Contents

I. Ideology and Metaphor

Ideologies contain and convey psychological meanings. How is it possible to decipher the latent content of ideological texts? My method, analyzing metaphor, consists of identifying recurring images and figures of speech in the writings and speeches of individuals who have been significant in defining and promulgating an ideology. Through this method, I reveal the unconscious fantasies that the ideology seeks to express.

An ideology functions to structure and externalize fantasies shared by a group. An ideology may be compared to the manifest content of a dream—that many people are having together—all at once. The psychological study of culture focuses—not on the idiosyncrasies of individuals—but upon how shared desires, fantasies, anxieties and conflicts give rise to collective representations. We seek to reveal the sources and meanings of belief systems that define or constitute a given societal group.

Within a given ideological system, certain words or terms recur and become salient. In the case of Nazism, the central terms were “Germany”, “the people” and “the Jew”, which together condensed the fantasies upon which Nazi ideology was constructed.

Ideologies exist as cultural and linguistic forms within societies. But culture and language do not explain the existence of the ideology. Ideologies perform psychological functions. An ideology exists as an element or dimension of culture because it allows desires and fantasies to become articulated as social reality.

II. Conceptual Metaphors

The theories of George Lakoff and Mark L. Johnson have become influential in Cognitive Psychology. According to their concept of metaphorical mapping, slots in a “source domain schema” get mapped into slots in a “target domain,” shaping our perceptions. Target domains are abstract concepts, whereas source domains are familiar, most often physical, ideas.

In The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1990), Johnson writes about “imaginative projection,” a principle whereby the body (i.e., physical experience and its structures) works its way up into the mind (i.e., mental operations). Johnson states that metaphors are not simply “figures of speech.” Rather, metaphors constitute “pervasive, indispensable structures of understanding by means of which we comprehend our world.”

Johnson states that the image-schematic structures of imagination (derived from the body and physical experience) are “extended and elaborated as abstract structures of meaning and patterns of thought.” Metaphors in speech and text convey the presence of the body within the mind. Structures of embodied experience generate “conceptual metaphors.”

My methodology grows out of my book Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology (1975), reprinted in 2007 as Hitler’s Ideology: Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy and History. I followed up with a series of papers, including Nationalism, Nazism—Genocide, Hitler's Body and the Body Politic, Nazism as Bodily Fantasy and Ideology, Perception, and Genocide. In these papers, I expanded my research by analyzing the rhetoric of important Nazi thinkers. Based on these studies, I conclude that Nazi ideology was defined, supported and sustained by a coherent fantasy: that Germany was an enormous body politic suffering from a potentially fatal disease.

Hitler’s entire worldview grew out of his belief that Germany was an actual body—and Jews pathogenic organisms whose continued presence within the German body politic would threaten to destroy the nation. These images and metaphors occur again and again in his writings and speeches.

The Final Solution grew out of Hitler’s perception of reality, constituting the performance of an immunological fantasy. Hitler and the Nazis sought to destroy the pathogenic Jewish element—imagined to be the source of Germany’s disease—to prevent the death of the body politic.

Hitler conveyed this fantasy to his closest colleagues, and to the German people. Enough Germans plugged into—embraced—this fantasy so that Hitler could enact it. A shared fantasy generated an ideology, which became the source of the history that the Nazis created.

In Analogies of War (1992), Y. F. Khong points to the importance of studying the rhetoric of leaders and decision-makers to find “systematic metaphors.” The repeated use of the same set of analogies over time allows one to be confident that metaphors are playing “truly a cognitive function” within political leaders’ rhetoric.

The metaphor that occurs most frequently in Hitler’s writings and speeches is that of Germany as a living organism, and the Jew as a bacterium, virus, parasite or “force of disintegration” working to bring about the nation’s demise. Hitler’s fundamental life mission was to eliminate the Jewish destructive force—to rescue Germany.

Hitler’s conception of the Jew grew out Hitler’s internal experience the Jew, which generated his perception of reality. It is as if an entity or object, “the Jew,” was present within Hitler’s body. The “disease within the body politic” was a disease within Hitler’s body.

