Culture and Unconscious Phantasy: Observations on Nazi Germany

In a previous paper6 it was argued that the origin of social institutions and their tendency to persist in relatively stable form may be understood in terms of the dynamics of unconscious phantasy: they arise as a response to phantasy, and, once defined on the level of cultural reality, function to provide socially acceptable means for acting-out. An analysis of The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus revealed that the institution which he embraced and the ideology which defined it represented a reaction to the Oedipal situation: an attempt to revive the competition with the father and to come into exclusive and permanent possession of the mother. Here, it is hypothesized that the institutional complex and ideology which came to be known as Nazism represented, as well, a particular response to the Oedipal situation: an attempt to defend the mother from the father through destruction of the father.

Nazi Germany has been selected for study because it provides a rather ideal case in support of the general theory: the social structure and ideology of an entire nation were shaped, in great measure, by the phantasies of a single individual. If, through an analysis of Mein Kampf, we are able to uncover the unconscious phantasies which motivated Adolph Hitler and to note the manner in which these phantasies attached themselves to various aspects of the social environment, we will have shed light upon the latent psychological meaning of the program which he sponsored and upon the sources of its appeal for the German people.