TLS May 21, 2008
Analysing Adolf : Nazism through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis
Daniel Pick
"I will obey you², Hitler was said to have declared at a first meeting with
his psychoanalyst, Dr Karl Krueger. Kruegerıs Inside Hitler, published in
New York in 1941, chronicled the failure of the therapy that ensued and the
practitionerıs own growing infatuation with his monstrous patient. Inside
Hitler is treated as a special item at the British Library, requiring that
the reader sit at a designated desk under the eye of an attendant in Rare
Books. This is presumably on the grounds that the work offers copious
evidence of the perversions. Obscene and punitive fantasies set the context
for a particularly florid dream, featuring Hitlerıs dead and probably
murdered niece, Geli, who reappears, decapitated, to haunt her tormentor, in
a pool of blood. Hitler says: ³Sometimes I see a mammoth shark opening its
jaws to devour me, and howling with terror I swim into the darkness². The
entire account was, of course, a hoax. The ³psychobiographer², Robert G.
Waite, complained that it was a joke in very bad taste, in an appendix to
his own rather weightier account of Hitlerıs mind, The Psychopathic God. But
it was apparently a convincing enough prank at the time to have induced the
novelist Upton Sinclair to provide the preface.
Etc
Well, I never...!
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