The unmourned wound: Reflections on the psychology of Adolf Hitler

Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 1995

The Unmourned Wound: R e f l e c t i o n s o n t h e P s y c h o l o g y of Adolf Hitler D O N A L D R. F E R R E L L ABSTRACT." Fifty years after his death by suicide, Adolf Hitler continues to arouse profound feelings of revulsion and attraction. This paper is an exploration of Hitler's psyche from the perspective of a depth psychology. After ex~m~uing analyses of Hilter's personality by Richard Rubenstein and Alice Miller, the argument is made that we need C.G. Jung's concept of psychic inflation to understand more fully Hitler's impact upon the world. Hitler is seen as inflated by the compensating energies of the Self in response to his deeply wounded ego, a wound he could not mourn. Consequently, he became identified with the dark and destructive energies of the Self which inflated and then usurped his ego. Hitler's demonic and destructive career resulted from that inflation, which he was not able to neutralize. The paper concludes with reflections on the role of mourning in protecting us from the experience of psychic inflation, especially by the Self in its dark and destructive aspects.

Friedrich Nietzsche gave us one of the great prophetic texts of the nineteenth century in the parable of the m a d m a n that appears in his The Gay Science: Have you not heard of that m a d m a n who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and criedincessantly:~I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked laughter. "Has he got lost?n, asked one. "Did he lose his way like a child?n, asked another. "Or is he hiding?.Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?~ Thus they yelled and laughed. The m a d m a n jumped into theirmidst and piercedthem with his eyes. "Whither is God? n, he cried;"I will tellyou. W e have killedhim--you and I. A n of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? H o w could we drink up the sea? W h o gave us the sponge to wipe away the entirehorizon? What were we doing when we unchained thisearth from itssun? Whither is itmoving now? Whither are we moving? Away from allsuns? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?Is there stillany up or down? Are we not strayingas through an infinitenothing? Donald R. Ferrell, Ph.D., is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in New York City and Montclair, NJ. 175

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Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? I s not night

continually closing in on us.~1

In this haunting tale, Nietzsche seems to be struggling to articulate something he felt was taking place within the psyche of Western people at a deep unconscious level, stillvery far away from collective awareness. The reach into the depth of this parable might well make one seem m a d to one's contemporaries. For Nietzsche, the death of God meant the loss to Western civilizationof a transcendent ground for value and meaning. This loss of a sense of transcendence, carried especially within the Jewish and Christian images of God, had already overtaken Western civilization,however unaware most m a y have been of the event. What comes in its wake is what Nietzsche called the time of nihilism,s which Western culture was going to have to pass through on its way to the complete "transvaluation of values" he believed we must move toward. Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is a complex experience2 One senses that "nothing" grounds and validates our historical existence; that h u m a n values are, ultimately, constructed from a people's root instinctual apprehensions of life. Good and evil ultimately refer to a people's sense of what promotes or thwarts its c o m m o n life.Values, then, serve the will-to-power. Nietzsche was passionate about exposing the underlying will-to-power he believed lurked behind the mask of morality in order to promote life.Still,in spite of his profound sense that we must will the death of God for the sake of our own liberation and embrace the fundamental nothingness at the core of our being, Nietzsche knew that the dawning time of nihilism was a dangerous and potentially destructive time in history. In the words of his parable it means that we have unchained ourselves from the sun, from that form of rational consciousness that sees moral order in the universe, that confers eternal ontological validity upon our values and constitutes the ultimate purpose of our existence. This loss of the sense of transcendence, though in a sense advocated by Nietzsche, was a profound loss for him and, I believe, a loss he was unable to mourn. 4 Perhaps his most disturbing metaphor for the age of nihilism is that it will be the time of night in our history2 Nietzche's parable of the madman who seeks God after God's death, who knows, in fact, that GOd is dead and that the death of God has profound consequences for us, is prophetic, it seems to me, because it anticipates the radical experiment in nihilism of European civilization that remains a central def~niag feature of the twentieth century. Clearly, this experiment is not what Nietzsche himself had in mind in his own advocacy of the destruction that would have to precede the emergence of the ego of the Superman that the prophet Zarathustra came to announce. Not even Nietzsche, in his intuition of wars to come, could have imagined what shape the experiment in nihilism actually would take. Nor could he have imagined the figure who, partly in Nietzsche's name, felt called upon by ~Providence" to carry out this experiment in nihilism: Adolf Hitler. 6

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Having reached the fiftieth snniversary of Hitler's death by suicide in his famous Berlin bunker (which has not, to this day, been excavated by the City of Berlin or the G e r m a n government), w e would do well to try better to understand l~m. H o w is such a task possible? H o w does one attempt to penetrate a h u m a n being who, in his m o m e n t in history, so profoundly exploded every criterion we t a k e as constituting the human? H e embodied a rule of evil that even now, some fifty years later, we still cannot comprehend. Perhaps there is no w a y fully to enter into Hitler's life, to reach greater understanding. ~ Yet, insofar as we can say that he was human, and t h u s one of us, we m u s t try to understand, for the kingdom of night, of nothingness that arose in t h e midst of civilized Europe, was made by h u m a n beings for human beings. Perhaps in trying to achieve a deeper understanding of Hitler's psyche, we can come Closer to an understanding of how this kingdom was, in fact, p u t into place and what it is in ourselves that drives us to embrace such an alien world as the Holocaust represents. Such an effort to make some sense of Hitler is of course not in any w a y to condone nor to exonerate. In fact, the ruined worlds of Hitler's kingdom, constituting that vast cemetery of the Jewish people we know as Eastern Europe, will not allow us to explain, interpret, or exonerate anything. These ruins, and the death camps that surround them, will always remind us of something in the h u m a n psyche that cannot be condoned or accepted, or perhaps even understood. The best we can do is to try to name and identify it. Let us, then, with Hitler's own words, try to enter his psychic world. It was during his abortive and disillusioning residency in Vienna as a YOung m a n that Hitler came upon a dreadful experience of otherness. "Once as I was strolling through the Inner City," he tells u s , m I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was m y firstthought.., but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my firstquestion assumed a new form: Is this a German?... Yet I could no longer very well doubt that the objects of m y study were not Germans of a special religion,but a people in themselves; for since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a differentlight than before.... In a short time I was made more thoughtful than ever by m y slowly rising insight into the type of activity carried on by the Jews in certain fields. Was there any form of filthor profligacy,particularly in cultural life,without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light--a kike!... Gradually, I began to hate them. ~ Allan Bullock 9 confesses in his 1991 study of Hitler, as Joachim Fest I°did in 1974, that w e have no grounds in what we k n o w about Hitler's life up to that time to determine w h y he should have developed his psychotic hatred of the Jews. Nor can w e account, they argue, for w h y that hatred remained una-

