It is only in the course of the early twentieth century that experts begin to locate the cause of racism in the crowd or the mob. Created to define a psychological state in the nineteenth century, this classification was as troubling as race itself. If race is the defining category that creates the bright lines for the classification of predisposition (or resistance) to mental illness, then the question becomes what type of category can be generated to understand the source of racism? As we will show, the foundations for contemporary practices through which racism became pathologized were firmly established within late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theories on crowds and collective behavior. Within these theories, racism is not only constructed as a mental illness, but one that expresses symptoms among crowds and crowd behaviors. Thus the “crowd” became a real entity in late-nineteenth-century psychological literature equivalent to “race.”
The crowd as a forensic concept has its origin in Lombrosian criminal psychiatry. The debate was begun in the early 1890s with Scipio Sighele’s study La Folla Delinquente, on the nature of individual culpability in the case of criminal activity in the mob.1 The underlying thesis was that in such a collective a form of degeneration, a “morbid deviation from the norm” (to use B. A. Morel’s classic formulation from midcentury) occurs that is primitive and atavistic.2 Sighele’s work was quickly translated into French and then, in 1897, into German.3 The sociologist Gabriel Tarde answered him. Tarde’s “Laws of Imitation” was based on a theory of unconscious actions as a form of hypnotic suggestion. In turn, this debate inspired the German sociologist Georg Simmel’s presentation of the crowd in his 1908 introduction to sociology.4 As early as 1903 Simmel was concerned with sociation (Vergesellschaftung), social forms, and the reciprocal effects (Wechselwirkungen) among individuals. The tension between a sociological and a psychological theory of the crowd set the agenda for much of the debates about racism as a social phenomenon or racism as a psychopathology until after the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, in many cases, as we show, there was a constant mixing of the two explanations.
It was with Gustave Le Bon’s La Psychologie des Foules (1895; English translation, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896) that the crowd as a concept came into its own in the public sphere. Le Bon’s work comes out of this general late-nineteenth-century preoccupation with the role of the social as well as the psychological role of the individual in the mob, and was to no little degree inspired by the extraordinary explosion of public animus during the Dreyfus affair in 1894, when wave after wave of antisemitism swept through every social level in France.5 For Le Bon the crowd is defined by three factors: anonymity, contagion (“a magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant”), and suggestibility (“an individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will”).6 Within the crowd, one can undertake acts anonymously that one would not do individually; such acts, the result of psychopathological forces in the new collective, become the acts of the collective. While one important focus of crowd theory was on the charismatic leader and his ability to whip up the crowd, for good or for ill, a focus that impacted on the political ideology of both Mussolini and Hitler, who read Le Bon with great interest, this aspect is of less interest in our context than the actual constitution of the crowd itself.7
Race appears as a variable in the construction of the crowd but in a manner clearly defined by the importance of the science of race in contemporary psychological and social theory. For Le Bon race is also one of the defining characteristics of the crowd:
Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings, which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group.8
For Le Bon, race stands in the “first rank” of those factors that help shape the underlying attitudes of the crowd. Racial character “possesses, as the result of the laws of heredity, such power that its beliefs, institutions, and arts—in a word, all the elements of its civilization—are merely outward expressions of its genius.”9 It shapes the crowd in its essence. Thus race theory and crowd theory become linked in what, to quote Le Bon, will be the “age [that] we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS.”10 In more than one way he was quite correct. But it will take a major shift in crowd theory for race to become a psychopathological aspect of the mob rather than an attribute of the crowd.
While the impact of Gustave Le Bon’s definition of the crowd was immediate and striking in all of the discussions of group action, it was with World War I that the question of racism was first raised.11 What made the Germans or the French or the British hate the British or the French or the Germans? Part of the tone had been set by the discovery of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on the “herd” among the broadest audience in these three countries (as well as the United States).12 For Nietzsche (and for Søren Kierkegaard before him) the “herd,” the masses, function only as a mindless collective to be dominated by a strong (and charismatic) leader (“The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd,” says Nietzsche, “and not reach out beyond it”).13 Slave morality (he takes the term from Hegel) is the morality of the herd and it is fine for the herd, but should not bind the higher man, the “superman.”
Given Nietzsche’s view that Judaism and Christianity encouraged such views, antisemitism was for him the classic case of herd mentality in his time. The herd mentality of Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism” was a central topic of Danish Jewish critic Georg Brandes’s (1842–1927) lectures on Nietzsche in 1888. The lectures were the first exposition of Nietzsche’s work and were widely translated (as was Nietzsche’s work) at the beginning of the new century. Brandes writes of Nietzsche’s view that the herd impulse is to be resisted:
On entering life, then, young people meet with various collective opinions, more or less narrow-minded. The more the individual has it in him to become a real personality, the more he will resist following a herd. But even if an inner voice says to him; “Become thyself! Be thyself!” he hears its appeal with despondency. Has he a self? He does not know; he is not yet aware of it. He therefore looks about for a teacher, an educator, one who will teach him, not something foreign, but how to become his own individual self.14
When Le Bon’s crowd is polemically translated into the Nietzschean herd during World War I, it is the morality of the crowd that is placed in question, as the focus is on the psychology of the herd. The powerful association of Germans, German political action, and the image of the herd in Nietzsche’s work colors the Allied psychological studies on the Germans as part of a destructive, amoral herd.
Certainly the most important of these works was by the British neurosurgeon Wilfred Trotter. Beginning in 1908, and then with the publication of his major work, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, at the beginning of the war in 1914, he examined the question of the psychology of German group consciousness in detail.15 Historians, without any irony, have labeled this interest a form of “Germanophobia.”16 Trotter’s analysis of the German mind asks why the Germans (he creates this category as the antithesis to the English) hate the way they do: “England and Germany face one another as perhaps the two most typical antagonists of the war. It may seem but a partial way of examining events if we limit our consideration to them. Nevertheless, it is in this duel that the material we are concerned with is chiefly to be found, and it may be added Germany herself has abundantly distinguished this country as her typical foe—an instinctive judgment not without value.”17 Yet it is only Germany that provides a case study of the herd mentality:
Germany affords a profoundly interesting study for the biological psychologist, and it is very important that we should not allow what clearness of representation we can get into our picture of her mind to be clouded by the heated atmosphere of national feeling in which our work must be done. . . . In making an attempt to estimate the relative moral resources of England and Germany at the present time it is necessary to consider them as biological entities or major units of the human species in the sense of that term we have already repeatedly used. We shall have to examine the evolutionary tendencies, which each of these units has shown, and if possible to decide how far they have followed the lines of development which psychological theory indicates to be those of healthy and progressive development for a gregarious animal.18
The fantasies of the healthy versus the ill, the moral versus the corrupt, the belligerent versus the pacifistic tendencies of Darwinian man are played out by Trotter in the contrast between the English and the German mindsets as seen by the neutral scientific observer.
It is solely Germany that functions as a herd: “It is one of the features of the present crisis that gives to it its biological significance, that one of the antagonists—Germany—has discovered the necessity and value of conscious direction of the social unit. This is in itself an epoch-making event. Like many other human discoveries of similar importance, it has been incomplete, and it has not been accompanied by the corresponding knowledge of man and his natural history, which alone could have given it full fertility and permanent value.”19 He describes the psychological makeup of the German herd thus:
The national arrogance of the German is at the same time peculiarly sensitive and peculiarly obtuse. It is readily moved by praise or blame, though that be the most perfunctory and this the most mild, but it has no sense of a public opinion outside the pack. It is easily aroused to rage by external criticism, and when it finds its paroxysms make it ridiculous to the spectator it cannot profit by the information but becomes, if possible, more angry. It is quite unable to understand that to be moved to rage by an enemy is as much a proof of slavish automatism as to be moved to fear by him. The really extraordinary hatred for England is, quite apart from the obvious association of its emotional basis with fear, a most interesting phenomenon. The fact that it was possible to organize so unanimous a howl shows very clearly, how fully the psychological mechanisms of the wolf were in action. It is most instructive to find eminent men of science and philosophers bristling and baring their teeth with the rest, and would be another proof, if such were needed, of the infinite insecurity of the hold of reason in the most carefully cultivated minds when it is opposed by strong herd feeling. It is important, however, not to judge the functional value of these phenomena of herd arrogance and herd irritability and convulsive rage from the point of view of nations of the socialized gregarious type such as ourselves. To us they would be disturbants of judgment, and have no corresponding emotional recompense. In the wolf pack, however, they are indigenous, and represent a normal mechanism for inciting national enthusiasm and unity.20
In what readers should note has a particular relevance for our subject, Trotter had perhaps the smartest of all the approaches to the study of the collective mind, and his work has a great impact after the war on thinkers in Britain about group dynamics such as Wilfred Bion. However, Trotter, and those who adapt crowd theory to explain the mindset of the enemy, is not speaking of racism. He is speaking of character, or what differentiates the Germans from “civilized” nations. The nature of the German mind is defined by its irrational hatred of, in this case, the British and all that they stand for. The German crowd is seen as an exaggeration of the normal:
In her negotiations with other peoples, and her estimates of national character, Germany shows the characteristic features of her psychological type in a remarkable way. It appears to be a principal thesis of hers that altruism is, for the purposes of the statesman, non-existent, or if it exists is an evidence of degeneracy and a source of weakness. The motives upon which a nation acts are, according to her, self-interest and fear, and in no particular has her “strangeness” been more fully shown than in the frank way in which she appeals to both, either alternately or together.21
Trotter sees the German mind as defined by discipline and regards this as “infantile” as opposed to the more mature character of civilized nations. It is atavistic in nature, more the disposition of the wolf pack than the nation.
