libraryofsocialscience | Well over 200 million people were killed in the twentieth century
as a result of political violence generated by nations. Episodes of
mass slaughter are given names like war, genocide, democide, social
annihilation and murder by government. It seems as though the world has
been living through an epidemic, or malignant disease.
Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
states that the 20th century was dominated by the “politics of
organized insanity.” Yet nowhere does one find a systematic concept of
psychopathology to characterize the monumentally destructive, often
bizarre events of political history.
In the privacy of a movie theater—witnessing the carnage,
absurdity and futility of battle—people often think to themselves, “War
is insane.” But what happens when people leave the theater? Where are
studies of the “war disorder”?
Freud in 1930 proposed a "pathology of cultural communities.” Chapter I of Norman O. Brown’s classic Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959)
is entitled “The Disease Called Man” and Chapter II, “Neurosis and
History.” Neurosis, Brown says, is not an occasional aberration and not
just in other people. Rather, neurosis is an “essential consequence of
civilization or culture” and therefore is “in us, and in us all the
time.”
Roger Griffin,
an authority on Fascism, summarizes his conclusions about Nazi
destructiveness on his website: “Since so many millions were involved in
Nazism and the Holocaust, this can’t be explained in terms of madness
or pathology: Something more basic had to be involved.” Why the a priori
assumption that just because millions of people are involved, a social
movement cannot be characterized as a form of madness or pathology?
In this paper, I discuss the concept of collective
psychopathology. I begin by focusing on the case-study of Adolf Hitler
and Nazism, specifically the behavior of Hitler and Germany during the
final years of the Second World War. I will show how Hitler acted to
bring about the destruction of Germany. What occurred may be understood
as a form of psychopathology enacted upon the stage of society.
Hitler fought in the First World War, in which two million German
men were killed and millions more maimed. In spite of the immense
suffering that he and his comrades endured, Hitler refused to renounce
the idea of warfare. Rather, he glorified the death of the German
soldier in battle.
In Mein Kampf,
Hitler wrote that in 1914 his young volunteer regiment had received its
baptism of fire. With “Fatherland love in our heart and songs on our
lips,” Hitler wrote, they had gone into battle “as to a dance.” The most
precious blood, he said, “sacrificed itself joyfully.”
Upon assuming power as Chancellor in 1933, Hitler immediately
began fantasizing about the Second World War—which would necessitate the
death of millions more German men. In one of a series of conversations
with Herman Rauschning in the mid-30s, he stated that he would be
prepared for the “blood sacrifice of another German generation;” that he
would not hesitate to take the deaths of 2 or 3 million German soldiers
on his conscience “fully aware of the heaviness of sacrifice.”
In another conversation with Rauschning, Hitler said, “We all
know what world war means. We must shake off sentimentality and be
hard.” He declared that when he took Germany to war, he would not
hesitate because of the “10 million men I shall be sending to their
deaths.” In planning for war, Hitler was preparing for the slaughter of
German soldiers.
I am going to cite during the course of this paper an article written by psychiatrist Stuart Twemlow and psychologist George Hough published in the journal Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.
Looking at group dynamics from a clinical perspective, the authors
develop the concept of a “psychotic fantasy of masochistic group death”
and show how a leader can be both the “victim and perpetrator of a large
group’s masochistic unconscious wishes and yearnings for death and
martyrdom.”
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