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bated right to the last hours of his life when, in the bunker in Berlin, before committing suicide, Hitler reaffirmed his unyielding conviction that the Jews of Europe had to be exterminated down to the last man, woman, and child. In his essay ~Religion and the Origins of the Death Camps, a Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ~ Richard Rubenstein 1~offers a penetrating analysis of the unconscious dynamics that led to the death of six million Jews. Hitler wrote in 1919: Anti-Semitism on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of pogroms. The anti-Semitism of reason, however, must lead to the planned judicial opposition to and elimination of the privileges of the Jews . . . . Its ultimate goal, however, must absolutely be the removal of the Jews altogether. Only a government of national power and never a government of national impotence will be capable of both. u Rubenstein acknowledges that we will not be able to understand Hitler, the Nazis, or the larger German embrace of Hitler unless we acknowledge the power of the unconscious and one of its primary expressions in the mythological deliverances of the religious imagination. "The roots of the death camps," he asserts, "must be sought in the mythic structure of Christianity. ~13This is not to blame Christianity for the Nazi genocide, but it is to grasp a deeply disturbing and sorrowful truth. This truth is that the Christian mythological construction of the meaning of the Jewish people, out of a deeply envious and ambivalent collective unconscious, subjected the Jews to a cluster of interpretations of such negative valence that it created a basis within European culture for the rise of what Joel Carmichael calls "mystical anti-Semitism,"~4 of which Nazi anti-Semitism was the most radical and destructive expression. Without the 2,000-year history of a ~teaching of contempt" by some Christians for the Jewish people, it is highly unlikely that Hitler could have mobilized the German nation for the execution of "the Final Solution to the Jewish problem~ in the way that he did. We must try somehow to take in this awful truth. ~ Rubenstein identifies the following motifs in the Christian mythological interpretation of the Jews. When the Jews, the chosen of God, rejected Christ, God in turn rejected and abandoned the Jews and left them on earth as negative witness to the peril of rejecting the divine revelation in Christ. Thus, every catastrophic event that overtakes them is divinely intended and deserved, including the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans and their humiliation again in the second war with Rome. The Jews are "God forsaken~ and have been superseded by the Christian community as the New Israel, now the beloved elect of God. Rubenstein rightly points to the sibling nature of this interpretation in which the Jew as the older sibling has been displaced and replaced by the Christian younger sibling in the esteem of God the Father. Within the dialectic of such a Christian interpretation, the Jews have both

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brought forth God Incarnate, the God-Man Jesus Christ, and become the murderers of God. However absurd to the secular mind the identification of the Jews as "Christ killers ~ may be, Rubenstein has shown how powerfully fateful this charge has been for Jewish existence in many places during the Christian epoch. Christian culture too olden i d e n t ~ e d Jews not merely as allteo-humRn]y "stiff-necked~ in their resistance to the theological meaning of Jesus, but, far more fatefully for the Jewish people, as devoid of a common humanity. The Jews were endowed with a demonic evilwkilling Gedmwhich can only be understood as in some sense satanic. Under the power of the image of deicide, Jews fall outside the circle of humanity and become a profound threat to the moral, psychological and spiritual order of the Christian structure of meaning and the world that arises out of that structure. Hence, the Jews can be seen as the children of Satan (cf. The Gospel of John, Chapter 8, for example). It was the fate of the Jews of Christian Europe to become citizens of the anti-world of the Devil, as his "spawn," and thus alien, malignant, and demonically destructive. The Nazi image of the Jews as vermin, filled with lust and greed, under the power of the Judas figure, organized to destroy Germany, flows directly from this ancient image of the Jews as children and agents of Satan. Rubenstein employs the psychoanalytic thinking of Freud and Fenichel to interpret the unconscious significance of this elaborate Christian myth of the Jews. We can see in this mythology, he asserts, the unconscious conflicts and strivings of the Christian psyche. In short, to invoke Jungian thought for a moment, which Rubenstein himself does not do,le the Jew is the shadow figure of the Christian psyche. What does this mean? We see in the manifest content of the myth of the Jews held by some Christians what may be most deeply split off, rejected, and thus unconscious, in the Christian psyche. There is, first, a murderous impulse toward the Jewish people which the moral structure of Christianity forbids overt expression. This murderous impulse can be seen as retaliation for the narcissistic injury created by identification of the older sibling, the Jew, as the most beloved of the Father. This wound is to be compensated for by a profound, irreversible, and global devaluation of the being and humanity of the Jews as a people. The rival to the Christian narcissistic need to be the most beloved child of the Father is destroyed, not by genocide, Hitler's "solution, ~ in unrestrained exercise of his own narcissistic rage, but by a mythic image and the social sanctions the image made possible, in which the Jewish people were deeply disadvantaged as serious rivals to the will-to-power of a Christian claim to be the superior and most beloved sibling. Christian anti-Semitism, then, is a pure cultural expression of Nietzsche's notion of ressentimentY In Rubenstein's analysis, there is something even darker in the Christian unconscious that can be seen in its mythic image of the Jews. The homicidal desire at work in the Christian psyche, a part of its supersessionary theology, is accompanied by a deeply regressive energy directed to commit deicide in

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order to yield to unconscious gratificationof instinctual aggressive and sexual drives. This unconscious yearning, which Rubenstein identifiesas a desire for infantile omnipotence, was rejected by the Christian superego and expelled from the Christian psyche by the mechanism of projection onto the Jews. In sum, the Jews are seen as a deicidal people, and thus the magically potent enemy, children of Satan, and therefore themselves satanic. In such Christian fantasy, the Jews are and do what is most deeply forbidden and thus repressed within the Christian psyche itself. Given the terriblefate of European Jewry in our historicalera, this m a y be the most destructive projection in the history of humanity's long struggle toward consciousness. It fell not only on the Jew, but in various forms on women, Africans, Asians, and most of the so-called primitive peoples of the planet, including Native Americans. Again, it m a y be difficultfor the so-calledsecular mind, or a mind that does not appreciate the archetypal dimension of reality,to understand what this whole terribledrama is about, w h y there m a y be such agony and explosively destructive potential within the structure of the Christian psyche (first analyzed by Hegel in his notion of the "unhappy consciousness" in The Phenomenology of Spirit) and why so m a n y victims. Rubenstein points out t h a t a dialectical correlate of the radical monotheism of both J u d a i s m and Christianity is t h a t God is the unconditional ground of the moral order and as such an absolute limit upon the unconscious and conscious strivings of the h u m a n ego. Because God is, certain possibilitiesof h u m a n existence are not permitted, for they violate the divine intention for the created order. AS Ivan Karamazov says, "If God is dead, everything is permitted." In both the Jewish and Christian unconscious, Rubenstein asserts, God must die if there is to be fulfillmentof the deepest longings of the h u m a n self,namely, the return to the edenic realm of infantile instinctual freedom, where there is no impediment to the fulfillment of instinctual desire. What was held in check by the moral structure of Christianity, as well as by the efficacy of projection, Hitler and his Nazi clones sought release from, n a m e l y moral restraint. AS a fanatical anti-Christian, dialectically tied to Christianity by the power of psychotic hatred, like the medieval celebrants of the Black Mass, Hitler also projected onto Jews his own unconscious strivings. Rubenstein describes Hitler's psychopathology in these terms: In his hatred of his father, in his contempt for the limitation of moral as well as military reality, in his irrational intuitiouisrn, in his utter failure to achieve an adult sexual relationship with a woman, and in his final suicidal mania for himself and his country, the Muttersohnchen remained triumphant. ~ As a Jewish-Christian heresy, Nazism wanted to destroy both Christianity and J u d a i s m and create a perfect model of a nihilistic universe in which God