The reader should recognize that Trotter is interested in dominant and subservient nations. Thus he turns to the Jews as an example of what happens when powerful nations come to lose their superior role:
Thus we see society cleft by the instinctive qualities of its members into two great classes, each to a great extent possessing what the other lacks, and each falling below the possibilities of human personality. The effect of the gradual increase of the unstable in society can be seen to a certain extent in history. We can watch it through the careers of the Jews. . . . At first, when the bulk of the citizens were of the stable type, the nation was enterprising, energetic, indomitable, but hard, inelastic, and fanatically convinced of its Divine mission. The inevitable effect of the expansion of experience which followed success was that development of the unstable and skeptical which ultimately allowed the nation, no longer believing in itself or its gods, to become the almost passive prey of more stable peoples.22
Here Trotter postulates one of the reasons for the status of the Jews (he never speaks of their madness) as weaker than the other nations of the world. It accounts for Jewish submissiveness to the stronger and more aggressive nations such as the Germans.
Even more political is the approach in The Group Mind (1920) by William McDougall, one of the leading social psychologists of the day. For McDougall it is the question of the constitution of the collective unconscious that is central:
Do the Poles share in the “collective consciousness” of the German nation, or the Bavarians in that of Prussia? Or do the Irish or the Welsh contribute their share to that of the English nation? Coming now to close quarters with the doctrine, we may ask those who . . . regard the “collective consciousness” as a bond which unites the members of a society and makes of them one living individual,—Is this “collective consciousness” merely epiphenomenal in character?23
Thus he sees the Germans as an organism, functioning with a collective psyche as reflected in their state organizations:
As regards the mass of the people, the position of each individual in the organism of the German nation is officially determined by the written and codified law of the State; all personal status and relations are formally determined by official positions in this recently created system. Almost every individual carries about some badge or uniform indicating his position within the system. In England, the status and relations of individuals are determined by factors a thousand times more subtle and complex, involving many vaguely conceived and undefined traditions and sentiments. In Germany, it is almost true to say, if a man has no official position he has no position at all.24
It is clear that all these attempts to locate the German mind have a strong psychodynamic quality. Trotter was a strong supporter of the importation of Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic theory before 1914:
The most remarkable attack upon the problems of psychology, which has been made from the purely human standpoint is that in which the rich genius of Sigmund Freud was and still is the pioneer. The school which his work has founded was concerned at first wholly with the study of abnormal mental states, and came into notice as a branch of medicine finding the verification of its principles in the success it laid claim to in the treatment of certain mental diseases.25
McDougall commented that his own work prior to the war was impacted,
especially the development of psycho-pathology, stimulated so greatly by the esoteric dogmas of the Freudian school. . . . The only test and verification to which any scheme of human nature can be submitted is the application of it to practice in the elucidation of the concrete phenomena of human life and in the control and direction of conduct, especially in the two great fields of medicine and education.26
Freud turned to the question of mass psychology and the herd to no little degree because of Trotter’s work and the animus he felt that it contained, which “does not entirely escape the antipathies that were set loose by the recent great war.”27
A psychopathology of character that leads to hatred and violence forms the context for these debates. What is important is that the crowd provides a definition of the psychopathological context for a group definition of those who act not only immorally but also psychopathologically. Clinical psychiatry of the 1920s usually avoids this leap even in writings about mass psychosis. The British psychiatrist Theodore Hyslop in his 1925 study of mass hysteria begins by claiming:
[The] history of the world is covered by shadows of beliefs germinated endemically and in ignorance. Social requirements and traditions have given rise to the most diverse religions, views and modes of life. Herein we have to consider how members of a society may combine to predispose to the genesis of a morbid mental condition, and how in the struggle for existence the stronger often seeks to carry off the prey from the weaker.28
Hyslop avoids any discussion of the war, the Germans, and the crowd, however, and instead focuses on outbreaks of mass hysteria such as the dancing mania of the early modern period. Only at the conclusion of the quoted chapter does Hyslop move to the political: “During the Russian revolution the transports of hysterical indecency indulged in by the women was somewhat analogous to the lust for blood shown by the women tricoteuses in the French revolution.”29 Here it is gender, not race, that defines mass hysteria. This is as close as any of the clinical psychiatrists of the 1920s get to describing the madness of the crowd. Indeed, even clinical psychiatrists whose work is informed by psychoanalysis, including Henry Dicks, who later becomes a major figure in attempting to provide a psychiatric evaluation for leading Nazis such as Rudolf Hess, fail to engage with this topic in clinical work of the era.30
The understanding that collectives possess a mass psychology that can become pathological is not limited to the post–Le Bon history of the crowd. The German Jewish scholars Moritz Lazarus and his brother-in-law Hermann Steinthal coined the term “Völkerpsychologie” (ethnic psychology) in the 1860s.31 Rooted in linguist and explorer Wilhelm von Humboldt’s work on language and thought, they developed a notion of a malleable ethnic psychology determined and expressed by language, where language was understood not as a biological quality of a human being as something that was learned and which changed both the mental set of the speaker as a member of a cohort and “the psychological nature” of that cohort.32 Certainly the most important advocate of this at the close of the nineteenth century was the founder of experimental psychology Wilhelm Wundt, whose massive study of ethnic psychology took place between 1890 and 1920. Wundt defined ethnic psychology as the complement to individual psychology. By the close of the century this notion of a malleable collective psyche had been integrated into a racial psychology by popular thinkers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who claimed that language and culture were both biological and immutable. By World War I such discussions had merged with notions of the crowd in German popular and scientific thought.33
By 1914 even Wundt had been captured by this notion of the collective mind as the source of psychopathological attitudes that lead to war (though, by the way, he strongly disavowed the war that erupted in Europe that year). In The Nations and Their Philosophy—A Contribution to the World War (1915) he attempted to describe “the war of minds, conducted silently but at times as bitterly as the war of arms.”34 He confessed that to him “the philosophy of German idealism has proven itself in the changing fates of individuals as well as of nations.” But he found in the collective those qualities that lead to destruction: for the French “honor” and “glory” were the “values of life to be most highly appreciated.” For the English it was “power and domination.” The highest value of the Germans, on the other hand, was “duty.” “It is the sense of duty which the German transfers from his peaceful occupation into the war where it becomes for him the noblest of all duties, the duty of sacrificing himself for the fatherland.”35 For Wundt, “England as a state is despotic, treacherous and underhanded” as is the individual Englishman and the Germans suffer “from false modesty.”36 The role of war provides insight into the healthy German mind:
We shall learn three things [from this war]. The first derives from the unconditional trust which we may put in our much decried militarism. . . . No, we shall not follow the advice of our enemies to abandon our militarism. We shall be in need of it in the future, not only to be armed on land and on the sea in order to preserve the peace, but also because universal military training has become a means of education which provides physical training and an attitude of duty for our youth. German military service like German gymnastics is a genuinely democratic institution, other than sports through which the wealthy young people of England satisfy their need for physical exercise and for a stimulating pass-time.37
For Wundt in 1915 there are healthy and diseased minds. And the German collective is a healthy and productive one.
At the same moment the philosopher Max Scheler, whose refunctioning of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment echoes through the early-twentieth-century understanding of the crowd, argues again for a healthy and diseased mass psychology. In his The Genius of War and the German War he called the war the “unique event in the moral world—the noblest of its kind since the French Revolution.”38 It is “folly and baseness to regard war as mass slaughter.”39 It is only the collective mind, the mind of the state (now a rational substitute for the crowd) that is engaged in war:
Wars are conducted not against individuals but against states following a preceding declaration and a voluntary agreement. The principal goal of war is the disarming of the enemy state, or rather of its government, not the killing of men. . . . Such killing is a killing without hatred, a killing even with the attitude of respect. . . . Hatred of the enemy is an entirely alien element of true war.40
Scheler justifies World War I as “highly characteristic of the great principles of culture which have proven themselves in history [and] are standing behind the fighting powers.”41 For Scheler, the Germans are psychologically healthy, a “world folk,” “a cosmopolitan folk, the national quality of which is this great world-gathering force, this great power of love and understanding of everything human, nay of everything living.”42
Scheler published his The Reasons for the Hatred against the Germans—A National-Pedagogical Discourse in 1917.43 In it, he distinguishes German militarism from its “enemy” counterparts: “Since our glorious victory of 1870 and 1871,” there are “nations with predominantly utilitarian militarism”—Germany’s enemies, of course—and the Germans with their “militarism from conviction.”44 Militarism from conviction “resembles a work of art more than a tool,” and, ultimately, “militarism from conviction hence is the one which can go together with the greatest love of peace.”45 The conviction of the German people is, for Scheler, evidence they are advanced, and, importantly, healthy:
We Germans are the most democratic people of the world as far as social values and feelings are concerned . . . in which the principle of personality development [Bildung], democratic in its origin, unfolds the greatest force in the organization of society. . . . The German heart is tender and soft and hence only capable of that great and worldwide understanding which makes up the nation of Herder, Goethe, Leopold von Ranke, the folk of “Geisteswissenschaften.” Under a rough shell the German heart is Greek, nay almost Indian in the noble capacity to open its soul in order to conceive the great image of the world in purity.46
The defense against being labeled psychopathological, epitomized by Scheler, is indeed a form of romantic reversal. All that is condemned is praised; all that is pathological is healthy.
