Der Fuehrer on the Couch
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
Der Fuehrer on the Couch The Mind of Adolf Hitler By Walter C. Longer Basic Books. 269 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, California State University, San...
...This was abetted by his brother's birth when Adolf was still in his oedipal stage, accentuating his aggressive fantasies toward his father (who he thought would castrate him, an anxiety that later developed into syphi-lophobia) and his estrangement from his mother...
...His consequent regression produced not only impotence in heterosexual relations but a diffusion of the sexual instinct to nongenital organs, specifically the eyes (Hitler was fascinated by nudity), mouth and buttocks...
...Some adverse commentary will no doubt come from those who regard his theory as too pat, too simple...
...He points out that Alois, a "mass of contradictions," communicated uncertainty and fear to his son, who thus became engaged in a futile search for a strong masculine figure and, finally, could be satisfied only with an image of himself as superman Fuhrer...
...as the German people saw him (an electrifying, domineering orator whose every quality was superhuman...
...But it should be pointed out, as an indication of Langer's understanding, that he predicted Hitler's suicide...
...He saw himself, after all, as the chosen one among his siblings...
...Recent forays into this uncharted territory include two essays by UCLA historian Peter Lowenberg: "The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler" and "The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort" (The American Historical Review, June and December 1971...
...Subsequently, and unconsciously, "all the emotions he had once felt for his mother became transferred to Germany," while decaying Austria represented his father...
...Postwar Germany resembled his former submissive self...
...This fourth section explores the future dictator's family situation...
...His father, the illegitimate and thrice-married Alois Hitler, was a civil servant abroad and an uncivil tyrant at home...
...That he faced an audience of potentially skeptical government and military officials is probably responsible for the clarity of his presentation, a sobering thought for academicians who write primarily for one another...
...Three years later his father died, followed in four years by Klara...
...Until he discovered National Socialist racism, the authority of the Catholic Church and his father, from whom Himmler got his idea of inner masculine strength, forced him constantly to repress his sexuality and aggression...
...Another crippling aspect of Hitler's childhood was the residual tension of toilet training that Langer finds quite evident in the imagery of soiling present in his writing...
...Still, he was always troubled by fears that he would be found out for what he really was (hence, his terrible nightmares...
...The youth, of course, gave Hitler disproportionate support (18-30-year-olds comprised 31.1 per cent of the German population in 1933, but 42.2 per cent of the National Socialist party in 1932...
...Both echo Langer's suggestion of the universality of the Nazi illness by rejecting the prevalent notion that "the men who guided the Third Reich are essentially incomprehensible to normal people...
...she fawned over her first son, Adolf, who was therefore shocked by the birth of a rival when he was five and struck down by guilt when his brother died at age 6 (there was also a younger sister, Paula...
...Langer's study is not invulnerable to criticism...
...And he had good reason to be ashamed, for his real self was despicable...
...and as he knew himself...
...Hitler became Himmler's father figure, his Pope...
...Blinded and struck dumb at the end of World War I by mustard gas (the real cause, Langer says, was hysteria...
...The masses are like a woman," he once said...
...Nonetheless, the fact that death had passed over him for his brother led to a fear of death and a desire for immortality, even if it meant a holocaust...
...They then reverted to earlier phase-specific fixations in their child development marked by rage, sadism, and the defensive idealization of their absent parents, especially the father...
...In Langer's view, it was not so much the birth of Hitler's brother as his observation of the primal scene that (combined with his fantasy of ridding the household of its father-intruder) troubled Adolf so greatly...
...All of these traits stem from the passive, feminine side of his personality...
...For it was in his speeches that the battle raging perpetually in his mind was won: The soft, sentimental, indecisive Hitler gave way to the hard, cruel, decisive Fuhrer...
...Klara's strong attachment to her son, moreover, intensified what otherwise would have been normal domestic sexual conflict...
...Above all, it prepared the young voters of Germany for submission to a total, charismatic leader...
...his lackluster school career promised no future, and in alien Vienna he knew only poverty and misery...
...By way of introduction, Langer presents four views of the Fuhrer: as he believed himself to be (the messenger of Providence, even the Messiah, who would guarantee his own immortality through the Thousand-Year Reich...
...Hitler had his vision of liberating Germany...
...An Afterword by historian Robert G. L. Waite offers a concise and handy review of the biographical data that has been compiled since Langer wrote The Mind of Adolf Hitler...
