You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Norbert Bromberg, M.D. is an Emeritus Training Analyst and a Retired Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, while Ms. Small is a writer and editor. Therefore the reader will assume that the content of this book is primarily the responsibility of the medical author, and that the second author's services were employed primarily for literary purposes.
This is another in the series of biographies of the arch-villain, Adolf Hitler, written with the intention of explaining his psychiatric disorder with the most recent psychoanalytic views. The addition of another such effort is justified by the same motives which maintain that the Holocaust must not be forgotten.
Early in the book the psychiatric diagnosis in Hitler's case is given as a “narcissistic personality with paranoid features, functioning on a borderline personality level, … more briefly referred to as a narcissistic—borderline personality….” There follows a lengthy section entitled, “The Life Record,” essentially a historical biographical sketch of Hitler. The two ensuing sections, “The Life and the Diagnosis,” in which the life and the diagnosis are compared, and “Psychoanalytic Speculations” on the nature of Hitler's personality, constitute the basic value of the book.
Bromberg makes many interesting interpretations of Hitler's personality. “Overwhelming popular support for Hitler in 1933 is sometimes explained as a result of his understanding of the yearning to belong. Adolf, the loner, presented for every age and interest a Nazi group in which to serve and … to sacrifice” (p. 121). “… no matter what his rationalization for the conquest of other countries, an unconscious psychological motive was to deny his inferiority feelings, especially his image of himself as a man.… The relentless persistence of his unconscious self-estimate of inferiority could not be permanently countered by real successes” (p. 185). “Always he was full of fears: of impending death; of illness, especially of cancer, and gastrointestinal and bl