For the Austrian Jew Sigmund Freud, at first a supporter of the war effort who became gradually disillusioned by it, group hatred cannot be nationally defined. Responding to the rise of crowd theory during World War I and the appropriation of psychodynamic models in it, Freud’s work describes group hatred as resulting from the psychological conflicts arising from social proximity.47 Most importantly it is in Freud’s essay on “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” published in 1921, that he writes the clearest response to the anti-German use of group theory by his British followers during the war. There he comes to terms with the anti-German rhetoric of crowd theory on the part of psychoanalytically informed writers such as Trotter and MacDougall as well as acknowledges the “German” side of the argument. Freud notes:
Group psychology is therefore concerned with the individual man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose. When once natural continuity has been severed in this way, if a breach is thus made between things which are by nature interconnected, it is easy to regard the phenomena that appear under these special conditions as being expressions of a special instinct that is not further reducible—the social instinct (“herd instinct,” “group mind”), which does not come to light in any other situations. But we may perhaps venture to object that it seems difficult to attribute to the factor of number a significance so great as to make it capable by itself of arousing in our mental life a new instinct that is otherwise not brought into play. Our expectation is therefore directed towards two other possibilities: that the social instinct may not be a primitive one and insusceptible of dissection, and that it may be possible to discover the beginnings of its development in a narrower circle, such as that of the family.48
For Freud it is this web of associations that ties the individual to the crowd but that also provides any given individual with the ability to transcend this association:
Each individual is a component part of numerous groups, he is bound by ties of identification in many directions, and he has built up his ego ideal upon the most various models. Each individual therefore has a share in numerous group minds—those of his race, of his class, of his creed, of his nationality, etc.—and he can also raise himself above them to the extent of having a scrap of independence and originality. Such stable and lasting group formations, with their uniform and constant effects, are less striking to an observer than the rapidly formed and transient groups from which Le Bon has made his brilliant psychological character sketch of the group mind. And it is just in these noisy ephemeral groups, which are as it were superimposed upon the others, that we are met by the prodigy of the complete, even though only temporary, disappearance of exactly what we have recognized as individual acquirements.49
Race, for Freud, following Le Bon, is a variable in constituting the crowd, but it is not pathological. Rather, it is one of the factors that define humanness. This is one of the rare moments when Freud, who objected to the very concept of a biological “race” as early as the marginal notes he made in his university textbooks, employs the category of race. It is clear that he is doing so because of his reading of Le Bon.50
Differences between groups, according to Freud, combined with close physical proximity, produces “insuperable repugnance”:
Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured.51
Thus the image of racism here is a natural extension of social relationships. The term “repugnance” reflects the impact of the thinking of the Finnish philosopher and sociologist Edvard Westermarck and his understanding of the rejection of incest as a result of social proximity rather than any inherent anxiety about biological mutations. Ironically, such views are echoed in a number of quarters, among them the eugenics movement (as shown below), to explain the revulsion in response to “miscegenation” between the Aryan or white and “lesser” races. The consequences of close contact among Germans with Jews, and among whites with nonwhites in the United States during the early twentieth century, were viewed as potentially pathological.
The rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in the early twentieth century partnered with the ongoing eugenics movement in both Europe and the United States to lend scientific merit to what at the time were widespread beliefs in racial differences (and racial superiority) among scientists and laypersons. As a result, within the United States there was a systematic attempt to formulate and implement a number of social policies aimed at controlling the prevalence of “inferior” races among the general population.52 As Kenneth Ludmerer has argued, this rediscovery modified U.S. geneticists’ approach to eugenics during the period 1905–1915. Their enthusiasm waned between 1915 and 1924, although, as Ludmerer notes, they did not “publically condemn eugenics.”53 The tension between the laboratory science, focusing on fruit flies, and the social claims of both positive and negative eugenics still echoes well into the twenty-first century.54
Perhaps no case better exemplifies the early-twentieth-century American taste for eugenic testing, policy development, and the “pathological” explanation of racial differences as that of Henry Goddard. Considered by some to be the primary catalyst behind the intelligence testing industry that arose in the mid-twentieth century, Goddard accepted a position with the New Jersey Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in 1906.55 Edward R. Johnstone, acting head of the school following the death of its founder, Stephen Garrison, had created the Psychological Research Laboratory that same year, and had sought out Goddard to be its first director. Though charged with conducting studies of feebleminded children, Goddard admitted he had no expertise in this field.
Goddard sought to catch up quickly in the summer of 1908, when he went to Europe to study the methods of European researchers working with mentally challenged children. Here he became familiar with an instrument developed by Alfred Binet just a few years prior, and began implementing the test among the children at Vineland as well as New Jersey public schools upon his return.56 By December 1908, five months removed from his trip to Europe, Goddard published his own version of Binet’s instrument in two academic journal articles, “The Binet and Simon Tests of Intellectual Capacity,” which outlined the instrument, and “The Grading of Backward Children,” on its use within school settings.57 The use of the test spread rapidly from this point forward. By 1911, it was being introduced among public schools throughout New Jersey, and by 1913 Goddard was administering the test among immigrants arriving at Ellis Island as part of government efforts to prevent the spread of feeblemindedness, imbecility, and other “diseases” associated with undesirable Southern and Eastern European (read: Jewish) populations.58
Goddard’s use of his test at Ellis Island was a result of the enormous popularity of his 1912 book The Kallikak Family.59 Here, Goddard wrote of a family whose origins in the United States dated to an American Revolutionary War veteran who married a “worthy” Quaker woman, but also was having an extramarital affair with a “feeble-minded tavern girl.” According to Goddard, descendants of the marriage to the Quaker woman had produced normally functioning generations of adults, whereas the extramarital relations with the tavern woman had produced generations of imbeciles and criminals. The book’s empirical foundation was shoddy at best, but it framed the harm that could come from intermingling with populations of lesser “stock” in a moral way. The book became quite popular among eugenicists of Goddard’s era, including many with close or direct ties to the U.S. Congress, which helps explain how he was able to establish an intelligence-testing program at Ellis Island the following year.
In implementing the intelligence-testing program, Goddard instructed his assistants to bypass immigrants at Ellis Island who appeared “obviously normal,” and instead choose individuals from the mass of “average immigrants” for testing purposes.60 He and his research assistants selected thirty-five Jews, twenty-two Hungarians, fifty Italians, and forty-five Russians upon whom to administer his English-language test. Generalizing his findings to these immigrant populations as a whole, Goddard concluded that 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians, 87 percent of Russians, and 83 percent of Jews were “morons.”61 He ignored the fact that many of the immigrants being tested did not speak English, that many were unaware of the cultural norms that underlay his test, and that these immigrants were generally exhausted, confused, and to some extent fearful upon arriving at Ellis Island. Nevertheless, the results led Goddard to conclude that Southern and Eastern European countries were sending the United States “the poorest of each race.” As a result, he began advocating strongly in both his scholarship and his public engagements for more restrictive immigration controls at the federal level.
By 1912, the debate over immigration restrictions had become so heated in New York that the state mental health authority blamed the rapid rise of inmates in the state asylums on “immigration [that] is chiefly responsible for the alarmingly large increase in the number of foreign born (Eastern and Southern European) insane in State hospitals.” This in turn had led to “a tremendously heavy [economic] burden on the State.” Morris Waldman, the manager of the United Hebrew Charities, responded that the increase was very much in line with the relative increase of the overall population and that native-born inmates had increased at a greater rate over the period, while “the foreign born have contributed a decreasing portion of the population.” He noted the extraordinarily high rate of the insane in Washington, D.C., which “might lead superficial observers to the conclusion that Federal politics is conducive to insanity.” But the increase “is probably due to the existence of a Federal hospital for insane soldiers.”62 In spite of such counterarguments refuting his claims, Goddard became one of the most vocal proponents of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which was partly inspired by the fact that its congressional advocates invoked many of Goddard’s papers, including The Kallikak Family.
