Ego and Purification Ritual: Psychodynamics behind the Nazi Final Solution1

Jews, during the period of the Third Reich, found themselves invested with images of taboo, defilement, and sin. Reading this process on a group psychological level, the culture-wide phobia against touching Jewish flesh coalesced as a new historically constructed taboo, the theme of defilement and abjection taking on a powerful medical and affective valence, enhancing older and more traditionally rooted anti-semitic stereotypes.

A new language of public morality and historical explanation emerged between 1935 and 1942. The taboos on touching Jewish flesh, on having sexual relations with Jews, institutionalized in the 1935 Nuremberg Blood and Marriage Act, reinforced boundaries between good and bad, inside (good, Aryan, white), and outside (bad, dark, Jewish, gypsy). The fear of defilement by the bad generated increased vigilance and became essential to guaranteeing the Kultur-group's sense of its own health and purity. Or, as Julia Kristeva puts it: “It is as if the skin [in this case, the Nazi belief in the cleanliness and inherent superiority of Aryan genes, ‘skin’ understood here as the culture's ideological tunic], a fragile container, no longer guaranteed integrity of one's “own pure and clean self” [that is, one's own and clean blood]” (53). Therefore, from a group psychological perspective, more aggressive actions had to be taken to protect the culture's boundaries from attack and threat, actions whose objective lay in walling or sealing off potential contaminants to the culture's moral and physical body.

In a paranoid situation of perceived threat, the individual—and this is also true for the group—may, in Thomas Ogden's words, experience “his surface (which in a sense is all there is of him) as a hard crust or armor that protects him against unspeakable dangers.” If the fear is unnameable, it will soon enough acquire names; it may even come to be represented by a set of ideological injunctions that various groups in the cultur