The First Freudian Analysis of Fascism
On Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Håvard Friis Nilsen
Only a few months after Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany, the first concentration camps with political prisoners were established. The first wave of German-Jewish emigrants fled the country already in March and April 1933. The Nazis arranged book burnings that appeared like primitive pagan gatherings; with a pompous gesture, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels lifted Freud’s works over his head and declared: “Against the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life! For the nobility of the human soul! We consign to the flames the writings of the school of Sigmund Freud.” Then he threw the books on the fire. From his study in Vienna, Freud wryly wrote to a friend: “After all, we are making progress! In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me, now they are content with burning my books.”
Jewish analysts had to flee Berlin and seek an uncertain existence in other countries. The IPA leadership, headed by Ernest Jones in London, tried to remedy the situation by creating overviews of which analysts could be received where. The association leaders in various countries were asked what the conditions were for receiving German colleagues, and what the possibilities were for making a living without threatening the local analysts’ livelihood. Most countries were very skeptical about accepting refugees for permanent residence as many of them were struggling with economic problems and unemployment after the financial crisis. A sudden entry of new analysts into a national association could also create rivalry and discord over professional authority in the association.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism appeared as a pamphlet in 1933 on Reich’s imprint “Sexpol Verlag.” At the time, it was the only analysis of Nazism by one of Freud’s pupils. In Germany, it was quickly banned, but nevertheless, it spread from Denmark to Berlin and constantly appeared in new editions, being smuggled into the country. Since its publication, it has appeared in many editions in several languages, and inspired a number of other books, such as Erich Fromm’s bestseller Escape from Freedom; T. W. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (which was originally conceived as The Authoritarian Character); Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus; and Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume classic Male Fantasies, just to name a few. It was a brave act both to write the book and to publish it, and as with Character Analysis, Reich had to self-publish it on his own imprint, as no established press would touch it. In his article “Group Psychology and Ego Analysis” from 1921, Freud had claimed that group affiliation could have a hypnotic effect, in the sense that individuals could shed parts of their critical faculties or individual reason in a similar way as when under hypnosis. Freud distinguished between two different types of groups: on the one hand, the random gatherings or arbitrary group formations such as trends or fashion waves. The other type encompasses the strictly organized groups that last for a long time, such as religious or military groups, churches and armies. Freud emphasized how both the strict norms in such groups and the group feeling itself could function as a form of hypnosis that leads to reduced ego function. Groups can carry out actions that everyone in the group does not really want, like in bullying and peer pressure. Freud also points out how each individual soldier forms an emotional bond with the leader, in the same way that the patient forms a bond with the analyst in therapy. In such a transference relationship, one will idealize the leader and attribute to him almost magical qualities, in the same way as a son might do with his father, or the patient with his therapist. Furthermore, in a mass you will be able to feel your own power significantly strengthened; you will feel both a secure belonging and that your strength is multiplied through the mass. This feeling of increased strength is also often attributed to the leader’s power, and one feels deep gratitude towards him for one’s own belonging and new strength.
In his study of fascism, Reich took Freud’s insights about the transference and shedding of ego functions and critical sense in a mass as his starting point, and tried to merge them with the sociological class theory from Marx. Reich points out that it is of great importance that fascism is a phenomenon that originated in the lower middle class. Until a few years before the rise of the Nazi Party, the political map in Germany had been considered stable, divided along voter groups that had found their political party: capitalists and industrial leaders in the Conservative Party, farmers in the Peasants’ Party, and workers and wage earners in the Social Democratic Party or Communist Party, which constituted the only mass parties. Officials and the middle class often chose the Social Democrats. The Communist Party in Germany also had several million members at this time. With the Nazi Party, everything changed. Nazism quickly became a mass party, which no one had expected, with a voter base primarily in a frustrated lower middle class.
The Fascists competed with the Communists for a mass appeal, using “revolutionary” rhetoric and symbols to attract working-class voters. The rise of the Nazi Party coincided with the sharp decline of the German economy in the years 1929–32, following the financial crisis. Of the 6.4 million votes the party got in 1930, the breakthrough year for the party, around 3 million votes came from wage earners, of whom 70 percent were white-collar workers, and only 30 percent workers. In the 1932 election, the Socialists and Communists got around 13 million votes in total, while the Nazis together with the German National Party got 20 million. The Nazis put a lot of effort into winning working-class voters and were particularly successful among young and unorganized workers.