The Johnson-Reed Act, composed by Congressman Albert Johnson (Washington) and Senator David Reed (Pennsylvania), was specifically designed to halt the immigration of Italians and Eastern European Jews, identified by Goddard and others as members of “lesser races,” yet whose U.S. numbers had roughly tripled from 1900 to 1920.63 The Johnson-Reed Act scaled back the number of immigrants allowable from each country to reflect their percentages of the U.S. population in the 1890 Census, when the dominant proportion of European immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe, that is, the “good whites.” So, for example, under this new law, the quota for Southern and Eastern European immigrants was reduced from 45 percent to 15 percent of all immigrants. Signing the bill into law, President Calvin Coolidge made its intention clear: “America must be kept American.”64
To be clear, the Johnson-Reed Act was only one in a long line of congressional bills intended to preserve the nativist racial and ethnic makeup of the United States.65 In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended all immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years, and disallowed any federal court to admit Chinese immigrants for citizenship; this act was not repealed until 1943. Fears about Asian immigrants on the grounds of their medical, moral, and racial fitness soon extended to others. By the early 1900s, the new theory of eugenics began to incorporate theories of racial superiority to augment the views that the criminal and “feebleminded” had become a drain on the American economy. Put forward most powerfully in Richard Louis Dugdale’s 1877 study of a family in New York’s Ulster County, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, the eugenic claim was that such criminal and mentally defective families undermined American productivity through multiple generations of reproduction. The claim quickly transformed into the view that certain immigrant groups, like the Jukes, had higher rates of illness, criminality, and “feeblemindedness” that became exponentially more corrupting over generations. The American Eugenics Society disseminated their beliefs through provocative images, like the flashing light signs that appeared as part of “Fitter Family” contests at eugenics fairs across the country in the 1920s. These displays would feature several lights that flashed at different intervals, with provocative claims associated with each interval. For example, at one such contest in 1926, one part of a sign read, “This light flashes every 15 seconds. Every 15 seconds, $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity such as the insane, feeble-minded, criminals, and other defectives.”66 Using these images and others, eugenicists attempted to convince a captive audience that selectivity in human breeding, including through immigration, would weed out those who burdened, rather than benefited, society. These ideas quickly gained traction, influencing new immigration restrictions, and culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924.
Three years prior to the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, Congress had signed into law the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, establishing immigration quotas for several European and Asian nation-states based upon the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality living in the United States as of the 1910 U.S. Census.67 The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 was meant to replace the Emergency Quota Act with even more extreme immigration restrictions, in part by using the “scientific evidence” from American eugenicists about the threat of an “impure” American racial stock.
The question of racial intelligence, however, was certainly not limited to immigrants. From the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act that revised quotas to reflect immigrant proportions from the 1920 Census, Congress produced numerous pieces of social policy centered on prohibiting potential threats to racial purity from outside. Simultaneously, during this same period, numerous states passed their own sets of laws meant to maintain racial separation within their territorial boundaries. A great number of these laws, broadly referred to as anti-miscegenation laws, focused on preventing both marriage and sexual contact between whites and “lesser races.” The object was to prevent the reproduction of mixed ethnic and racial bloodlines, and reduce what was perceived to be the potential for various mental, physical, and social deformities that would follow.
While the prevention of sexual contact among whites and nonwhites was the concern of eugenicists and some public policy officials of this period, for legal purposes, marriage was often the focus of many of these laws.68 This was due to the fact that marriage carried with it a degree of social respectability for the couple and their offspring as well as several economic benefits. Appeals courts adjudicated the legal issue of miscegenation as frequently in civil cases centered on marriage, divorce, paternity/maternity, and inheritance as in criminal cases concerning sexual misconduct.69 Of the forty-one states and territories that prohibited interracial marriage at some point in their history prior to Loving v. Virginia in 1967, twenty-two states also had legal restrictions against interracial/interethnic sex. New York, though not prohibiting interracial marriage, legally prohibited interracial/interethnic sexual contact.70
The first laws criminalizing interracial sexual contact, including marriage, within what is now the United States were enacted among the colonies of Maryland and Virginia, in 1664 and 1691, respectively. By the 1930s, forty-one states employed eugenic categories and evidence in restricting interracial/interethnic sexual contact, not just among racial and ethnic groups, but also “lunatics,” “imbeciles,” “idiots,” and the “feebleminded.”71 By the mid-twentieth century, in several of these states blood tests had become a standard legal prerequisite for marriage. In 1924, the same year that the Johnson-Reed Act was passed, Virginia passed one of the most restrictive anti-miscegenation laws in U.S. history, with a great deal of help from eugenicists. The Racial Integrity Act mandated it was unlawful for any white man or woman to marry a nonwhite man or woman, with “white” being defined as having “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.”72 The single-drop-of-blood rule, in the absence of any realistic definition of “Caucasian” and given the social reality of “passing” in American society, meant that the law was simply a club aimed at visibly different minorities. It was ideology framed by the claims of the biological science of its day. One of the eugenic claims was that such marriages produced more insane offspring, which damaged the economic fabric of society. As early as 1909, for example, “the American Breeders Association [had created] subcommittees . . . for different human defects, such as insanity, feeblemindedness, criminality, hereditary pauperism and race mongrelization.”73 Such projects led directly to the creation of the Cold Spring Harbor eugenics laboratory on Long Island.
In addition to anti-miscegenation laws, states implemented forced sterilization practices as a method of population control, primarily targeting poor women and racialized immigrant groups. The justification was usually related to forms of mental illness (such as chronic depression) or developmental disorders or mental deficiency (feeblemindedness). In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass laws allowing for forced sterilization of populations deemed “socially inadequate”; Connecticut followed suit in 1909.74 This presaged the increased somatization of madness across the twentieth century. Medicine attributed more and more symptoms to specific neurological deficits such as dementia. Developmental disorders came to be sorted out from illnesses with complex neurological causes—reductively dividing environmental diseases from genetic ones, for example—and those diseases seen as purely illness of the spirit, the psyche, or the mind were still further separated out. Thus the idiot and the lunatic, often housed in the same state institution through the nineteenth century, were by the early twentieth century seen as manifesting quite different social and medical causes.75
Indeed, biological interventions such as sterilization dealt with such individuals not to aid them but to improve society by eliminating their ability to reproduce. In the 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling that upheld the constitutionality of such laws, U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded in affirming the Commonwealth of Virginia’s eugenic sterilization law: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”76 Biological definitions of madness generated a wide range of biological interventions to limit and control madness. What was key to the ruling, and this was the state’s purpose of using Carrie Bell, a white Virginia woman declared to be feebleminded, as the test case, was that this was not to be seen as part of American racial politics even though involuntary sterilization disproportionately affected black Americans.77 Negative eugenics was presented as race blind; it never was.
The Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell ruling had an enormous impact on the subsequent passage of compulsory sterilization laws throughout the United States. By 1935, twenty-nine states had passed bills allowing the forced sterilization of almost twenty-two thousand individuals, a disproportionate number of them nonwhite and poor. Most states discontinued compulsory sterilization practices by the mid-1960s, with one notable exception: Oregon, which conducted its last forcible sterilization in 1981!78
In Germany, meanwhile, the link between the new genetics and eugenics of intermarriage was also powerful. German eugenics incorporated genetics into its racial argument as early as 1913 when Eugen Fischer, who was later to have a major role in Nazi eugenic politics as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, published his study The Rehoboth Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation among Humans—an investigation of the biological effects of racial intermarriage between Dutch settlers and native Khoi Khoi (Hottentots) in German Southwest Africa (Namibia). His argument, that the product of such relationships suffered from greater rates of mental illness and developmental disorders, used American studies as part of its scientific basis. Fischer’s study was subsequently billed as the first successful demonstration of Mendelism in a human population, although that claim has been recently and rightfully called into question.79
The scientific debates about “mixed race” individuals and their proclivity for or resistance to specific forms of illness that used the American models concerning intermarriage with blacks and claimed that the offspring of such relationships had higher incidences of mental illness have their parallel in the eugenic debates within Europe about the Jews as a race. While an assimilationist such as German chancellor Otto von Bismarck declared in 1892 that “the Jews bring to the mixture of the different German tribes a certain mousseaux [sparkle], which should not be underestimated,” this was not as benign as it sounds.80 He spoke quite openly about “putting a Jewish mare to a Christian stallion of German breed.” The eugenic goal, as Bismarck notes, is “that to prevent mischief, the Jews will have to be rendered innocuous by cross breeding.”81 Stronger races trump weaker races.
Antisemitic writers of the late nineteenth century such as Max Brewer and Richard Wagner’s widely read son-in-law Stewart Houston Chamberlain, on the other hand, saw the root of much of the weakness of the Jewish body and character as a result from the mixed-race status of the Jews.82 For them the Jews could not be a pure race, like the Aryans, but were rather a “mongrel” mixture of the worst of all races. Jewish anthropologists at the turn of the century, such as Elias Auerbach, seem to echo these views about the weakness of the mixed race in regard to the offspring of Jewish intermarriages in Europe and the United States.83 Expressing a view typical of German Zionists, the sociologist Arthur Ruppin argued in 1913 that “the descendants of a mixed marriage are not likely to have any remarkable gifts. . . . Intermarriage being clearly detrimental to the preservation of the high qualities of the race, it follows that it is necessary to try and prevent it and preserve Jewish separatism.”84 For Ruppin and other Zionists, agricultural work wasn’t the lowest form of productivity as Samuel A. Cartwright had implied it was in relation to black Americans; the labor that would debase whites if they were forced to do it would improve the health of the Jews. Ruppin writes in his diary during 1898:
Only a Volk engaged in agriculture can be healthy, only a state with the majority of its people engaged in agriculture comprises a firmly bound, organized whole. Agriculture is the well-spring of mankind. England and other states (whose agricultural populations are steadily declining) will always present only an aggregate of individual people who have been haphazardly thrown together.85
The debates about health and productivity were often placed within the tense arguments concerning the mutability of national identity and race.