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is dead. The death camp became that perfect model. While this ambition was not unconscious to Hitler or his circle of fellow perpetrators, their ultimate reasons for seeking such a universe were unconscious. We find the clue to the nature of Hitler's unconscious, as we do to the unconscious of the Christian of whom Hitler is the dialectical opposite, by again looking at that which was projected upon the Jews and acted out through projective identification. As the omnipotent enemy that threatens the purity of German blood and the integrity of the German state, Jews are categorically evil and must be destroyed. From the random pogroms of the early Nazi period, to the mobile killing units that followed in the wake of the German invasion of Poland and Russia, and the early experiments-with death by carbon monoxide poisoning at Chelmno, to the highly organized assembly-line deaths in the gas chambers of Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, a central unconscious need informed the whole unspeakable enterprise for which Auschwitz became the archetypal symbol. Drawing upon Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, Rubenstein points out that a primary motif in the mythology of Satan is his association with the dynamics of anality. In this mythology, Satan and his followers exude a horrible fecal stench and fecal material, as a kind of negative sacrament, must be used in the worship of Satan. At the same time, Satan promises his followers what Rubenstein calls "anal freedom." The Nazis referred to Auschwitz as the anus mundi, the anus of the world. Here the devil's kingdom was created as in no other place on earth or in history. The Jews, children of Satan, were turned into the feces of the world. Combatting satanic evil as they believed they were, Hitler and the SS felt compelled to fight evil with evil, to use the devil's ways against him, and at the same time to work to destroy all impediments to the gratification of their own deepest, most primal unconscious desires. The unconscious function of Auschwitz, which in Polish means "Blessed Place," is twofold. It was the place where Jews and others were killed for carrying the projection of union with Satan, which was in fact the deepest unconscious longing of Hitler and the SS. And Auschwitz became the space in which the Nazis could fully regress into anal freedom again, their own most deeply forbidden desire, the radical opposite of the characteristic German preoccupation with order, cleanliness, and submission to authority. Six million Jews had not only to die but to be killed in such a way that they symbolized the Nazi unconscious fantasy of infantile omnipotence and rebellion against the adult ideal order of the world of this most ordered people, the ultimate expression of which is the freedom to play with one's own feces?9 The most powerful memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto--a replica of a seweropening, with its iron lid inscribed by the survivors--drives the point home, and, as Joanna Luria Mintzer suggests, gives powerful testimony to Rubensteins thesis. 2° The few Jews who survived the Warsaw Ghetto uprising clearly

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understood themselves to be not heroes, but sewer dwellers and little more, the first inhabitants of the Kingdom of Night whom the Nazis, literally turned into feces. The death camp was the most complete expression of Adolf Hitler's psyche. Hitler's psychotic hatred of Jews is rooted in the mythic image of the Jews that one so often found in the Christian imagination, as subhuman creatures of Satan. This image Hitler internalized (as did all too many in European Ch "rm~ndom) by his participation, however marginally, in the Christian culture of Europe. Hitler's hatred, Rubenstein shows, is also rooted in his psychopathological fixation at the infantile level of psychic functioning. Caught in this fixation as he was, Hitler was driven by fantasies of omnipotence and by primitive destructive energies from Which he was never able to carve out for himself an adult ego that could contain and integrate the powerful unconscious forces within him. Projecting these forces upon the Jews and vowing to destroy them, he could then destroy in himself what he saw in them. This allowed Hitler to maintain a crude and primitive form of psychological survival in the short run, but ultimately it devoured him and his people, as it did so many Jews. Splitting and projection allowed Hitler to experience himself as the dark and savage god of his primitive fantasies, who for a few short years achieved a nearly unlimited exercise of power as his unconscious desire for infantile omnipotence required. Rubenstein writes: In the camps the Jews were treated as dead long before the fatal moment arrived. That which the Christian myth of the Jew as Judas, Christ-killer, and deicide asserted to be the Jews' ultimate aimmthe total withdrawal of all impediment to anarchic desire--was actually brought about by the German murderers. They were able to rid themselves of the last restraints of violence of their Jewish God and to avenge His death at the very same time?~ Rubenstein's analysis is clearly within the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud, Fenichel, and Melanie Klein. Hitler becomes an extreme example of a personality who was unable to negotiate the necessary developmental tasks of childhood, especially at the anal stage. Pathologically tied to his mother, and driven by primitive intrapsychic forces that Freud would understand as derivatives of the death instinct, Hitler acted out humsnklnd's most primitive fantasies and darkest desires. Rubenstein helps us understand not only the nature of Hitler's psyche but also the historical condition of the German people, which led it to follow him down the path to the infantile destruction of the world. There is still more to uncover in our search for understanding. Rubenstein's Freudian emphasis upon the intrapsychic domain in interpreting Hitler's psyche needs to be balanced by a greater effort to see what it was in Hitler's actual childhood that helped turn him into the monster he became.

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Alice Miller's recent essay on Hitler's childhood in her book For Your Own Good: Childhood and the Roots of V'm/ence supplements Rubenstein's analysis. Miller reconstructs Hitler's childhood by looking closely at the assertion made, among others, by Hans Frank, Hitler's attorney and later Governor General of Poland, at the Nuremberg trials, that Hitler's paternal grandfather was half-Jewish, which according to Nazi racial laws would have consigned him to the status of a non-person. Joachim Fest, in The Face of the Third Reich, documents the historical fact that Hitler's grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgrnber, became pregnant out of wedlock while in the employ of a Graz Jew named Frankenberger. Although Maria married five years after Alois's birth in 1837, Frank asserted that Frankenberger paid her the equivalent of child support for fourteen years, probably on behalf of his son, the alleged father of Alois Hitler. Although the question of Hitler's Jewish grandfather was investigated, first by Frank at Hitler's request, and later by the Gestapo at the order of Heinrich Himmler, no convincing evidence was found that would confirm or deny that Hitler was partly Jewish. However, Frank's findings, as Fest points out, "forced Hitler to doubt his own descent. ~ When Alois was five years old, his mother not only married Johann Georg Hiedler, another possible father of Alois, but also gave her son over to the care of her husband's brother, Johann Nepomuk Huttler, "presumably," as Fest suggests, "because she felt she could not raise the child properly.~ The Heidlers were, according to stories handed down, so poverty-stricken that they had to sleep in a cattle trough. Their poverty may have motivated Alois's mother to put him in the care of her brother-in-law. Alois was separated from his mother at a most vulnerable age. It was not until Alois was 40 that his adoptive father (who may also have been Alois's biological father), Johann Huttler came before the parish priest in Dollersheim with three witnesses and asked for the legitimation of his "foster son." He asserted to the priest that Alois's biological father was his brother, J o h a n n Georg Heidler (we are given no information in the biographies as to why the brothers had the same first name and different last names). From that point on, Alois Schicklgruber became Alois Hitler, who at 40 had risen in the ranks of the civil service, and for the sake of his career may have needed to resolve the question of his paternity by taking his adoptive father's name Given the pervasiveness of the negative Christian mythology of the Jew within European culture, it is likely that the Hitler family, members of the Roman Catholic Church, had internalized this negative image of the Jews. Hitler himself was an altar boy in childhood, and his name, as Harry James Cargas 24 has pointed out, has not yet been removed from the Church rolls through posthumous excommunication! The allegation of Jewish blood in the family, whether true or not, would have been deeply shameful to Hitler's childhood family. It was a shame which Alois defended against by the development of a persona as a good German civil servant.