Reich pointed out that Hitler himself had a lower middle-class background as the son of a lower civil servant, and with a corporal rank from the army and an incomplete education as a painter and architect, Hitler was a person large groups of voters could identify with. Having a particular talent for being a catalyst for the frustrations of the lower middle class, its sense of powerlessness and lack of power and influence, Hitler often at the same time suggested a future victory, evoking feelings of conquering power and becoming strong as part of a larger community. From his many years as a therapist, Reich saw that the psychological frustrations of the lower middle class tended to have typical common features that revolved around obedience and rebellion. A lower middle-class person typically had an urge to rebel and free himself from authority, while at the same time being among the most obedient, who feared authorities and was quick to demonstrate complete loyalty. This duality was typical in therapy: the patients who had the greatest dreams of rebellion and assertiveness (against fathers or mothers) were often the most submissive and obedient. They had had strict fathers who demanded discipline, and they often had bureaucrat positions where they felt cowed under an authoritarian leader. Ambivalence towards authority was the result, with dreams of rebellion under obedient submissiveness, and the Nazis were unsurpassed in hitting this segment. Reich also pointed to the many symbolic analsadistic features of the Nazi ideology, that often dealt with purity and freedom from filth, while at the same time evoking unconscious images of submission to the leader and permitting violence against the enemy. The Nazis let the masses vent their hatred and frustrations by directing it towards particular groups like the Jews, while at the same time feeling safe through the blessing of the leader, who confirmed that you were “inside” and part of the greater whole.
Reich reminded his readers that Hitler initially had been attracted to the Social Democrats but was repelled by the trade unions and more attracted to Bismarck’s national-imperialist goals rather than a socialist focus on class antagonisms. Hitler did have a keen eye for the social democrats’ mass appeal, however, and saw that the conservatives would never be able to achieve such a following. A key question for Hitler was: Where would the masses go if the Social Democratic Party was dismantled? Quoting Hitler’s own autobiography, Reich claimed that this was his long-term strategy, and argued that despite his revolutionary rhetoric, Hitler was open about his anti-communism from the start. His long-term goal of invading the Soviet Union was mentioned already in Mein Kampf: “If the goal was to conquer countries in Europe, it could only be achieved at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich would again have to set out on the march following the pattern of the Teutonic knights of the past, in order to win by the German sword seed for the German plow and daily bread for the nation,” quoted Reich from Hitler’s manifesto.
While Hitler was spreading the revolutionary rhetoric to the masses, he was simultaneously assuring foreign investors that Germany would be a safe and profitable investment area, promising new growth and broken trade unions. Reich pointed out that the way fascism was expressed in both Italy and Germany was characterized by an unbridled display of power and authority symbols, with excessive use of uniforms, medals, and decorations very far from the discreet style of the upper classes. Rather, these symbols appealed to the lower middle-class dreams of greatness, now given free rein in a cavalcade of pompous spectacles with Roman symbols and the ravages of stormtroopers in the streets. Reich further showed how the Nazis effectively exploited sexual urges and emotions in their propaganda, without their opponents understanding it. Reich’s analyses of sexual symbolism in Nazi propaganda, and in particular how they were able to create embedded hatred through sexual fear, were in many ways pathbreaking. The Nazis consistently appealed to emotions rather than to rational reason, Reich pointed out, and he described how Hitler described the red color of the swastika flag as an expression of the Nazi movement’s “social anchoring,” reminiscent of the revolutionary communists. It was known that the swastika was an old fertility symbol, and Reich found that in ancient times, it had “heads” on two of the ends, so that it probably was an illustration of a couple in the sexual act. Reich pointed out that the