The psychopathic god by Robert G. L. Waite

Author:Robert G. L. Waite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945 -- Psychology, Heads of state -- Germany -- Biography
ISBN: 9780306805141
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 1993-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE PSYCHOPATHIC GOD: ADOLF HITLER

to society and “public decency.” They should all be handed over to the Gestapo and severely punished:

Experience shows that unnatural offenders generally turn into homicidal maniacs; they must be rendered harmless however young they may be. I have therefore always been in favor of the strongest possible punishment of these antisocial elements. 317

Other aspects of Hitlers personality also fit what we know to be true about the psychopathology of sexual perversion. The infantilism we have found in him is one necessary ingredient. For as Freud was first to notice, “perverted sexuality is nothing else but infantile sexuality, magnified and separated into its component parts.” Infantilism is clearly marked when, as with Hitler, the perversion involves a reversion to the anal stage. 318 Hitler’s harrowing childhood memories of his primal scene experience and his monorchism clearly qualify as prerequisites for adult perversion, as set forth by the distinguished child psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre. “If I were to attempt a formula describing the development of perversion,” she has written, the primary cause would lie in a disturbed mother-child relationship, “especially [one] involving the genitals. This becomes most significant . . . when castration anxiety is extraordinarily acute.” 310

Psychoanalysts have shown that the mothers of boys who become sexual perverts often were overly stringent about toilet training. As we have noted, Klara Hitler had a reputation in Leonding and Linz for having had “the cleanest house in town” and keeping her children “absolutely spotless.” It is interesting, and perhaps in this connection suggestive, that in one case of perversion described by an American analyst, the patient showed an identification with his mother: he displayed a desire “to have his sweetheart urinate in his presence while he encouraged her in a friendly way. He was playing the role of his mother who used to put him on the chamberpot when he was a baby.” 320

In his chapter on perversion in his standard work on psychoanalytic theory, Otto Fenichel lists three basic characteristics: patients with perversions tend to be infantile; they have unreconciled Oedipus complexes; and they all display castration anxiety. Indeed, Fenichel concludes: “Castration anxiety (and guilt feelings which are derivatives of castration anxiety) must be the decisive factor.” 321 Adolf Hitler’s lifelong concern about castration has already been mentioned perhaps too often.

If the clinical literature is correct in concluding that Oedipal problems, sadomasochism, infantilism, and castration anxiety are the marks of perversion, then Hitler certainly had all the chief symptoms. But there is a more specific reason why Adolf’s symptoms were so intense and why a sexual perversion of the kind described was, psychologically, an appropriate response to sexual problems dating from his

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