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Is it possible that Hitler's hatred of the Jews and of his father is, at least in part, rooted in the shame-based identity he developed through unconscious internalization of his father's shame? If so, we can begin to see t h a t Hitler's "gradual ~ hatred of the Jews, which he asserts as the result of his experience in Vienna, in fact, has early childhood roots which clearly over-determined the meaning of the Jew for him. But it was not just his father's shame that .wounded the young Adolf. According to Miller, both Hitler and his sister Paula reported t h a t Alois Hitler was violent with his wife and children, as well as the family dog. He shamed his son and beat him regularly. Rudolf Oden, for example, remembers that Hitler's father often summoned his son by whistling on two fingers, as if he were calling a dog.~ Fest reports that in 1938, as Hitler was on his way to becoming the most powerful m a n in Germany, he was deeply upset by Frank's discovery of allegations of Jewish blood on his father's side of the family. In May, 1938, he ordered the village of Dollersheim and its environs turned into a training area for the army. As a consequence, "his father's birthplace a n d his grandmother's burial place were obliterated by the tanks of the Wehrmaht. ~ Miller rejects Fest's suggestion that Hitler's latent anger at his father surfaced after the question of his father's paternity was raised by Frank and others. Her argument is that Hitler's hatred of his father has its roots in his childhood, not only in the shame over his alleged Jewish blood, b u t especially because of daily beatings, which began, Miller hypothesizes, as early as his fourth year. Miller points out that even with both Adolf's and Paula's eyewitness testimony, several of Hitler's biographers have either completely denied, or substantially downplayed, the question of the impact of his father's beatings upon Hitler's developmentY It is her thesis that Hitler, like m a n y others (e.g. Nietzsche), were victimized by the influence of what she calls "poisonous pedagogy," the philosophy of childrearing that was especially pervasive in German culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ~ Hitler told his secretaries that his father once gave him thirty lashes, which he counted to himself without manifesting any outward sign of pain or sorrow. He was following the example of Karl May's novels of the Native Americans and the way they suffered pain and torture--"heroically. ~ We have in this account a significant clue to the etiology and dynamics of Hitler's pathology, including his sociopathy. Hitler learned early in life to deny both physical and psychological pain, and thus not to experience it, including the profound grief generated by being constantly dJmlnished and violated by one's parent. Grief is the reaction to psychic loss of one's integrity as a person of worth and of the meaning that the anomic violence of an idealized figure brings in its wake. The themes of Hitler's early, on-going traumatization through his father's reign of terror and his defensive adaptation to this deep a n d destructive wound to his sense of self are central to Miller's analysis of his childhood.

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Alois Hitler seems to have chosen the young Adolf as the scapegoat for his own inner rage and conflicts. Clearly, Alois made the young Adolf suffer for his own pain511 past. In later years Hitler recapitulated his early abuse upon the German people in the racial laws, for example, which Miller sees as Hitler's way of ridding b~mself of the haunting question of his Jewish ancestry. It was as if Hitler could only rid himself of the inner dissonance concern° ing his own origins by surrounding himself with people whose racial identity was in no way in question. Insofar as the hated father became unconsciously identified with the hated Jew, Hitler expressed his own inner wound by doing to the Jew what he unconsciously was driven to do to his father, by defining the Jew as utterly outside the circle of Aryan humanity. Through the magic of the repetition compulsion, encoded in the racial laws, Hitler attempted to undo the shame and disgrace of his father's alleged Semitic origins. As Miller's analysis shows, Hitler obviously projected upon the Jews the evil part of himself created by his hatred of his father. Here Rubenstein's analysis of the myth of the Jew as deicide becomes especially important, since the desire to murder God the Father is often unconsciously bound up with a desire to murder one's own father. Now all that is evil in Hitler is put onto the J e w - - h a t r e d of one's father makes one evil in a culture where fathers are honored and their brutality condoned in the name of"firm" childrearing practices. ~ Disowning one's own negative feelings and putting them onto the other, one in effect gets rid of them in oneself by getting rid of the other. Hitler, the parricide and deicide, can persecute and murder Jews because they were fated by 2000 years of anti-Semitic mythology to carry his projected evil self and his displaced narcissistic hatred and rage. His hatred of his father for beating, shaming, and humiliating him found sanctioned outlet in his hatred of the Jews. In Miller's interpretation, as in Rubenstein's, the Jews served symbolic functions for Hitler. Jews were the symbolic equivalent both of the hated father and of Hitler's inner helpless child. In making the Jews the helpless child, Hitler became the omnipotent father. It is Miller's argument that children who have been severely traumatized, especially through physical abuse, and have not been allowed by their abusers to mourn their deep and often nearly inexpressible pain will express the trauma in their adult lives in some encoded form, often in art-forms or self-destructive acting out. She believes that one can see Hitler's whole career as an encoded, unconscious acting-out of his early childhood trauma. The concentration camp, she argues, is a nearly total replication of the concentration camp of Hitler's childhood. Perhaps Hitler's biographers, Miller proposes, have failed to take seriously his childhood trauma because, however evil he became, his profoundly destructive life is, even if only in part, the outcome of a cultural system that openly valued the "destruction of a child's will," through beatings if necessary, as a proper goal of childrearing. In denying Hitler's childhood abuse, his biographers collude with the culture that sanctioned it.

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Hitler's profoundly onesided fascination with power, in compensation for his inner sense of helplessness, can be seen especially in his drive to violate and overthrow the fundamental moral traditions of the West. In his open avowal of lying and murder; his refusal to tolerate any form of political opposition; his growing sense that he was exclusively called by Providence either to save the German people or bring them to their collective death if they proved unworthy of him, and finally his radical commitment to genocide as a political policy can be seen the self of a terrii~md child. Hitler's inner terror and rage were the consequence of his early childhood being utterly at the disposal of a seemingly omnipotent other who could do anything he wished with complete impunity. What is striking about Hitler's psychology is both the extraordinary depth of his feeling of being menaced and the omnipotence he sought to combat his unyielding inner terrors and the threat of disintegration21 These are the hallmarks of early traumatic injury to the core self and the frozen grief and inability to mourn that olden come in the wake of such destructive traumatization. A Jungian perspective adds still another level of understanding of Hitler's drive toward omnipotence. It is not so much the result of regression to the infantile level, as Rubenstein and the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition would have it, nor of his identification with the omnipotent father. It is rather a symbolic symptom of the invasion of the ego by the archetype of the Self, which for J u n g is the archetype of meaning. This is crucial to understanding that there is much more at work.in the profoundly destructive career of Adolf Hitler than merely his own enraged inner child. From 1934 to 1939 J u n g conducted an important seminar in Zurich on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a seminar that at some points was concurrent with Heidegger's Nietzsche seminar in Germany. Running throughout the seminar is Jung's analysis of the way Nietzsche's ego tragically and progressively succumbed to a profound and irreversible inflation by the transpersonal center of the psyche Jung called the Self. ~ Understood psychologically, the Self in Jungian thought represents the primordial unity and wholeness of the archetypal psyche out of the matrix of which the ego, as the seat of consciousness, emerges in struggle, pain, and blessing within the process Jung calls individuation. Edward Edinger = points out t h a t the ego's emergence from the matrix of the Self is characterized by a movement between inflation and alienation. In inflation the ego is identified with the Self, and in alienation the ego is cut off from the Self and thus from the source of its own life. This dialectical movement of the ego between alternating states of inflation and alienation, as it differentiates itself from the original wholeness and unity in which it was born, is a necessary organic process; yet it is intrinsically painful for the ego to confront its own finitude and separateness from that to which the ego also belongs. Understood psychopathologically, inflation can be seen as the state in which the ego "refuses" its finitude and separateness and experiences itself as