Hitler’s rhetoric demonstrates how a source domain (the human body) becomes mapped onto a target domain (the body politic). Hitler’s metaphors played a cognitive function. Because Hitler projects the idea of a human body (his own) into the body politic, therefore he infers that Germany is suffering from a disease requiring diagnosis and cure.

According to Lakoff and Johnson, conceptual schemas organize our knowledge about or perception of reality. Our minds contain models about some aspect of the world—that we use to comprehend our experience, and to reason about it. The central insight of conceptual metaphor theory is that schemas and cognitive models—organizing our perceptions—grow out of structures developed in relationship to our bodies. In short, bodily experiences are projected into mental operations.

III. Fantasy and the Embodied Mind

The psychoanalytic concept of fantasy refers to an intermediate mental state existing between body and mind. According to Freud, impulses and desires located within the body give rise to mental corollaries, i.e., fantasies, which represent the transformation of the impulse or desire into a form of ideation.

Presenting Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theory, Thomas Ogden states that fantasy “never loses its connection to the body.” Fantasy content is always ultimately traceable to thoughts and feelings about the “workings and contents of one’s own body in relationship to the workings and contents of the body of the other.”

If ideologies articulate fantasies and fantasies derive from the body, it follows that ideologies are bound to—not separate from—our bodies. How may we understand the relationship between body, fantasy and mental operations in the case of ideology? Textual metaphors, I suggest, convey the presence of the body and allow fantasies about the body to enter social reality.

Metaphors are the link between the body and its mind. Through metaphors, the body with its fantasies makes its way into discourse. Entities, attributes and processes in the target domain (the body politic) are lexicalized from the source domain (the human body).

Nazi ideology represented a fantasy about Germany as an organism suffering from a potentially fatal disease. This fantasy about the body was conveyed through the vehicle of images and metaphors that appear endlessly in ideological texts that the Nazis produced. The Nazis created culture and history— based on a fantasy about the body projected into their ideology.

IV. Psychic Determinism

Freud’s principle of “psychic determinism” asserts that there is no such thing as chance occurrences or randomness in the life of the mind. According to this principle, dreams, jokes, slips-of-the-tongue and psychosomatic symptoms possess psychological meaning.

Dream images, for example, reflect the mind’s desire to bring forth thoughts from a state of unconsciousness into consciousness. Slips-of-the-tongue represent the breakthrough of repressed ideas. In the case of psychosomatic symptoms, an idea or fantasy makes its way into reality in the form of a bodily symptom. The body has a mind of its own.

Metaphors appearing within speech and texts do not exactly “break in” to consciousness. Rather, they are contained within ordinary patterns of language. Lakoff suggests that a community’s worldviews are articulated through figurative language. Metaphors are the vehicles through which unconscious fantasies and desires make their way into everyday life, and define cultural structures.

According to this view, unconscious fantasies (about the body) continually enter language and consciousness—through the vehicle of metaphor. Thus, there is no clear distinction between fantasy and ordinary mental operations, which are infused with fantasies about the body.

Reality is continually constructed—as metaphors bring the body and its fantasies into the external world. Ideologies are those culturally defined structures that allow fantasies to become part of the “external” world. Ideologies are shared fantasies, transforming desires and anxieties into socially-defined structures of thought.

Analyzing ideologies is analogous to interpreting dreams. We play close attention to images and metaphors. As dreams reveal the unconscious fantasies of individuals, so ideologies reveal fantasies shared by members of a group. To analyze an ideology is to interpret a collective dream.

V. The Human Body and the Body Politic

Nazi ideology represented a fantasy about the body externalized into the world. The reality that the Nazis constructed cannot be separated from bodily fantasy. If ideas about a target domain are derived from experiences in a source domain, it follows that ideas about bodies politic cannot be separated from the experience of our own bodies. Recent social theory has focused on the ways that discourse shapes the body. I hypothesize that our bodies—and bodily experience—give rise to and structure discourse.

In the case of nationalism, the experience of one’s body is projected into the idea of a body politic. Often, the line of demarcation between the two blurs. When Rudolf Hess declares, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler,” he implies there is no separation between Hitler and Germany. Hitler’s small body has fused with the larger body. Hitler himself has become a body politic. Two have merged into one.