In 1933, shortly after its seizure of power, Germany’s Nazi government adopted the Law for Protection against Genetically Defective Offspring, providing the legal basis for sterilizations in Germany. Fischer had authored textbooks on eugenics in the 1920s and early 1930s and his co-authored 1936 handbook Human Heredity Theory and Racial Hygiene summarized the scientific basis for Nazi eugenic policies. Introduced at the very end of the Weimar Republic under Fischer’s influence, the 1933 law echoed American eugenic policies toward the mentally ill and was supported by parties of the left, center, and right.86 It was based on the California statute of sterilization inspired by Harry Laughlin’s 1922 study of American sterilization policy, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. The scientists involved in drafting the law cited Goddard’s work on the Kallikaks (well after he had withdrawn it) as well as the case of the Jukes as proof of the need to control the mentally ill and feebleminded.87 It included as subjects for eugenic sterilization the feebleminded, the insane, criminals, epileptics, alcoholics, blind persons, deaf persons, deformed persons, and indigent persons. The Nazi law ordered the sterilization of “any person with a hereditary disease” and among those diseases were a wide range of forms of mental illnesses such as:
In its first full year of operation, the Nazi program dramatically eclipsed activities in the United States, sterilizing about eighty thousand persons without their consent. Laughlin was given an honorary doctorate at Heidelberg in 1936 at the five hundredth anniversary of the university.
In 1935 the Nazis passed a series of eugenic laws inspired by their American models. The Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German Volk (Healthy Marriage Law) forbade any marriage in which “either party, regardless of whether he has been declared legally incapacitated, suffers from mental illness which renders the marriage undesirable for the Volk community.”89 The American miscegenation laws were redrafted in September of that year in the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which read:
[C]ompelled by recognition of the fact that the purity of German blood is the prerequisite to the survival of the German Volk, and inspired by the unflinching will to secure the future of the German nation in perpetuity, the Reichstag has unanimously passed the following law, which is hereby promulgated that (1) Marriages between Jews and nationals of German or related blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law shall be considered null and void even if, for the purpose of circumventing this law, they have been concluded abroad.90
The Nazis accepted both the premises and the structures of the American laws.91 The “anti-miscegenation laws” had as their goals the purification of the race and the elimination of weak and ill offspring. In 1941 the Weimar social reformer turned popular Nazi writer on human sexuality Hugo Hertwig stressed the importance of avoiding hybridization as it was a product of modernity and technology—“[t]hese utterly preposterous, inferior, and dangerous racial crossbreeds we often see today have been made possible only by a technology that [enables us to] transcend time and space.” Modernity enables the production of eugenic monsters that are inferior either because of their weakness or their illness. Germany has not precluded
absorbing the blood of inferior races into our lines and have, therefore, banned marriages with people who are alien to the species of the German Volk (for example, with Jews). Such laws for the protection of the blood have also existed in previous nations, in the United States of America, for example, or in the South African Union, etc. These laws are designed to prevent arbitrary crossbreeding that violates the natural order and that is made possible only by technological advances.92
The avoidance of such crossbreeding strengthens the nation by eliminating various illnesses, including forms of insanity.
The result of such eugenic laws first became evident in the fall of 1939 when Hitler signed a secret order that “broaden[ed] the powers of designated physicians to the extent that persons who are suffering from diseases which may be deemed incurable according to standards of human judgment based on a careful examination of their condition shall be guaranteed a mercy.” Thus “life unworthy of life” or “useless eaters” were to be killed. Conservatively, five thousand institutionalized mentally ill patients were murdered in six gassing installations in asylums as part of the “euthanasia” action: Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin; Grafeneck in southwestern Germany; Bernburg and Sonnenstein, both in Saxony; Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria, and Hadamar in Hesse. As Henry Friedlander has well illustrated, racial theory played a major role here also.93 Jewish patients in these asylums were at much greater risk of being murdered than the general population. The assumption of a Jewish danger to the body politic through race mixing involved an anxiety about a greater risk based in the claims of a Jewish predisposition for mental illness. After the war, in an ironic twist, German racial scholars such as Eugen Fischer, who continued to publish well into the 1950s, attempted to rewrite their country’s history by appropriating the terms “pseudoscience” and “pseudogenetics” to distinguish the work of Nazi ideologists from their own, putatively scientific, activities.94
By the end of World War I the original image of the predisposition of Jews and blacks for mental illness becomes circumscribed as self-hatred in the psychological as well as the popular literature. Such structural explanations dominated theories of the psychopathology of racism even following the rise of political antisemitism in the 1890s and then its instantiation in Austrian and German politics in the early twentieth century. Jew hatred evident at the time is like all other forms of group antipathy, debunking Pinsker’s view of it as a specific formation triggered by the “rootlessness” of the Jew, which was in turn caused by the inherent Christian (Western) hatred of the Jew: Judeophobia.
It is the shift to the Realpolitik of race in the early twentieth century that changes the equation. While fringe parties in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire used antisemitism as a plank in their party platforms (even getting candidates elected to important positions, such as mayor of Vienna) it was not until the mid-1930s, with the rise of the Nazis in Germany after 1933 and of clerico-fascism in Austria after 1934, that Sigmund Freud develops a specific theory of the origins of a specific German racial madness as defined by antisemitism. This shift is important to note because it moves the discussion from the impact of race or character on the crowd (using the model of Le Bon) to a psychopathological theory of racism:
We must not forget that all those peoples who excel today in their hatred of Jews became Christians only in late historic times, often driven to it by bloody coercion. It might be said that they are all “mis-baptized.” They have been left, under a thin veneer of Christianity, what their ancestors were, who worshipped a barbarous polytheism. They have not got over a grudge against the new religion, which was imposed on them; but they have displaced the grudge on to the source from which Christianity reached them. The fact that the Gospels tell a story, which is set among Jews, and in fact deals only with Jews, has made this displacement easy for them. Their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Christians, and we need not be surprised that in the German National-Socialist revolution this intimate relation between the two monotheist religions finds such a clear expression in the hostile treatment of both of them.95
This account of the specificity of a German neurotic impulse that leads to antisemitism (and, for Freud, more centrally, to anti-Christian self-hatred projected onto the Jews) is found in his late work, Moses and Monotheism, begun in Vienna in the mid-1930s and finished in London after his exile in 1938. It is framed, however, by a more general theory of antisemitism, which has its roots in Jewish belief and practice.
As stated in Moses and Monotheism, Freud’s view of the cause of antisemitism in general, beyond the specific German case, was that it was the result of the straitjacket of monotheism, which the Jews created out of Egyptian practices and which they then bequeathed to the world.96 According to Freud’s account, it was the Jews who killed their leader, the Egyptian Moses, rebelling against him, and came only later to regret his death and build into their rigid, monotheistic faith the idea of the redemptive power of a returned Messiah. Jewish religious practices grew out of the repression of the memory of this original bloodletting and are at the root of antisemitism, as Freud noted already in his analytic case study of the five-year old child called “Little Hans” in 1909: “The castration complex is the deepest root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis—a piece of his penis, they think—and this gives them a right to despise Jews.”97 (We would remind the reader of Paolo Mantegazza’s late-nineteenth-century comments on the same phenomenon in Chapter One.) Freud’s creation of a special case for the “mis-baptized” Germans as self-hating Christians illuminates how complex the question of the nature of prejudice for Freud. The academic acceptance of theories of racial inferiority and degeneracy is the source of racism that self-hatred seems to internalize. Freud makes this turn only very late in the 1930s after a number of thinkers had already provided not only theories of race madness but also potential therapies for it.