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one with the Self. In the universal inflation of childhood, the infantile ego is identified with the Self for the most part and only very slowly and painfully begins to understand that it is not the center of the universe. Healthy adult ego-identity consists in disidentlfying from the Self, while living in conscious relationship to it. In Jung's thought one of the functions of the Self is its compensation of the inevitably one-sided, limited, and ~egological ~ attitude of the ego. Since the Self is the t r a n ~ n d e n t , superordinate, and ordering center of the psyche, the Coincidentia Oppositorum as Jung calls it, following Meister Eckhart, it is the source of meaning for the ego. As its primordial ground, the Self constautly confronts the ego with what I have called elsewhere~ a ~surplus ~ of meaning, which the ego must struggle to individuate and integrate over the course of its own developmental history. According to Jung, Nietzsche's fragile and vulnerable ego structure was confronted by the Self in such a way that Nietzsche became less and less human and more and more identified with the Self, until psychosis overwhelmed him. It is significant, if Miller is right, that both Nietzsche and Hitler were deeply wounded in their core selves by physical abuse and the assault upon their integrity as persons such abuse represents. ~ Neither Nietzsche nor Hitler ever mourned the tragic woundedness of their childhoods. Instead, they both, though in different ways, adopted the heroic attitude of the masculine ego behind which lay a deep narcissistic injury. Nietzsche heroically searched for truth in the realm of spirit, to create a new structure of me~nlug in the face of the death of God. Hitler was driven by his sense of his own heroic greatness to achieve a new world order. As heirs of the tradition of "poisonous pedagogy,~ both men experienced an unmourned wound to their core sense of being, a wound best understood, perhaps, as an irretrievable loss of their constitutive selves, which could only be resolved by a deep and sustained mourning of that loss. Neither Nietzsche nor Hitler was allowed, as a child, to grieve for his loss, which included a loss of meaning. Because they could not mourn, both men became identified with the Self as it expresses its organic compensating function of restoring meaning and balance to the wounded ego. The ego that does not do the work of mourning the deeply destructive and traumatizing wounds of childhood is especially vulnerable to inflation from the surplus of meaning that flows into the ego from the Self and thus is exposed to the dangerous regression that such inflation often precipitates. Such was the fate of both Nietzsche and Hitler. Both men shared a hatred for Christianity and the bourgeois world it sanetiffed, and both wanted to undo that world. Yet Nietzsche in his inflation never seemed to be tempted toward the human destruction that Hitler ultimately carried out in a system of genocide ("rational anti-Semitism~) which still remains, fifty years later, incomprehensible. In comparing Nietzsche and Hitler, we recognize that we cannot under-

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stand Hitler becoming the monster he did without the explanatory hypothesis of brutal childhood abuse. Yet not every child who is physically and sexually abused grows up to become an abuser of others, or, in the extreme case, a mass murderer. Nietzsche, for example, did not, although he did become hopelessly mad. This hypothesis, then, is a necessary, but insufficient, explanation of Hitler's profoundly hate-driven and destructive career. Hitler's identification with the Self and the inflation this identification generated in him drove him to become increasingly inhuman and inhumane, grandiose, without any real sense of limits. Hitler's psychosis was, in short, that he was unconsciously identified with God. At the conscious level he saw himself as the heroic leader, morally and spiritually superior to all others, including the Pope.~ Since there was such deep narcissistic injury to his core self, he lacked the intact ego to receive and integrate--without identifying with i t w t h e meaning that poured into him from the compensatory agency of the Self. Instead, unconsciously, he sought to become the Self. It was not only his father's brutal violence toward him that damaged his core self. Miller points out that, again in contradiction of the official biographies, it is highly unlikely that Hitler ever received the love from his mother he needed to feel safe and secure. Obviously, she was unable to protect him from his father. Moreover, in the months before Adolf was born on April 20, 1889, Klara Hitler lost all three of her prior children to diphtheria. She was thus in a state of profound grief and anxiety when Adolf was born and would have had to possess extraordinary personal qualities to have facilitated a securely attached bond to her fourth and only living child. What seems more likely is that to defend herself against the threat of the loss of yet another child Klara did not psychologically bond with her son, thereby exposing him to the overwhelming anxieties of the insecurely attached child. 37 Thus, even before Hitler was to suffer the shame, humiliation, and destruction of his world of meaning by his father's brutality, he was confronted with a mother unable to love him, who may have idealized her dead children to such an extent that little Adolf could never compete with their idealized memory.~ Unconscious of this wound, too, Hitler was never able to mourn. The search for the admiring and loving mother drove him all his life to work to achieve monumental size in order to be loved. Fest tells us that he was obsessed with gigantism. From his grandiose plans to create in Berlin a city to transcend Athens and Rome, depicted in architectural fantasies shared with Albert Speer, to his pride in having designed the largest framed window in history for his mountain chalet at Berchtesgaden, we see expressions of Hitler's mother-complex. Hitler's obsession with Germany's need for Lebensraum, that preoccupied him from the early 1920s onward, and ultimately led him to launch the campaign against the Soviet Union that was to become his downfall, points to his unconscious need to create from the earth a mother big enough to hold his

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wounded narcissistic need to be seen, mirrored, and contained. The fact that the original inhabitants of most of the land to the East Hitler hoped to capture for Germany were to be enslaved or murdered also points to the repetition compulsion to recreate the dead siblings who are the mother's most beloved. Even here Hitler would have to force captured countries to give up their love for their native sons and daughters and love him instead. Miller's analysis shows how insecure attachment, coupled with physical abuse, becomes even more dangerous when a culture's pedagogy has created in its citizens a repressed rage and hatred which seek a sanctioned outlet and a target population upon w h o m all the repressed destructive energy can be unleashed. Such was the situation in Germany when Hitler came to power. In contrast to Rubenstein's analysis of the fixatedchild,who never learned to renounce his most profound childhood longings for anal freedom and unlimited gratification of his instinctual desires, Miller gives us Hitler the wounded child. By placing Hitler's mania to destroy the Jews within both a psychoanalytic frame of interpretation and a mythological tradition of Christian anti-Semitism, Rubenstein forces us to see the way the Christian hatred of the Jew made Hitler's own hatred plausible and legitimate. Miller, on the other hand, drives us to consider the enormous cost to all of us of profoundly destructive practices of childrearing that wound and deform a child's inner world of meaning and sense of self. In both analyses we must ultimately see Hitler as "our Hitler," one of us, in some way created by our culture and history. Each analysis needs the other to grasp something of the hill reality and significance of Adolf Hitler. I would argue that both need the Jungian concept of inflation to penetrate the mystery of Hitler's life among us more fully.3' Both Rubenstein and Miller take the unconscious seriously in their analyses of Hitler. Yet neither, profound and helpful as they are, fully penetrates the power of the drive in Hitler to create meaning. As Peter H a a s ~° has argued, Hitler and the Nazis had a moral i m p e r a t i v e - - a n d thus a m o r a l i t y m they were profoundly committed to carrying out. As disturbing as it is to consider, it is important to see t h a t Hitler did indeed have a moral vision. He believed that he and the German people were elected among the peoples of the world to create a transcendent political state, embodying an ontologically superior form of life, the essence of the German gift, to which all nonAryan peoples were subordinate. He further believed that in the pursuit of this politicalidea no means consistent with his vision were unthinkable, including mass slavery and genocide. Hitler's vision is most certainly a heresy from the viewpoint of Jewish and Christian ethics and the centrist tradition of philosophical ethics. Just because it is profoundly wrong when subjected to critical analysis, however, does not make Hitler's vision possess any less a full structure of meaning for him and the millions who followed him. It was Hitler's commitment to that vision, as much as his narcissistic rage

