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.
Psyche has published several issues dealing with psychological aspects of the war years and the history of the psychoanalytic movement during the war. Müller-Braunschweig deals with the psychological factors that account for Hitler's extraordinary rise to power in 1933 and his influence on the German people during the thirties. He traces various historical developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in Germany. A strong, almost mystical belief in the unification of Germany into a Reich, which occurred in 1871, was followed by the defeat in World War I, with disintegration of the Reich and abdication of the Kaiser. The unconscious and primitive meanings of these occurrences, and the feelings about the Reich, are explored. By the First World War, mankind, previously so confident of mastering "Mother" Nature through science, had found that the resulting technology had become more destructive than Nature had ever been. To the unconscious, this was equated with the revenge of the threatening father for Mother Nature's being deprived of her omnipotence. The author develops his interpretation of the fascist mass movements as rebellion against the father. He reviews Hitler's biography to sort out the psychological conflicts that Hitler experienced, involving the death of his father when he was thirteen and of his mother when he was seventeen. However, he deplores the "poor Hitler" explanation of history; rather, he makes explicit the primitive splitting, projections, fusions, and labile sense of identity that enabled Hitler in his speeches to win over and influence so many followers by conjuring up for the audience the dissociations and conflicts of the era as experienced by the German people.