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Some observers have taken Japanese and German propaganda at face value, branding its content as: lies, falsifications and exaggerations of facts, justifications of misdeeds. Others, including both lay and psychological sources, have endeavored to interpret the behavior along psychiatric lines. Some authors have called Japanese or German attitudes paranoid (Brickner, Wittels, Mousheng Hsitien Lin). Kris compared certain aspects of German behavior to common behavior in gangsters. Gunther thought that the Japanese nation leaped from childhood to maturity leaving out adolescence.
While it does not seem scientifically permissible to assign diagnoses and interpretations that are found correct for individuals to groups and nations, perhaps we may safely follow up analogies between the behavior of certain groups and the behavior of individual patients. In using the dynamic understanding of such behavior in patients to interpret dynamically the sources of similar behavior of a group, we must keep in mind that such procedure does not lead us to a discovery of scientific facts, but only to hypotheses.
Writing during the first world war, Freud in “Thoughts on War and Death” speaks of the disillusionment brought to us by the nations “these greater units of the human race.” He ventures a hypothesis: “Perhaps they are reproducing the course of individual evolution, and still today represent very primitive phases in the organization and formation of higher units.” Our attention was drawn to the similarities between the neurotics of today and primitive tribes by Freud's “Totem and Tabu.”
The behavior of our neurotic patient resembles those phases of childhood whose conflicts he was unable to overcome successfully; we say, he regressed to a certain period of his childhood. In considering a nation from the viewpoint of individual psychology, we may find group characteristics similar to characteristics of certain infantile developmental stages (“primitive phases”). We may ask ourselves wh