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and hatred, the repetition compulsion of his childhood abuse and the drive toward infantile omnipotence, that sustained him in his rise to power. His being seized by a form of demonic meaning can be more adequately under° stood if we see this phenomenon in relation to Jung's concept of the ego-Self AYis and the compensating function of the Self within the h u m a n psyche. For Jung, one of the earliest mythological explorations of the dark side of the Self, personified in the God-image of the Hebrew scriptures, is the story of Job. In The Book of Job, the h u m a n ego remain~ more moral, as it were, t h a n the Self or God. In the person of Hitler, in contrast, we have the phenomenology of an ego that is totally identified with the dark side of the Self. It may be t h a t Hitler raises a question for us about the nature of God and evil even as Job does. J u n g sought to explore and answer Job's question in Answer To Job. Job's question might be: What is the meaning of my suffering at the hand of Yahweh? Jung's answer suggests that Yahweh is on his way to becoming h u m a n and somehow requires the suffering of h u m a n existence to become fully conscious, to unite the opposites of humanity and divinity within the Godhead and thus to become incarnate in space and time in the person of Christ. Jung's reading here follows traditional Christian thinkingmalthough with much more radical implications--that the Hebrew tradition is preparation for the Christ and as such has been enlarged and often superseded by Christian revelation. I would suggest, in response to the debate about whether J u n g was anti-Semitic, that one can see both in ,Answer To Job and the controversial writings on Jewish psychology of the early 1930s, some of the antiJudaic attitude that Jung, as the son of a Christian pastor, may have ingested, given the pervasiveness of the Christian myth of the place of the Jews in European civilization.41 To his credit, Jung did not simply identify the dark "savage" God~ (Zaehner) with Yahweh. The Christian God also has a darkness within for Jung which most Christians repress with the doctrine of the S u m m u m Bonum. It is this darkness that is split off and personified in the form of Satan, so that evil is outside GOd. In one major interpretation, the famous privatio boni doctrine, which J u n g battles in Answer To Job and elsewhere, ~ evil is reduced to a privation of the good. Job's question about the meaniug of suffering is answered by Jung, then, in relation to the divine process of self-actualization through the uniting of the opposites of good and evil within God's own being, then becoming incarnate in humanity. What would Hitler's question be then? And how might it be answered? One way Hitler's question might be formulated from a Jungian point of view is this: How does the Self incarnate itself within the h u m a n psyche when the h u m a n environment catastrophically fails the child? In drawing this parallel of the questions Job and Hitler p u t to us, I do not mean to imply that they are on the same level. Still, it is important to recognize that the archetypal and collective dynamics of Hitler's life can teach us about radical evil as a poten-

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tial within h u m a n existence, as Job's experience can also. Moreover, I believe that Hitler's historical role raises extremely difficultand urgent questions for Western culture. It behooves us all,and especially Christians and others not Jewish, to contemplate his life and his psyche in something of the same way that Jung opened himself to the reality of Job's question. Job's suffering has a cosmic context. H e is beset by devastating events beyond his control which originate in divine omnipotence. His suffering forces him to see that God is neither just nor fair,even though he also sees that God is omnipotent. Job's question is about the character, as it were, of the divine Father. Hitler's suffering, on the other hand, while analogous to Job's, has a different origin.44H e was set upon by a sadisticpersonal father who beat, shamed, and humiliated him on a nearly daily basis during the most formative years of his life.H e was born to a deeply depressed mother, who was not allowed to mourn by her husband, and who was unable to bond with her male child. Utterly unprotected by his mother, Hitler was fated to rescue her, and to try to make her come alive. It could be said that when Hitler projected his depressed, abused, and enfeebled mother upon Germany, he gave his life to trying to rescue her. If Miller is right, this is not just a m a n who perversely refused to grow beyond his childhood. Rather this was one who, as a child, was profoundly deformed by catastrophic parental failure,the pathogenic nature of which meant that very early in his lifehe developed a psychotic core of murderous rage, paranoid hatred, split inner objects and a splitting defense, and a progressive inflation in which he became increasingly indifferent to the demands of reality, while utterly convinced that he had a divine mission to carry out on Germany's behalf. Unable to mourn, Hitler's profoundly damaged ego was overtaken by the compensatory, meaning-bestowing function of the Self and he succumbed to a progressive psychotic inflation, an inflation of negative meaning as it were, reflecting the very same side of the Self,if Jung is right, with which Job also struggled but with which he did not identify.Job's accusation of God, for example, reads like a description of Hitler's career. Here is Stephen Mitchell's translation: He [God] does not care; so I say He murders both the pure and the wicked. When the plague brings sudden death, He laughs at the anguish of the innocent. He hands the earth to the wicked and blindfoldsitsjudges' eyes. Who does it,ifnot HeT ~ Perhaps we need to rem~ud ourselves that Job's encounter with God takes place in the context of a profound grief, namely in Job's mourning of God's

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betrayal and abuse of him, who is God's faithful servant. Whatever else The Book of Job is about, it is an exploration of the relationship between profound mourning and a liberated vision of God, in which the ego, as Stephen Mitchell has pointed out, does not submit to God like a whipped dog (or whipped child?), but rather surrenders to the mystery of a GOd who is both being and nothingness, creator of good and evil, darkness and light, blessing and curse. The Jobian ego does not identify with the Self because it is free to mourn and in mourning to ~see~ God, that is, to take in the expanded meaning from the Self that truly functions as compensation to the wounded ego. In Hitler's life, we see a man who is literally drowning in his own grief; yet the grief can only be expressed through rage, blame, accusation, projection, violence, and finally, mass death, in a progressive psychotic inflation. Hitler was never able to engage in a conscious inner dialogue, which, had it been possible, might have determined a dLfferent course for the tragic and destructive history of our century. In a word, Hitler could not deal with his wounded ego in such a way that it surrendered to, rather than identified with, the Self. Miller argues that behind every terrible crime there is a deep trauma in the life of the criminal. In Hitler's life we see the price of the t r a u m a that the Jews, especially those of Eastern Europe, had to pay. We also see that the ego that does not mourn its woundedness is tempted to identify with the dark side of the Self, "the destroyer of worlds. ~ When early object relations do not mediate to the young ego an adequate sense of the benevolent, nurturing, empowering side of the Self, the ego will identify with the negative side of the Self, and become inflated. ~ Such, I believe, was Hitler's fate. What Hitler most hated and repressed in himself, his woundedness and need to mourn, he sought to destroy in the Jews and Judaism, because of all the peoples of Western civilization the Jews have learned most about, and been most responsive to, the psychic imperative to mourn27 Where, then, we may ask, has our attempt to understand such a one as Hitler brought us? It has not answered the unresolved questions of the Holocaust, nor has it made the psychotic hatred and technological and bureaucratic cunning of the Nazi mind any more intelligible. It certainly does not address the unspeakable suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of one of history's most destructive criminals and criminal states. Neither has it made Hitler much more intelligible, because it has reminded us t h a t something transpersonal expressed itself in Hitler's life that lies beyond rational explanation. ~ Perhaps what it has accomplished is to offer a warning for the future that would remind us that, like Job, we will continue to be confronted with evil and its profoundly destructive career in the world, especially as it de-forms and de-constructs the human ego of its structures of meaning, thus opening h~man consciousness to the threat of being overwhelmed by the murderous negative energy of the dark side of the Self. Hitler stands before us, in a sense, to remind us that either we find a way to mourn our woundedness or

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we will go up in flames of hatred, psychosis, inflation, and mass death. This is the answer to Hitler's question, and may be as well the answer to the question of our future. In mourning, we meet the enlightening God who will help us against the darkening God. In surrendering to this God we may be more able to bear the pain and joy of being human, without turning our world into a wasteland and continuing the historical process--to borrow a metaphor from Hegel--as a butcher's bench.

