Nixon, Hitler, and Power: An Ego Psychological Study

Freud initiated the enterprise we now call psychohistory not merely because he was a curious commentator, critic, and analyst of civilization who wished to present a “general psychology” that was valid for all mankind, and not merely because he was a deeply cultured man who would have preferred to be a philosopher rather than a clinician. He committed his psychodynamic ideas to the problems of history, culture, art, and literary criticism also as a strategy of presentation to circumvent the evidential problem of case histories. No one fully knows what goes on in any clinical psychoanalytic setting. Even in the Rat Man Case where we have Freud's notes, there is much that we must infer and will never know. Freud chose to demonstrate his insights and formulae of mental functioning by reference to the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Ibsen because these data and artifacts belong to the culture at large. Any person may obtain, study, scrutinize, and question Freud's interpretations from the same data base to see if they make sense or convey conviction. In their persistent quest for a more accurate model of the mind, Freud and his successors created models that reflected shifts in the culture at large; thus, the recent interest in narcissism.