Psychoanalysis of Evil by Henry Kellerman

Author:Henry Kellerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Hitler’s Program as a Function of his Personality: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Hitler was the leader of Germany essentially from 1933–1945. In the 1920s when Hitler was in his early 30s (born April 20, 1889), he became the Chairman of the German Worker’s Party. This was an inconsequential nationalistically inclined group functioning in or about 1921. In the mid 1920s, Hitler led an unsuccessful coup against the Bavarian government and was imprisoned. There, from 1923–1924, he dictated his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle, or My War, or more accurately and perhaps in a slightly more figurative sense, My Crusade). He did this dictation to his aide, Rudolph Hess, along with continuing it later at an inn at Berchtesgaden.

Foxman states that Hitler was megalomaniacal and presented his entire life in Mein Kampf “….as the chronicle of an incipient Messiah waiting for the moment to redeem his people.” In addition, “….his efforts were devoted to stirring the ­German people with his anti-democratic message of militant ultra-nationalism, economic conservatism, and racial superiority” (p. xvii). Further, Foxman also states that “Hitler’s racial theories cemented together all of the disparate aspects of his philosophy, Pan-Germanism, ultra-nationalism, rabid anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism, along with theories of racial conflict [leading] to his Manichean philosophy of Aryan versus Jew….” (p. xxi). To this is also added Hitler’s “….program of….territorial expansionism”….and “disdain for democracy and human rights.”

Borofsky and Brand (1980) point out the starkly retrogressive ideological content encasing Hitler’s obsessional focus (based obviously on his “inner rage”), which he projected and then directed toward others, Jews in particular, and again, as well as on others he considered to be imperfect or inferior. In this sense, he felt that racial purity and racial principles were biological givens and that therefore since he himself needed to feel perfect (psychologically suspect as actually concealing the sense of feeling imperfect or inferior), he projected this need for purity and perfection onto the German folk. According to Mosse (1966, p. 4), Hitler’s “racial principles [were] fundamental to all life: race [according to Hitler] is the foundation of all cultures.” This sort of philosophical/political/anthropological position, seemingly, again, and from a psychological point of view, acts to validate Hitler’s own obsessional focus on his personal need for perfection and purity.

Dorothy Martyn, in her book Beyond Deserving (2007, p. 122), observes that self-doubt or its synonym, “inferiority feelings” most often will generate a persecutory complex. This sort of persecutory complex can be identified as an unfortunate pathological process that transforms the suffering of feeling inferior (and therefore of probably feeling persecuted) to a feeling of hating others. Here, Martyn would probably use the Garden of Eden symbol of the Serpent, the snake, as equivalent to this pathology of hatred. The snake then would mean something akin to an evil effluvium (an aura of evil). Martyn actually indicates that the snake is clever because “self-doubt triggered by the sting of devaluation from without” is based on a persecutory presence which in turn invites vigilance (to be alert and clever) on the part of the subject (the snake), and perhaps also on the part of the object.

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