From 1933 onward, in works by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and others, the image of the mentally ill racist absorbs much of the interest in the psychology of race. Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) was the first truly systematic attempt to define the etiology of a psychology of racism. Reich, like a wide range of German thinkers in the 1920s including Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Kurt Lewin, attempted to bridge the gap between Marx (economic explanations of human action) and Freud (deep psychological ones). His success at bridging this gap can be measured by the fact that he was expelled from the German Communist Party early in 1933 because of the unapproved publication of a short pamphlet called “The Sexual Struggle of Youth,” which ironically had first been excerpted in the official Communist Party publication, Die Warte (The Lookout).98 The irony is that the publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism prompted the Danish Communist Party to announce that Reich was being expelled from the group, but Reich had never joined the Danish branch. In general the Communists did not like how The Mass Psychology of Fascism began by noting the “failure of the workers’ movement in a phase of modern history in which, as the Marxists contend, ‘the capitalist mode of production had become economically ripe for explosion.’”99 Anna Freud and Ernest Jones were behind Reich’s expulsion for political militancy from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934 after a hearing held by a high-level subcommittee of the IPA.100 According to a recent historian, Reich’s expulsion was due to the fear that his writing endangered the existence of the German Psychoanalytic Society and was implemented in order to avoid a ban on psychoanalysis by the Nazis.101
Reich’s argument rests on a development of Freud’s view of the repressive qualities of society. This was best articulated in Freud’s essay “Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness” (1908), intended to be readable by the general public, as well as his more technical Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). Reich linked Freud’s views to Engels’s argument about capitalism and its crippling of the individual through its creation of a “false consciousness.” Such psychological analysis was offered to explain the inability of members of capitalist society to understand their own repression. For Reich it was the authoritarian nature of the capitalist family that inhibited sexual curiosity and created a specific character type that was easily dominated and controlled. Using Freud’s model of superego formation, Reich saw capitalism as promoting the creation of an individual that was easily manipulated in the family and therefore easily subsumed to the demands of the crowd.102
Thus the crowd, now defined as the fascist state, is the product of the sexually repressive family. The family is the
central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation. In this connection, the findings of [Lewis H.] Morgan and of [Friedrich] Engels are still entirely correct.103
The therapy is the development of “a social ideology [that] changes man’s psychic structure, [in that] it has not only reproduced itself in man but, what is more significant, has become an active force, a material power in man, who in turn has become concretely changed, and, as a consequence thereof, acts in a different and contradictory fashion.”104 This view challenged Freud’s statement in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), where he wrote against the view of those psychoanalysts who tried to incorporate the view of the historical materialists such as Friedrich Engels. Freud writes,
[A]ggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form. . . . If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there.105
Reich stated his opposition to such a dismissal of the role of capitalism in his defense against his expulsion from the IPA in 1933. He “stated that he understood his exclusion if opposition to the death instinct concept and Freud’s theory of culture were incompatible with membership. At the same time, he considered himself the legitimate developer of natural-scientific psychoanalysis and, from that viewpoint, could not concur with the exclusion.”106 Reich’s scientific theory of racism was rooted in his understanding of the relationship between psychological social structures exemplified by Nazi Germany.
Wilhelm Reich focuses on racism as a symptom of sexual repression in the mind of the authoritarian racist. He describes racism in terms that derive from Freud but which incorporate a direct critique of the Nazi rhetoric of race:
There is a direct connection between the “dominion” over animals and racial “dominion” over the “black man, the Jew, the Frenchman, etc.” It is clear that one prefers to be a gentleman than an animal. To disassociate himself from the animal kingdom, the human animal denied and finally ceased to perceive the sensations of his organs; in the process he became biologically rigid.107
Reich describes fascist race theory as following the model of sexual repression using the vocabulary of hygiene and eugenics:
The race theory proceeds from the presupposition that the exclusive mating of every animal with its own species is an “iron law” in nature. The National Socialist went on to apply this supposed law in nature to peoples. Their line of reasoning was something as follows: Historical experience teaches that the “intermixing of Aryan blood” with “inferior” peoples always results in the degeneration of the founders of civilization. The level of the superior race is lowered, followed by physical and mental retrogression; this marks the beginning of a progressive “decline.”108
Reich writes of such a predisposition for madness among the racists in a world in which the internalization of racism as a form of mental illness remains a commonplace. Thus the product of the authoritarian society is equivalent to the product of the racist society. However, this is not a German problem in Reich’s view, unlike that of thinkers such as Trotter, but a modern one: “The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression. Correspondingly, there is a German, Italian, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish and Arabian fascism. The race ideology is a true biopathic character symptom of the orgastically impotent individual.”109 For Reich, race hatred defines the center of the authoritarian society.
Reich positions his intervention into the conversation about mass psychology by claiming his own medical authority. He raises the stakes for the analysis of group psychology by claiming that the rise of Nazism stems not from Hitler’s power or some form of “mass psychosis” but rather from the qualities inherent in a group living in a sexually and economically authoritarian society. Similarly, by insisting that readers not think of fascism as a national (i.e., German or Japanese) quality, but one that has firm roots in international social and economic structures, he appropriates the entire world population as suitable for medical and psychological study. He situates the source of his knowledge as his medical profession: “[M]y medical experience with individuals from all kinds of social strata, races, nationalities and religions showed me that ‘fascism’ is only the politically organized expression of the average human character structure, a character structure which has nothing to do with this or that race, nation or party but which is general and international.”110 Here and elsewhere, Reich refers to himself as an objective doctor and a scientist, and in this way positions himself as more authoritative than a “mere” economist or sociologist.111 His training as a psychiatrist becomes important as he clarifies, following the deadly riot on July 15, 1927, in Vienna (the violent culmination to that point of the political struggle between left and right in Austria) what is pathological about mass psychology, namely, that it does not simply arise from socioeconomic issues. He saw the spontaneity of the crowd in the circumstances and the mechanical responses of the state functionaries as well as the police. Thereafter he dismissed the widespread belief that the working class could not suffer from sexual repression or stasis and rethinks the meaning of mass psychopathology.112 His training as a psychiatrist becomes important as he clarifies what is pathological about mass psychology, namely, that it does not simply arise from socioeconomic issues. The example Reich gives is that socioeconomic factors may account for why the poor would steal bread—but fail to account for the reality, which is that most poor people do not steal, and even provide political rationales for those whose policies ensure their continued poverty. In this way, he positions perversity and irrationality as a medical, rather than simply economic or social, issue.
Reich castigates Marxism for its unswerving privileging of material conditions over psychological factors, and positions Freud’s new approach to psychoanalysis as a corrective. He uses the language of science—“brain” and “psychological structure”—to contest the ability of Marxism to answer its own questions: “The Marxist dictum that economic conditions transform themselves into ideology, and not vice versa, ignores two questions: First, how this takes place, what happens in the ‘human brain’ in this process; and second, what is the retroactive effect of this ‘consciousness’ (we shall speak of psychological structure) on the economic process?”113 He does not wholly follow Freud, however, and critiques him for analyzing mass psychology as individual psychology, suggesting instead that mass psychology is related to the individual because it is made up of typical traits. He suggests, “political psychology alone—not social economics—can make us understand the human character structure of a given epoch, how the individual thinks and acts, how he reacts to the conflicts of his existence and how he tries to manage them.”114 Using the language of Freud’s psychoanalysis allows him to integrate economic and psychological issues in his medicalization of group psychology as the sexual life and family structure become elements that can pathologically predispose those living in authoritarian societies toward fascist regimes. He uses the language of illness to great effect: “the fact should not be overlooked that fascism, ideologically, is the revolt of a deathly sick society, sick sexually as well as economically.”115 Ultimately, by combining economic approaches with what he sees as “medical” approaches, Reich positions himself as a scientific authority on social phenomena.
Reich does not directly examine the response of the victim to the worldview of racism as he is interested in the collective, the crowd, rather than the individual. The other side of the question about how the victim responds to the hatred of the crowd is articulated in a more limited fashion in Anna Freud’s The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (1936), where the varieties of ego defense mechanisms described by her father (repression, displacement, denial, projection, reaction formation, intellectualization, rationalization, undoing, sublimation) are augmented by a new category very much of the 1930s: identification with the aggressor. Much later she commented that this innovation, which she notes she borrowed from the child psychologist August Aichhorn, was not one “of the recognized defense mechanisms”; nonetheless, she says, “I felt modest about this new one. I didn’t think it had a claim to be introduced yet.”116 Aichhorn, in his 1925 lectures on juvenile delinquency, stressed the role that the superego had in structuring our relationship to the world.117 For him, it is “the father who represents to the child the demands of society, forces him to fulfill those demands through the child’s identification with him.”118 Aichhorn stresses the normal identification of the child with the same sex parent. For him the ego retains the form into which it was structured by the demands of the father and by society. Thus we become ourselves through our own identification with the ideal represented by our parents. When this identification is faulty, delinquency results. Aichhorn notes that such a pattern leads to a “renunciation of these wishes through the laying bare of unconscious relationships.”119 This is “a matter of reeducation” rather than psychotherapy.120 “Life forces him to conform to reality; education enables him to achieve culture.”121 Aichhorn provides case studies of such reeducation through riding the delinquent of his identification with the aggressive or destructive parent, where the child had “identified himself with his father and doing as he did, escaped his own unpleasant situation.”122 Aichhorn postulates that a youth counselor can overcome such identification with the negative aspects of the parent and therefore of the superego through focusing the transference of the youth with the counselor. Thus the destructive forces are reformed and the negative identification modified.
Anna Freud transforms this, arguing that the child identifies with the parent by “impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatening into the person making the threat.”123 Her focus is not, as was Reich’s, on the level of the constitution of superego formation, how and why capitalist society shapes the individual through its repressive rule making, but rather on the individual’s resistance to all such forces, a resistance that, however, can become the source of mental illness.