References 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 181.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans Walter Kaufmann & R. J. HoUingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968) pp. 9ft. 3. For a penetrating discussion of Nietzsche's concept of nihilism, see Maurice Blanchet, ~i~ne Limits of Experience: Nihilism," in The New Nietzsche, edited by David B. Allison (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 121ff. See also Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1984. For a critique of Nietzsche's understanding of nihilism, see Michael Allen Giliespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 4. Donald R. Ferrell, ~In the Shadow of Zarathustra: Jung's Encounter with Nietzsche" (Unpublished thesis, C. G. Jung Institute, New York City, 1991). 5. It is significant that Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwits, entitles his memoir of the deathcamp experience Night. What Nietzche somehow anticipated, Wiesel and millions of others were forced to experience, i.e., the explosion of nihilistic energies that culminated in the Holocaust and the near destruction of European civilization under the Hitler regime. 6. In one of the most prescient sentences Nietzsche ever wrote, he says: "Someday my name will be associated with something monstrous~ (quoted in Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Da Cape Press, 1993), p. 276. It is one of the great ironies of intellectual history that the Nazis, with the help of Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth, were able to invoke Nietzsche's name in support of National Socialism. While Nietzsche seemed to understand that it would be easy to misunderstand and misuse his thought, it seems clear that he did not understand what monstrous potentialities were lying just below the surface of German cultural life in the service of the actualization of which Nietzche's thought would be appropriated. 7. Ron Rosenbaum in "Explaining Hitler,~ The New Yorker, May I, 1995, pp. 50-70, has most recently explored the question of the impossibility of ever fully understanding or explaining Hitler. Rosenbaum asserts that something appeared in Hitler that explodes all our human categories of explanation, and thus every effort to explain Hitler ultimately fails. No doubt the present effort will also fail; however, this is why the archetypal dimension needs to be drawn upon in attempting to approach the reality of Hitler. 8. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1971), pp. 56-57. 9. Allan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 10. Joachim Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Janovich, 1974). 11. Richard L. Rubenstsin, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (New York: Bobbe-Merrill Press, 1966). There have been a number of attempts, in addition to Rubenstein's, to understand the profoundly destructive life of Adoff Hitler from a clinicalpsychological perspective. The first significant effort in this direction was by Walter Langer (The Mind of Adolf Hitler [ New York: Basic Books, 1972]), which stresses the intensity of Hitler's Oedipus complex, exacerbated by his witnessing the ~primal scene" as a child, cansing him to hate both his mother and father: This hatred was displaced onto the Jews (father) and Germany (mother), the latter Hitler beth wanting to ~save~ from the ravishing father

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and to destroy for her betrayal of him. Langer's psychoanalytic study of Hitler (first written in 1943) was followed by the psychoanalyst J. Brosso, who in Hitler avant Hitler (Fayard, 1972) understands Hitler's hatred and destructiveness as motivated not so much by the unconscious desire to undo the primal scene as to undo the intercourse between his parents which led to his own conception. In Brosse's view, Hitler's unconscious rage is directed toward the murder of~bhe phallic mother,= i. e., the copulating pair from whom he came forth. For Brosso this accounts for Hitler's ~natred of life.~ Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, 1973) finds Brosse's hypothesis ~absurd~ as an explanation of Hitler's destructiveness; however, Fromm finds Brosse's concept of Hitler's hatred of life helpful and interprets Hitler from a characterological perspective as a ~necrophilous ~ personality driven by malignant aggression. As a necrophile in the characterological sense, Hitler was driven by the unconscious need to dismember and destroy life itself, in contrast to the "biophilious ~ personality who is motivated by the desire to preserve and nurture life. Robert G. L. Waite, op. c~, reflecting the advances in the nosology of mental disease in clinical work, interprets Hitler primarily as a borderline personality and emphasizes the split in Hitler's ego (all good and all bad) and the corresponding split in his sense of reality. Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger (~Hitler's Appeal~ in Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts [MA: Lexington Books, 1991], pp. 141-164), on the other hand, acknowledge the depth of Hitler's madness but draw upon recent social psychological research on the cycle of unacknowledged shame, anger/rage, and violence to explain Hitler's profound impact upon the German people. Hitler's vulnerability to unacknowledged shame drove him to a nearly permanent state of rage/humiliated fury as the key affects of his life. He projected this on the outside world, especially on the Jews of Europe, and encouraged the German people to express their humiliated rage upon his selected targets. While these varying interpretations are in some conflict with each other (e.g. Fremm denies that Hitler was psychotic, while Langer, Waite, Sheff and Retzinger argue that he was), they each offer an insight about Hitler's psyche that contributes to our understanding. I t is difficult to avoid the conclusion, however, that none of these perspectives fully captures the reality of Hitler's life and mind. 12. Fest, op cir., p. 115. 13. Rubenstein, op. cir., p. 3. 14. Joel Carmichael, The Satanizing of the Jews: Origins and Development of Mystical AntiSemitism (New York: Fromm, 1992). 15. Since Rubenstein published his essay, a number of beoks have appeared exploring the role of Christian anti-semitism in the Holocaust. The following are among the most significant: Fleischner, Eva, ed. Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (New York: KTAV, 1977). Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols., rev. ed. (Chicago: Holmes & Meier, 1985). Nicholls, William. Christian AntiSemitism: A History of Hate (New Jersey: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1993). Rubenstein, Richard L. and Roth, John If. Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy (Atlanta: John Knox, 1987). 16. Rubenstein, as a Jewish scholar, has raised what is by now the familiar question about Jung's alleged anti-semitism. His view of Junks concept of ~racial m e m o r f as it was developed during the Nazi years is that it is ~a polite way of psychologizing a vicious racism [of the Nazis] which was to turn millions into smoke in the twentieth century.~ The Religious Imagination: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Jewish Theology (indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1968), p. 19. Cf. Andrew Samuels' more recent evaluation of Jung as a ~psychologist of nations~ and how that led him to his ambiguous relationship to Germany and Hitler in Lingering Shadows: Jungians, Freudians, and Anti-Semitism, Ed. by Aryeh Maldenbaum and Stephen A. Martin (Boston: Shambhala, 1991), pp. 177-209. 17. See Walter Kaufmann's analysis of Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 3rd Ed (New York: ~,rmtage, 1968), pp. 371ff. 18. Rubenstein, op cit., p. 13. 19. Ibid., p. 32; 39. 20. Joanna Luria Mintzer made this observation in a seminar in Warsaw after a group of Christians and Jews, led by her, myself, and Dr Eva Fleischner, went to some of the major death camps in Poland and Germany in May, 1993 had just completed a tour of the Warsaw ghetto. 21. Ruben_stein, op cir, p. 35.