...He started thinking in this manner before World War I and, after Germany's humiliation shocked him into becoming a new person, he identified with the aggressor (the intruder-father), adopting such slogans as "Brutality is respected...
...These elements made this age cohort particularly susceptible to the appeal of a mass movement utilizing the crudest devices of projection and displacement in its ideology...
...it channeled his asceticism and his need for an absolute hierarchy of values and rigid principles of conduct...
...Lowenberg, however, is more impressed by change than continuity, by the unique experience of Germans whose early childhood coincided with World War I. He cites the "ample evidence that this generation of German youth was more inclined toward violent and aggressive, or what psychoanalysts call 'acting-out' behavior than previous generations...
...Nazi ideology was permanently necessary to stabilize his ego and his identity...
...The tragic irony was that in attempting to create a warm and secure childhood protected by an ideal father, the German people re-created another war generation which suffered the same traumas that marred their own young lives...
...What a surprise, then, to find that in 1943 the psychoanalyst Walter Langer (brother of the historian William Langer, who distinguished his presidency of the American Historical Association by challenging his colleagues to draw on psychology as an interpretive tool) not only brought Adolf Hitler to the couch but produced a perceptive and convincing analysis...
...If this harsh character was a reaction-formation, it was also the image he projected to his fellow Germans...
...as his associates knew him (an erratic leader, whose periods of great activity, decision and accomplishment—when he spoke directly to the German subconscious—alternated with times of apathy, insomnia, rage, disassoci-ation...
...Though World War I brought him into the Army, a respectable social institution where he might have rebuilt his personality, the defeat of Germany devastated him...
...Moving on to psychoanalysis and drawing heavily on the imagery in Mein Kampf, Langer probes more deeply into Hitler's formative years...
...Hitler's basic defense mechanism, according to Langer's analysis, was projection: He made Jews the target of his self-hatred, imagining them to embody the very traits he despised in himself...
...Suffering from terribly inadequate nutrition and its physical and psychological consequences, deprived not only of soldier-fathers but war-working mothers, facing a wholly new and insecure political situation, German youth approached physical maturity with an unusual number of unresolved conflicts that impeded psychological development and, thus, provided points of return in later life...
...He conformed to "a pattern which is consistent with what psychoanalysis defines as the obsessive-compulsive character...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, California State University, San Francisco We have heard much talk about psychohistory and psychobiography of late, and a few historians, psychologists and sociologists have actually ventured into this new field...
...Adolf's life collapsed...
...The Germans lost their critical faculties, and the instability of the national neurosis Hitler played upon made each aggressive act more brutal than its predecessor...
...Since Langer had only a short time to produce this now declassified study for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), it is amazing that he collected so much information, including an array of personal interviews as well as printed sources...
...Some observers, notably William Shirer, attribute this to German culture...
...Alois' third wife, Klara, was 23 years his junior...
...We may be destroyed," he said, "but if we are, we shall drag the world with us—a world in flames...
...His sexual perversion was to have women urinate and defecate on him...
...he groveled before women for sexual pleasure, and he had a strong tendency toward homosexuality, although no conclusive evidence of his engaging in this practice exists...
...The leader of the Third Reich exhibited in exaggerated form the prevailing social forces of his time...
...We must discover the psychological streams that nourish this destructive state of mind...
...The book has held up well with the passage of time, as has Langer's admonition that "we are forced to consider Hitler, the Fuhrer, not as a personal devil, wicked as his actions and philosophy may be, but as the expression of a state of mind existing in millions of people, not only in Germany, but to a smaller degree in all civilized countries...
...Nazism, Lowenberg maintains, catered to their regression: "The War generation had weakened egos and superegos, meaning that the members of this generation turned readily to programs based on facile solutions and violence when they met new frustrations during the Depression...
...In addition, Hitler was masochistic...
...Langer points to sociological evidence of widespread sentimentality and subordination to strong masculine figures among German men...
...by directing his oratory at the feminine-masochistic side of German men, he aroused in them his own earlier emotions...
...Examining diaries Himmler kept from ages 14-24...
...In the military reserve, however, he found his role as a political educator...
...Lowenberg finds that as a young man the future SS chief was robotlike rather than spontaneous, given to duty instead of emotion, a schizoid personality cut off from outer reality...
...Turn-of-the-century German families, Langer notes, were generally beset by such conflicts brought on by fathers whose public and private roles mirrored those of Alois...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 8