The pattern is one that she sees as part of a normal course of human development, when the child mimics the adult in order to avoid punishment: in “‘identification with the aggressor’ we recognize a by no means uncommon stage in the normal development of the superego. Nevertheless, it can become pathological.”124 She continues, “It is possible that a number of people remain arrested at the intermediate stage in the development of the super-ego and never quite complete the internalization of the critical process. Although perceiving their own guilt, they continue to be peculiarly aggressive in their attitude to other people. In such cases the behavior of the superego toward others is as ruthless as that of the superego toward the patient’s own ego in melancholia.”125 Thus psychopathology can result in harm to the ego: “If the child introjects [internalizes] both rebuke and punishment and then regularly projects this same punishment on another, ‘then he is arrested at an intermediate stage in the development of the superego.’”126 The key to what comes to be understood as projective identification is the image of “assimilation”:
The German word is Angleichung. The child becomes like the teacher. “Assimilating himself” is a rather clumsy translation. But, you know, the best example I now have of this process is one which I didn’t possess at the time. It came later at the Hampstead Nurseries from the little girl who had a small brother who was so afraid of dogs that she said to him, “You be doggie and no dog will bite you.” That is a perfect expression of the whole thing.127
Anna Freud argues that it can also be at the core of racism, for “vehement indignation at someone else’s wrongdoing is the precursor of and substitute for guilty feelings on its own account.”128 Intolerance of other people precedes intolerance toward the self.
This category had been exemplified much earlier in German Jewish writings about the internalization of racism and is a commonplace in early-twentieth-century popular psychology.129 The German Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann’s widely read and translated My Life as German and Jew (1921) reflected such images:
I have known many Jews who have languished with longing for the fair-haired and blue-eyed individual. They knelt before him, burned incense before him, believed his every word; every blink of his eye was heroic; and when he spoke of his native soil, when he beat his Aryan breast, they broke into a hysterical shriek of triumph. . . . I was once greatly diverted by a young Viennese Jew, elegant, full of suppressed ambition, rather melancholy, something of an artist, and something of a charlatan. Providence itself had given him fair hair and blue eyes; but lo, he had no confidence in his fair hair and blue eyes: in his heart of hearts he felt that they were spurious.130
But for Wassermann this was a form of superego deformation, which Anna Freud transformed into a normal aspect of ego development. For Wassermann it is “self-shame” that marks the relationship of the Jew to his own sense of self as a human being.
I was often overcome by discouragement, by a sense of shame at all those tumbling, stumbling selves among whom I too now was numbered, but who from far away had seemed to me superhuman creatures dwelling in an enchanted garden. At times I was moved to wonder whether the narrow spitefulness, the pecuniary squabbling combined with the striving toward universal goals, the provincial dullness and brutal ambition, the mistrust and stubborn misunderstanding where achievement and perfection, ideas and an exchange of impulses were at stake, where thoughts and images were concerned—whether all this was a peculiarly German disease or a by-product of the metier as such, its somber lining, the same with us as in other lands.131
Wassermann notes the inauthenticity of such forms of identification and their concomitant rejection, evident to the outside observer, which destabilizes Jewish identity. It neither enables the Jew to become part of antisemitic culture nor does it provide a positive Jewish identity for him. It transforms him into a psychopathological case, and such characters haunt the literature of the day in works by the non-Jewish Thomas Mann (“Blood of the Walsung,” 1905) and Arthur Schnitzler (The Road into the Open, 1908), the Jewish friend and neighbor of Anna Freud’s father.
Indeed identification with the aggressor even becomes a theme in Jewish American writing of the 1920s with Ludwig Lewisohn’s novel Island Within (1928). In an essay written in 1938 Lewisohn labels all of the “Jewish accusations against Jews today [as] pure and unadulterated bitter escapist mechanisms, Masochistic mechanisms, mechanism of self-hatred.”132 Identification with the aggressor becomes a means of labeling internal conflicts among the various groups that evolve in exile from Europe. As late as 1945 Zionist and educator William Chomsky (father of Noam) can provide a case study as telling as that recounted by Wassermann, but in the American context: “‘Whenever the word ‘Jew’ or a Jewish person is mentioned when I am among gentiles, I immediately become tense to see if what is being said is complementary or otherwise. . . . When a name that is definitely Semitic is mentioned in class or among other gentiles I try to laugh along with the others, but fortunately I feel that anyone with such a name should change it immediately and not single himself out so.”133 Chomsky condemns such anxiety and sees it as a part of the pressure to conform to standards of American culture rather than to the goals of Jewish education.
What is important to remember is that Anna Freud postulates that this mode of ego defense, stemming as it does from the son’s Oedipal conflict with the father and simultaneous identification with him, is part of normal superego development. By internalizing the power of the authority, the ego is in a position to project its repressed aim and thus criticize others as well as to learn what is to be condemned and protect itself against the pain of guilt through identification. This process can become pathological, but what she is arguing is that it is merely one of the mechanisms of defense used by the ego in a nonpathological manner. It does not take long, however, for Viennese psychoanalysis, under the pressure of Austro-fascism and the complexity of Jewish identity in such a politically and culturally charged environment, to see such a “normal” defense as clearly a pathology, not of the ego but of the superego, of the interaction between the ego and the world beyond. In 1937 the Viennese Jewish psychoanalyst Theodor Reik argues that such identification is inherently a form of psychopathology:
In connection with this part of Anna Freud’s theory, I do not think it is right to say that an ego of this kind is intolerant of other people before it is severe towards itself and that we have here an intermediate stage in the development of the super-ego which at the same time represents some kind of preliminary phase of morality. On the contrary I am of the opinion that the subject’s perception of his own guilt has in these cases assumed such an exceptionally severe and acute form that he must drive his aggressiveness outwards if his ego is to remain intact. I hold that we are here confronted not with a defective development of the super-ego, but with a hypertrophied activity on its part—with a development, which is excessive at any rate in relation to an ego that is still weak and unconfident of itself. If the ego, finding itself in this situation, were not to seek relief by such a method of unburdenment, the sense of guilt, now become too powerful to bear, would turn against the ego and the result would be, not a greater awareness of guilt (which indeed is often perceived consciously) but an attack of melancholia.134
For Reik this is not inherent to superego development, but rather an exaggerated form of superego development. What psychotherapy can provide in these cases is for the analysand to trust the self more, which such identification denied. At this moment, shortly before the Anschluß, the question of ego anxiety undergoes a transformation into a psychopathology. Identifying with the aggressor is a form of madness unless it becomes the object of therapy.
In exile in London Anna Freud found her understanding of the identification with the aggressor confronted in her own clinical practice. In her Hampstead Clinic for Children there were boys and girls who had escaped on the trains rescuing children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, the Kindertransport, who were observed playing “Nazis and Jews”: everyone wanted to be a Nazi! She slowly began to alter her view, and after the war she commented on the nature of this aggression:
The mechanism of identification with the aggressor, as a means of achieving the turn of passive into active, by implication deals not with libido but with aggression (or rather, masochism as its counterpart). The mechanism of displacement of object from the animate to the inanimate, or from humans to animals, does play some role in the conflicts with infantile sexuality but holds a much more significant place in the child’s or adult’s struggle with his aggression. Undoing, as it is known from the obsessional neurosis, is directed against aggression only. Delegation . . . is another defensive measure, effective in curbing the individual’s aggression and does so in two ways. One consists in attributing responsibility for the aggressive action or wish to another person or external influence; this happens normally in early childhood or, abnormally, in the paranoid reactions. The other is the familiar social phenomenon that the individual denies himself the fulfillment of aggressive wishes but concedes permission for it to some higher agency such as the state, the police, the military or legal authorities. This latter instance resembles somewhat the working of altruism on the libidinal side; the “altruistic” individual “delegates” to others the libidinal wishes, which he denies to himself, i.e. he “externalizes” or “displaces” them, with the result that he can enjoy their fulfillment vicariously.135
Here there is a glimpse of her critique of the societal context of aggressive behavior and how the individual can abdicate his or her own anxiety about identification with the aggressor to greater societal forces such as the state. What is of interest it that while obsessional neurosis is evoked here the general idea that racism was a mass obsession is rare to this point.136
The reader can only understand the renewed and revitalized interest in social psychology within the social and psychological sciences in the United States in the 1930s in historical context. As one of the standard histories of social psychology from the 1970s states:
If I were required to name the one person who has had the greatest impact upon the field [of social psychology], it would have to be Adolf Hitler. There are several reasons why these events in the world at large were so important for social psychology: They came at a critical stage in its development; they were largely responsible for the spectacular increase in its rate of growth; they basically influenced the subsequent demographic composition of the field; and they exerted a fundamental influence upon its entire intellectual complexion right up to the present.137
Among other psychologists in exile the topic of identification with the aggressor lead to other approaches to this question of the predisposition to madness of the Jews. Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), trained in Berlin and long associated with the Institute of Social Research (better known as the Frankfurt School) that married psychoanalytic approaches to society with Marxist theory, was one of the most prominent pioneers of social and applied psychology in the modern era.138 In 1933 Lewin immigrated to the United States, eventually ending up teaching and researching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then later heading the Center for Group Dynamics.