Nazi cultivation of uniforms, both for ordinary party members and youth members, with distinctions and rank systems for functionaries at all levels, exploited the effect simple symbolism of power has on unconscious perception. Psychoanalysis arose out of hypnosis, and all hypnosis is based on authority. Power symbolism creates a kind of hypnotic effect; the rhythmic marching in high leather boots had a sexual dimension; Nazi posters and campaign materials often carried a not-so-subtle sexual symbolism. At the same time, Goebbels’s book burning was justified by the fact that the books in question undermined the purity of the German race and the morals of the young, or were decadent, sex-fixated, Jewish-pornographic, and so on. Reich points out that the Nazis operated with a double standard in the sexual area: They consistently accused Jews of being sex-fixated and animalistic, in contrast to the Aryan, pure, chaste, and decent people. The juxtaposition of “Jewish” and “pornographic” was very common, and Reich pointed out that Nazi anti-Semitism did not differ greatly from Southern Americans’ perception of blacks: in both cases an image was created that became the object of sexualized hatred. Both the Jew and the black man were depicted as a sexual threat, an animalistic force that could attack and rape “our women.” On that level, the violence and harassment of Jews were mentally anchored as a type of self-defense, which made it easier to give free rein to hatred. Julius Streicher’s journal Der Stürmer, which was printed in mass circulation, was full of “news” about Jewish ritual murders of babies and children, as well as secret societies with sacrifices and gang-rapes of young Aryan girls, and so on. Such “news” had a special function, Reich believed, because it affected readers on a subliminal level. Such strong images affected a deep level in the reader that awakened both unconscious sexual urges and desire for violence at once. Even if the text itself could be quickly forgotten, the triggering of these emotional planes could persist much longer, and release impulses that did not allow themselves to be calmed down so easily, but needed an outlet. Reich was here the first to establish something very important, namely that such narratives, by employing emotional triggers that frame the Jews as sexual monsters attacking women and children, anchor the hatred in the reader. Today, modern neurolinguistics has confirmed this assertion, and a lot of research explores how certain forms of linguistic expression can affect nerve pathways and precisely “anchor” feelings and moods in a permanent association with the word. Modern neurolinguistics emphasizes how language and words can be “charged” through emotional associations that are stored in the body, and in recent decades the study of hate speech has been the subject of much research. Reich described the phenomenon and chose the term “anchoring” for it already in 1933, and this early sensitivity to the psychology of hate speech has been an underappreciated contribution of his.
Reich recalled that a combination of sexual triggers on a subliminal level, with a cultivation of chastity, purity, and abstinence on the conscious level, could create frustration and a highly charged state of energy that would seek forms of outlet. While the Nazi regime organized boys and girls into youth associations and lured increasingly younger groups of children into their groupings, they understood that by creating an arena where boys and girls could meet, they were making a strategically very important move. It was crucial for the party to win the youth, to ensure the movement’s future growth. Reich pointed out that the Nazi girls’ organization Bund Deutscher Mädel, abbreviated BdM, was colloquially called “Bubi, drück mich,” because the young girls could be seduced by boys in the youth camps.[1] Even figures and articles from the Nazis themselves confirm this: the Ulm district branch of the Hitler Youth wrote in its report for 1938 that the evening gatherings with boys and girls dancing “had a greater significance for the organization than all the seminars and lectures.” In 1936, when around 100,000 Hitler Youth and BdM members met at a large meeting in Nuremberg, no less than 900 girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen came home pregnant. In 400 of the cases, it was impossible to determine paternity.
“Reich’s book was until then the only contribution to the understanding of fascism from the ranks of psychoanalysts, and the first psycho-social analysis of Hitler as a leader, a genre that would gain momentum after the war.”