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22. Fest, op eit., p. 15. Frank's claim of Hitler's Jewish blood has been largely rejected by histerians. Simon Wiesenthal, among others, has researched this question and found no evidence that a Jewish family named Frankenberger ever lived in Graz, an even more unlikely possibility since the Jews had been driven out of the area in the 15th century. What is of interest in regard to Hitler's origins is that Gestapo documents recovered by the Allies show that severe retardation and mental fitness seem to have run in the paternal side of his family. Fear of mental illness may well have informed Hitler's euthanasia policies to rid Germany of ~mental defectives.~ See Ben E. Swearingen, ~Hitler's Family Secret,~ Civilization, March/ April, 1995, pp. 54-55. 23. Ibid., p. 15. 24. Henry James Cargas, Shadows of Auschwitz: A Christian Response to the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1992) 25. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), p. 159. 26. Ib/d, p. 155. 27. Erich Fromm denies that Hitler was ever severely beaten by his father. See Fromm, op. cit., pp. 422ff. 28. Susan Griffin, for example, has shown how much the rules governing homosexuals in the concentration camps, and their punishment for violating these rules, resembles the advice given to parents by Dr. Schreiber and other authors of childrearing texts for the prevention of childhood masturbation. See Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 145. 29. Miller, op eit., p. 153. 30. Waite, op cit., pp. 295ff. 31. R. G. Waite has argued that Hitler's deeply fragile inner self structure drove him, unconsciously, toward a kind of ultimately masochistic self-subversion or self-undoing in his disastrous decision to invade the Soviet Union while shortly thereafter declaring war on the United States! Waite sees this same dynamic at work in Hitler's allowing the British to escape from Dunkirk and regroup to carry out a more effective resistance against him. Had Hitler been less subject to powerful inner forces of self-destruction, the course of 20th contury western history might have had a much different outcome. Ibid., pp. 396ff. 32. C. G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathuetra: Notes on the Seminar given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung in 1}no Volumes, ed. James L. Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 33. Edward Edinger, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974) 34. Ferrell, op cir. 35. Alice Miller has argued that Nietzsche, like Hitler, was also physically and emotionally abused by his family members, which abuse, not syphilis, accounts for his descent into madness. See Alice Miller, The Untouched Key: Facing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1990). 36. Fest, op. cir., pp. 283-4. 37. Cf. Robert Karen's discussion of the psychological consequences of insecure attachment in Becoming Attached (New York: Warner, 1994). 38. Miller, op cit., pp. 180ft. 39. This commitment to a Jnngian perspective is made in the face of Alice Miller's more recent repudiation of both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic approaches to human suffering. See her comments in the Revised Edition of The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self(New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 3-4. It is Jung's metapsychology that MiUer believes is causing harm, namely, that evil may have ontological and even cosmic character, as Jung asserts, and thus cannot be reduced merely to the repression of memories of early childhood abuse. The abuse of children in any form is certainly a powerful cause of violence in the world, as Miller has helped us see, but to understand that evil has both archetypal and historical reality does not require us to deny the truth of uncovered memories of abuse as they emerge in analytic treatment nor to flee from one's own childhood suffering. 40. Peter J. Haas, Morality After Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). 41. John Kerr has provided evidence from Jung's early career in support of my argument here that Jung internalized a largely negative image of the Jew out of his childhood participation

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46.


in the Christian culture of post-reformation Switzerland. Kerr identifies Jung as ~almost certainlf the subject who is discussed in his paper, co-authored with Riklin, in 1903, in relation to the Word Association Test, "the Association of Normal Subjects.~ The subject, a 24-year old physician, who "had not yet outgrown adolescent internal conflict, and as he had had a strict Christian upbringing, his inclinationfor a Jewish girl worried him a great deal.~ Kerr calls this Jung's ~Jewses complex.~ See John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and 8abina 8pielrein (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 56ff. While a serious attempt has been made (see L/nger/ng Shadows, op. dr., for example) to place Jung in historical context in regard to the question of his alleged Anti-semitism, the key to Jung's unconscious issues with Jews and his relationship to the Nazi regime is ultimately explicable when seen in the light of the ancient tradition of Christian hatred of the Jew and "I'ne Teaching of Contempt" about the Jew. However, this is a part of the contexualizing of Jung's shadow issues vis-A-vis the Jews that has not yet been fully carried out to my knowledge. For an overview of ~ h e Teaching of Contempt," see Eva Fleischner, ~rhe Teaching of Contempt~ The Origins of Christian Anti~udaism" in New Conversations, Nanette Roberts, ad. Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993. R. C. Zashner, Our Savage God: The Perverse Use of Eastern Thought (New Yerl~ Shsed and Ward, 1974). For a critique of Jung's understanding of the Privatio Boni doctrine and an alternative interpretation of it, see Ann Belford Ulanev, "Scapegoating: The Double Cross" in Lingering Shadows, op cir., pp. 223ff. It might be argued, using Alice Miller's hermeneutic, that encoded in The Book of Job is an abused child's witness to his/her abuse by a parental figure projected into the cosmos onto the image of God Stephen Mitchell, ~Introduction,~ The Book of Job, trans Stephen Mitchell (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), p. xvi. The Jungian argument being developed here is certainly controversial and disturbing. It can be stated briefly: In Hitler's unspeakably destructive career, in his psychotic hatred; his split ego and the split object; his utter emotional isolation from others; his perverse relationships with women; his psychopathic omnipotence that placed him ~beyend good and evil,~ as well as his deeply disturbed moral vision for the realization of which he was prepared to sacrifice everything; his worship of power and the iron will with which to exercise it; and especially in his genocidal rage toward the Jews, the Slavs, the Gypsies and the infirm--in this whole %tructure of destruction" (Tillich) that was Hitler's personality, which places him outside the human circle, can be seen the dark half of the energies that are intrinsically resident within the Self as the trausporsonal center of the psyche. Since, for Jung, the Self is the source of the God-image (but not to be identified with God as such), and the God-image is that ultimate symbol of wholeness that organizes, consciously or unconsciously, psychic life within given historical epochs, what we call evil must be seen as within the divine life. Otherwise a whole aspect of the Self must remain in the unconscious and split off from ourselves, thus making us unconscious of the evil of which we are capable as bearers of the Self and the Godimage. Hitler shows us what we are up against in our struggle with the dark side of the Self. In spite of rigorous opposition to this view, there is evidence that many are struggling to take it into their psychological and theological constructs. Richard Rubenstein, for example, speaks of God as ~rIoly Nothingness" (see especially Morality and Eros [New York: Scribners, 1972]) and David R. Blumenthal asks us to face the "abusing God" (Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest [Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993]), while Joanna Luria Mintzer has argued that the image of God as rapist captures metaphorically the Hebraic vision of God as the creator of evil and thus containing evil within the Godhead as a divine potentiality (Joanna Luria Mintzer, "In the Shadow of the Holy," a paper presented at the Second International Conference on the Holocaust, Berlin, Germany, March, 1994). Barry Ulanov, in his discussion of R. G. Zaehner's confrontation with %ur savage God~ vis-a-vis Jung's work, has shown how in the Hindi poet Kabir GOd is seen as the divine ~dlug,~ in the service of Kaii, whose beneficence cannot be seen until the divine thuggery is acknowledged (Jung and the Outside World [Wilmette, IL: Chiron, 1992]. Langdon Gilkey has argued that Paul Tillich was making his way toward a vision of God that more radically even than Tillich included nonboing itself (ouk on) within God's being. See Langdon Gilkey, Gilkey on T~Uich (New York: Crossroad, 1990). Francois O'Kane

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in her Sacred Chaos: Reflections on God's Shadow and the Dark Self (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1994), seems to be moving us in the same direction. At the level of what is called Upopulaf culture, the recent Mike Leigh film Naked (Fine Line Features, 1994), starring David Thewlis, presents the view that God is evil. In this profoundly nlhl]istic ~]m the evil potential in God is unmitigated by the sense of the reality of the opposing or embracing opposite of God's goodness, even though Johnny, the nihilistic anti-hero of the film, acknowledges that the good that appears in the world is a perplexity given the radical, unconditioned evil of God. 47. Jeffery Jay, ~iValls for Wailing," Common Boundary: Between Spirituality and Psycho. therapy, Vol 12, Issue 3, May/June, 1994. 48. See Alvin H Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler (New York: Indiana University Press, 1985) for a discussion of the disturbing shape recent literary attempts at imagining Hitler have taken. For Rosenfeld, our continuing fasdn~tion with Hitler points to an elaboration of a demonic cultural myth about Hitler that suggests, somehow, that we may be approaching the "death of culture. ~ This death of culture may be adumbrated in Hitler's becoming, in our collective imagination, a fantastical and even nonhistorical symbol with truly alarming implications for our future.

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