Hitler imagined Germany as a national organism consisting of people as cells. He was the head or brain of this organism—the will that generated action. In the Nuremberg rallies, Hitler sought to concretize or materialize his bodily fantasy of nationalism. He imagined the tens-of-thousands of people gathered and marching together as a single body—flesh and blood of a gigantic organism.

Hitler insisted that the German nation was a real entity—not merely an abstraction. His fantasy of the German nation as an actual body politic crystallized at the Nuremberg rallies. Hitler created these rituals so that he could perceive or “witness” Germany. At the moment that people marched into the stadium and moved before him, Hitler lost his doubts about the reality of the German nation. Suddenly, a vague, “imagined community”—the nation—became a concrete reality—a genuine “substance of flesh and blood.”

Norman O. Brown in Life against Death: the Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959) states that “New objects must substitute for the human body, and there is no sublimation without the projection of the human body into things” (p. 281). Hitler and the Nazis sought to recover the infantile fantasy of an omnipotent body through creation of an omnipotent body politic. The fantasy of an omnipotent body was rediscovered in a projective container: the German volk.

Nations are imagined to be entities contained within a vast, geographic space. “America the Beautiful”:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

“God Bless America”:

From the mountains, To the prairies,
To the ocean, White with foam,
God bless America,
My home sweet home.

To the extent that one identifies with one’s nation, one becomes this vast, geographic space. The boundaries of one’s ego expand so that one imagines that what is contained within the space of one’s nation is contained within one’s self. The wound of separation from the fantasy of infantile omnipotence is healed by virtue of connecting to a new omnipotent object. The ego fuses with a gigantic body of territory in order to imagine that it is powerful and immense.

According to Freud in Civilization and Its Discontent (1929, p. 15):

Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing feeling which corresponds to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.

The infantile ego imagines that the entire world is contained within or attached to it. A trauma occurs when the ego recognizes that it is separate from the world. The ego splits off from the world. One comes to perceive one’s smallness and insignificance: the world is no longer bound to the self. Identification with one’s nation represents an effort to recover the all-embracing ego-feeling. The entire world (the portion of it contained within one’s nation) is re-incorporated into the ego.

Identification with one’s nation implies equating one’s ego with everything that exists and occurs within the boundaries of one’s nation. The ego expands by projecting itself into or incorporating everything that exists “out there.” Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (in The Ego Ideal) states that the individual’s megalomania finds its expression when each person’s ego is “extended to the whole group.” The group according to allows each member to feel himself to be, not a minute, undifferentiated particle of a vast whole, but on the contrary “identified with the totality of the group, thereby conferring on himself an omnipotent ego, a colossal body.”

The nation is the fantasy of an omnipotent ego, projected into the world. Nations are symbolic objects permitting us to recapture our lost omnipotence—curing the wound of separation. The tendency to identify with one’s nation and culture seems so natural and normal that we rarely take note of the fact that a psychological mechanism is involved. The unconscious fantasy of being fused with the symbolic order constitutes the basis of the individual’s relationship with society.

To internalize one’s nation into one’s self is to incorporate: its entire history, especially its wars; its political leaders; its artistic achievements; it’s natural wonders and monuments; its scientific achievements; its cities and buildings; its economic development; its crimes and criminals; its music and movies; its sporting events and athletic heroes. What is distant from the self comes to be experienced as very close to the self. One’s nation and its national life become an intimate companion.

People make statements like “we” won (or lost) the war; or that “we” sent a man to the moon; or that “we” won a gold medal in the Olympics. People make these extraordinary statements, but it doesn’t seem extraordinary when they do so. The fact that one is a citizen of nation gives one the right to make such statements. Nationalism means that everything that occurs within the boundaries of a certain geographic space is imagined to relate or belong to the self.

The individual’s sense of smallness and limitations is overcome or denied through a psychic mechanism whereby one equates one’s ego with an entire nation. Freud theorized that the ego is ultimately a body ego. Insofar as this is the case, incorporation of the nation into the self-possesses a psychosomatic meaning. The entire nation becomes a part of one’s body. One’s body becomes a body politic.

The wound or loss of self that occurs upon separating from infantile love objects leads to identification with one’s nation and culture as a means toward healing the split within the self. Separation means that the ego has been severed into two: one has lost a part of the self. One overcomes the sense of separateness, frailty, incompleteness, helplessness, and insignificance—by attaching to an omnipotent body politic.

Felix Deutsche in On the Mysterious Leap from the Mind to the Body (p. 80) states that the process of symbolization originates in the “need to make good for the loss of the body’s integrity by reintegrating into it adequate substitutes.” Symbolization “substitutes the amount of loss which the lost object represented to the individual.” Nazism represented the attempt to find the lost object in a body politic. The Nazi movement represented a social construction based upon projecting the fantasy of a gigantic, omnipotent body into the outer world.

Hitler sought to “find the lost object in the external world” (Brown, 1959). Nazism was based upon a shared fantasy about the body. Howard F. Stein put forth the concept of “psychogeography” in Developmental Time, Cultural Space (2013), Howard Stein states that the scope of psychogeography is the “unconscious construction of the social and physical world.” Men and women “fashion the world out of the substance of their psyches from the experience of their bodies.” Fantasies about the body are transmuted into descriptions of one’s own group and of other groups. Projected outward, Stein declares, “The fate of the body becomes the fate of the world.”

Hitler desired to re-fashion the German nation so that it could become a “closely knit body.” People would fuse together like cells of a body to create a single, cohesive entity. At the Nuremberg rallies, Hitler sought to materialize this fantasy of Germany as an actual body politic. Tens-of-thousands of people marched in rows and acted in unison—as if cells of an orderly, well-functioning body with Hitler as head, dictating the body’s actions.

In order to actualize Hitler’s fantasy of the body politic, it was necessary that each individual be obedient. People had to act in concert for the benefit of this body—mindful of its needs. A cell cannot act independently of the body of which it is a part. A cell cannot act autonomously because it does not possess autonomous existence. Cells live only to the extent that they are bound to a body.

Apparently many Germans embraced Hitler’s fantasy. By acceding to the fantasy of being cells, the German people imagined that they were part of an omnipotent body. Hitler believed that the power of Germany derived precisely from this capacity of its people to act in concert—as one body. Whereas people in other societies acted as individuals—doing their own thing—Germans acted together. The Nazis imagined that obedience to Hitler—willingness to act in the name of a collective purpose that he defined—would confer enormous power upon them.

Hitler conceived of nations as people welded and fused together to create a cohesive body. Insofar as nations were bodies, it followed that people could not exist in a condition of separation from their nation. No individual can exist independently from the body of which it is a part. Hitler became enraged when he contemplated the idea that some people might wish to go their own way—to exclude themselves from the national project. In 1933, Hitler declared that he wished to “exterminate the things that tear our volk apart.”