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Taking the approach of psychoanalytic self psychology, Muslin seeks to understand Adolf Hitler and the group-self responses of the German people to him during the rise and fall of the Nazi reign, through Hitler's tenure as chancellor, and during the military phase of the Third Reich. Muslin describes Hitler's self as enfeebled and unformed, depleted of values and self-regard, with an exceedingly diminished capacity for accepting nurturance and direction. The self psychological analysis understands much of Hitler's behavior in terms of this inadequacy, involving compensatory tactics of aloofness and grandiosity, narcissistic deficiency states, and vicious attacks on seeming persecutors. In the absence of object relationships and consequent lack of self-equilibrium, Hitler strove to achieve national equilibrium for Germany by displacing onto others a selfobject transference psychotic reaction from the paternal selfobject of his childhood. Hitler's distintegration anxiety, arising from self-fragmentation, required increasingly vast compensatory measures. Unable to show neediness or defect, fearful of exposing any deficiency or corresponding dependency, he externalized this fear into retaliating against imagined punishers by such grandiose measures as mass killings. All of this took place within a selfobject/self-dyad between Hitler and the German people.