrapolations The Metaphors of Marx The Interest in Interest The Vicious Circle and the Bad Parent More Opiates, More Anxieties Lurking Ambivalence Goods and More Goods Notes and References Part Two 
 Part Three: Disrupting the Tie to the Inner World 
 A Glance Backward, A Glance Forward The Meaning of Non-Ordinary Moments The Emergence of the Non-Ordinary World Solidifying One's Change Transforming the Past at the Mind-Body Level Notes and References Part Three

The Withdrawal of Human Projection: Separating from the Symbolic Order

Health, Fitness & Dieting

M.D. Faber

Psychology & Counseling

SYMBIOSIS AND SEPARATION lays the foundation for a psychoanalytic theory of culture and politics by focusing on how objects in the external world symbolize infantile objects and fantasies. Culture, Dr. Koenigsberg suggests, facilitates the break with infantile love-objects by representing reality as a realm that contains omnipotence and the possibility of unlimited gratification. Infantile fantasies of omnipotence are replaced by the dream of being bound in a symbiotic tie to one's culture. Society performs developmental functions, facilitating the displacement of psychic energy onto cultural ideals and objects. Koenigsberg develops a psychoanalytic theory of nationalism. Separation from the mother is experienced as mutilation of one's body--the loss of self. One binds to one's country to recover a part of the body experienced as lost. Nationalism seeks restoration of bodily wholeness ("Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler"). The body politic symbolizes the dual-unity of self and Other contained within a single object. Identification with one's nation, subsequently, may be experienced as oppressive, leading to a struggle for liberation. Koenigsberg illuminates our ambivalent attachment to cultural objects, which simultaneously enhance and diminish the self. 
 Table of Contents 
 I. The Dual Nature of the Human Ego II. The Conversation Process as a Response to Separation III. The Denial of Separateness IV. Internalization V. The Struggle for Separateness VI. The Fantasy of Merger as a Source of Anxiety VII. Conflict and Ambivalence Surrounding Separation-Individuation VIII. The Transitional Object and the Struggle to Separate IX. Culture as a Transitional Object X. The Bodily Roots of the Symbol XI. The Bodily Roots of Culture XII. Repression

Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture

The Withdrawal of Human Projection: A Study of Culture and Internalized Objects

Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War

Why did Hitler believe that it was necessary to destroy the Jewish race? What was the purpose and meaning of this extraordinary project that the Nazis called "The Final Solution?" In this pathbreaking book, Richard Koenigsberg shows how genocide grew out of the logic of warfare. Hitler reasoned that if he had the right to sacrifice his soldiers, he also had the right to send Jews to their deaths. Hitler embraced his role as military leader, stating in the mid-thirties that if millions of Germans had to die in the next war, he would not shrink from this sacrifice. Based on a meticulous reading of Hitler's speeches and Mein Kampf, Koenigsberg shows how Hitler's thinking about warfare led to his decision to exterminate the Jews. Hitler reflected that if he had no compunctions about sending the "best" people to die in battle--German soldiers--why would he not also have the right to send the "worst" people--mortal enemies of Germany--to their deaths? Nations Have the Right

Engineering & Transportation

Engineering

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Books by Library of Social Science

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Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology

Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology

The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism

The Myth of Africa

Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (Second Edition)

Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (Second Edition)

The Withdrawal of Human Projection: Separating from the Symbolic Order

Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture

The Withdrawal of Human Projection: A Study of Culture and Internalized Objects

Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War