Reich’s book was until then the only contribution to the understanding of fascism from the ranks of psychoanalysts, and the first psycho-social analysis of Hitler as a leader, a genre that would gain momentum after the war.[2] In the conclusion to the book, Reich stated that the great appeal of the NSDAP party could not be explained away by the fact that the leaders managed to deceive the voters, or that the voters suffered from “false consciousness.” Reich showed a parallel between the “apolitical attitude” of the masses and the phenomenon of resistance in psychoanalysis: The “apolitical attitude” was not a “false consciousness,” as some Marxists claimed, but a highly active political attitude, according to Reich, and it could be compared to the active resistance encountered in individuals in therapy.[3]
As one of the very few psychoanalysts who reviewed the book or even mentioned it, Karl Landauer gave it a glowing review in a review in which he also addressed Character Analysis. Landauer was the analyst of the famous social scientist Max Horkheimer, and the review was printed in the Frankfurt School’s journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1934. “Reich is a rebel with something at heart, he sees many things very clearly, and he knows his subject very well, a fact the second book is excellent proof of,” Landauer wrote. Furthermore, he praised Reich for not succumbing to the temptation to resort to popular psychological slogans such as “mass psychosis,” as many did in the face of Nazism, but rather asking the question “how and why each individual voter has a character structure that welcomes such a ‘leader’, which is something quite different,” concluded Landauer. Karl Landauer was one of the many psychoanalysts who did not survive the war, dying in a concentration camp in 1943.
Not everyone on the left was enthusiastic about Reich’s book; among other things, the leading echelons of the German Communist Party reacted to the fact that Reich had become too independent and productive as a writer, without taking into account the party line. Reich had opened the book with the sentence “The German labor movement has suffered a great defeat”; he could not describe Hitler’s rise to power and the creation of concentration camps for political prisoners and Jews otherwise. This was cracked down on, for the directives from Moscow were unequivocal: Hitler’s rise to power was only a temporary setback for the German Communist Party, and claims of defeat were unacceptable. The Hungarian and later British author Arthur Koestler was in the same communist cell as Reich (they were both later firm anti-communists), and he described the exclusion of Reich in his novel Darkness at Noon (1938), where the character “Richard” is based on Reich, and his wife “Anny” is Annie.[4]
Norbert Ernst was a young communist who fled Germany in 1934. He could tell that he and likeminded members of the German Communist Party saw Reich and Trotsky as two brave writers who dared to stand up to Stalin and criticize him. Ernst and a group of his friends smuggled Reich’s and Trotsky’s books into Nazi Germany with false covers, after they had been banned by the Nazi regime.[5] One dust jacket was titled “Mystical Uplifting: A Book for Young Men” by the author “Pastor Friedrich Traub.”[6] The first page of the book, which was presumably also written by Reich, was a glowing text about the joy of bowing in Christian submission to the strong leadership of the Leader, a joy described in cheerful terms until the text on page two abruptly turns into The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich’s book was both important and dangerous, and was printed in three editions already in the first year.
But the book did nothing at all to change the IPA leadership’s view of Reich. Shortly after the publication of the book, on October 14, 1933, Ernest Jones wrote to J. van Ophuijsen:
“[W]e should in the coming Congress propose a new rule giving the President the power to exclude any unsatisfactory national group, a measure that would, of course, have to be ratified by the next Congress. Perhaps we should say “suspend” instead of “exclude.” And the same right could also be useful in relation to individuals. I think of Zilboorg and Reich. As it is now, a local group can exclude an individual member, but it can quickly be difficult to implement this locally.”
[1] “Bubi, drück mich” means “boy, press me down,” or “press me down”; it is thus an expression of the girls’ desire to have amorous intercourse with the boys, and was a nickname for the organization that showed that people were ready that there was a lot of sexual intercourse going on here.
[2] Historian Jaap van Ginneken notes that Mass Psychology of Fascism has long been underestimated despite its great qualities, particularly because of the biological perspectives Reich introduced in later editions.
[3] Reich (1933): op. cit. This observation later became the basis for Erich Fromm’s international bestseller The Fear of Freedom (1942), or Escape from Freedom, as it was called in England.
[4] To my knowledge, no one has previously pointed out Koestler’s use of Reich as a role model, but when you know the circumstances surrounding Reich’s exclusion after the publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, the parallels between “Richard” and “Anny” and Reich and Annie are completely obvious.
[5] Telephone interview with Norbert Ernst. April 25, 2002.
[6] See Andreas Peglau’s 2013 Unpolitische Wissenschaft? Wilhelm Reich und die Psychoanalyse im Nationalsozialismus, Giessen: Psychosozial- Verlag, pp. 548–551.