Lewin began to formulate his theory of group dynamics in 1937, looking at the Gestalt of such formations, in that an individual’s psychology could be comprehended only in the context of the environment of the group, its members, and the situation in which all find themselves: B = f (P, E), behavior (B) is a function of a person (P) in their environment (E). The whole is truly, as in the discussions of the crowd during World War I, greater than the sum of its parts but is also constituent of its parts. Lewin’s emphasis on the importance of the present moment of lived experience rather than Freud’s emphasis on the centrality of early child experiences paralleled other psychoanalytic thinkers in the Frankfurt School such as Erich Fromm (and others in the Berlin psychoanalytic association such as Karen Horney). In 1941 Lewin, who would later become involved in the rehabilitation of concentration camp inmates, turned to the question of the identification with the aggressor in the context of Nazi antisemitism in what becomes the classic psychological paper on “Jewish self-hatred.”139
Lewin begins his study in the context of Nazi antisemitism, and by discounting the idea that all self-hatred stems simply from identification with the aggressor:
There is an almost endless variety of forms which Jewish self-hatred may take. Most of them, and the most dangerous forms, are a kind of indirect, under-cover self-hatred. If I should count the instances where I have encountered open and straightforward contempt among Jews, I could name but a few. The most striking, for me, was the behavior of a well-educated Jewish refugee from Austria on the occasion of his meeting a couple of other Jewish refugees. In a tone of violent hatred, he burst out into a defense of Hitler on the ground of the undesirable characteristics of the German Jew.140
While Lewin seems to discount such moments of identification for a broader theory of what comes to be called group dynamics, he returns to this theme later in the essay: “the development of Palestine, the recent history of the European Jews, and the threat of Hitlerism have made the issues more clear. A few Jews, such as the infamous Captain Naumann in Germany, have become Fascistic themselves under the threat of Fascism.”141 Lewin’s reference is to the ultranationalist Max Naumann, an Army officer and holder of the Iron Cross during World War I, who was the chairman of the Verband Nationaldeutscher Juden (League of Nationalist German Jews) in Weimar and a violent opponent of Eastern Jews, whom he accused of being the true target of German antisemites. In 1933, on the eve of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Naumann supported one of the political parties allied with the Nazis, hoping that this might mitigate the Nazis’ radical antsemitism. These are for Lewin “real” cases of self-hatred and not the typical manifestations of the phenomenon. While Lewin desires to limit his investigation to the field of social dynamics, the specter of the identification with the aggressor haunts this essay.142
Lewin claims that psychoanalytic explanations are incomplete because they fail to encompass
what Freud calls the drive to self-destruction or the “death instinct.” However, an explanation like that is of little value. Why does the Englishman not have the same amount of hatred against his countrymen, or the German against the German, as the Jew against the Jew? If the self-hatred were the result of a general instinct, we should expect its degree to depend only on the personality of the individual. But the amount of self-hatred the individual Jew shows seems to depend far more on his attitude toward Judaism than on his personality.143
By “Judaism” Lewin seems not simply to mean religious belief but the totality of the meanings ascribed to the symbolic Jew, positive as well as negative, religious as well as ethnic. Lewin does address the general charge that Jews are particularly susceptible to psychopathology, as he seems to admit that there are greater manifestations of pathological self-hatred among Jews, but that most cases are the result of the context of self-loathing.
Self-hatred seems to be a psychopathological phenomenon, and its prevention may seem mainly a task for the psychiatrist. However, modern psychology knows that many psychological phenomena are but an expression of a social situation in which the individual finds himself. In a few cases, Jewish self-hatred may grow out of a neurotic or otherwise abnormal personality, but in the great majority of cases it is a phenomenon in persons of normal mental health. In other words, it is a social-psychological phenomenon, even though it usually influences deeply the total personality. In fact, neurotic trends in Jews are frequently the result of their lack of adjustment to just such group problems.144
There may be individuals who are psychopathological and their symptoms may be articulated as self-loathing. But it is the social environment that generates self-hatred in a group, it is not intrinsic to the group itself. It can, however, be a form of identification with the aggressor, as much as he wishes to discount this. For Lewin’s self-hating Jew “sees things Jewish with the eyes of the unfriendly majority.”145
Lewin does not deem this a problem of the Jews as a group alone. Residing now in the United States, he sees the phenomenon in black American identification with the aggressor as well as that of other immigrant groups as analogous to that of the Jews:
One of the better-known and most extreme cases of self-hatred can be found among American Negroes. Negroes distinguish within their group four or five strata according to skin shade—the lighter the skin the higher the strata. This discrimination among themselves goes so far that a girl with a light skin may refuse to marry a man with a darker skin. An element of self-hatred which is less strong but still clearly distinguishable may also be found among the second generation of Greek, Italian, Polish, and other immigrants to this country.146
Lewin sees identification with the aggressor, which is clearly the phenomenon that he is addressing even though he never uses the phrase, as the core problem. Its cure is to be found not in the therapeutic treatment of Jews or black Americans but through amelioration of the racism of the society in which they find themselves: “Jewish self-hatred will die out only when actual equality of status with the non-Jew is achieved. Only then will the enmity against one’s own group decrease to the relatively insignificant proportions characteristic of the majority group’s. Sound self-criticism will replace it.”147 It is the race madness of the Nazis in Germany and American society that generates self-loathing in individuals as well as in collectives of oppressed minorities.
Such debates echoed among the various émigré therapists. In the 1950s, building on earlier studies, the Berlin-trained non-Jewish psychoanalyst Karen Horney’s popular work codified the discussion about the unstable nature of identity formation where there is a constant need to reify one’s self-image, which being “essentially false, is never really secure.”148 Such insecurity leads to self-hatred or the projection of such feelings toward others. Horney, a close collaborator of Erich Fromm, opens the field well beyond oppressed minorities to reappropriate Anna Freud’s model free from specific social contexts. The question is not whether such phenomena exist but rather what are their parameters and limitations. These parameters and limitations shift over time and are shaped by the demands of the theorist.
In 1934 Adolf Hitler was convicted of “crimes against civilization” because of actions “against Jews, minorities, labor, democracy, women, religion, world peace, civil liberties, sciences, arts, education, liberals, free press and assembly.” The trial was held at Madison Square Garden in New York City before an audience of twenty thousand. Sponsored by the American Jewish Congress and other anti-fascist organizations, the judge, Bainbridge Colby, a former U.S. secretary of state, heard testimony from a wide range of witnesses. Among them was Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, professor emeritus of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, who stated, “Hitler is an egocentric fanatic while Hitlerism is a ‘psychic epidemic.’ . . . It is an abnormal emotional mass movement that reminds us of the Dark Ages. . . . To understand Hitler and Hitlerism one is compelled to enter the domain of psychopathology—that is to say, of the mentally abnormal.”149 Hitler is an “egocentric fanatic” but “no imbecile.” Racism is one of the symptoms, not merely of Hitlerism but of the Germans, at least of the German middle class: “The Jew was to be made the scapegoat, and hatred of the Jew was systematically cultivated. The depressed middle classes of Germany, undernourished and preternaturally susceptible to suggestion, welcome any message that promised to release them from the pinch of want, that would give relief from their intolerable hardships and limitations.” In his testimony, Barker “confessed that he knew of no effective antitoxin for a psychic epidemic, which, he held, might have to run its course.”150 The image of the Nazi state as dominated by psychopathology represented by antisemitism resuscitates some of the World War I images of the Germans as victims of a racial mass psychology of destruction. Among the exiles who began to deal with this topic the focus was also on the role of identification in the part that Jews, too, played on the right.
In his recent account of the discussions of Hitler’s mental state before and during the war the British historian Richard Evans summarized the claim that Hitler was mad in part by citing a number of academic studies arguing for his sanity. Books such as that by the Austrian émigré psychiatrist and dean of the Yale medical school Fritz Redlich, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (1998), refuted the claim that Hitler was psychopathological based on post facto analysis of the documents available on his mental state. But such retrospective diagnoses are generally useless except as ideological counterarguments. Thus the core of Evans’s analysis is not that Hitler was sane but that “the idea that Hitler was insane was something that many Germans came to believe in during the later stages of the war, and for sometimes afterward, not least as a way of excusing themselves from responsibility for his actions. . . . The idea of Hitler’s insanity was only one of an enormous range of speculations through which people tried, then and later, to explain the Nazi’s leaders actions.”151 Madness of the leaders releases the Germans from culpability except within the general theory of the madness of crowds, now lead astray by a charismatic leader.
During the late 1930s, the obsession with the madness of the Nazi leadership as the force that shaped the individual German became a preoccupation of not only popular psychology but of state agencies. If racism was a symptom of the psychopathology of fascism, understanding the fascist mind had to be one of the operative undertakings of the war effort. Daniel Pick, in a brilliant study of British and American intelligence agencies’ use of such analysis to get “inside the minds” of the enemy, shows how the needs of the war effort shaped the needs of analysts and psychologists examining the madness of the racist.152 While Pick provides detailed accounts of a wide range of theoretical approaches to the psychology of the Nazis (from Wilhelm Reich in 1933 on), he focuses on the “real” case of the deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, whose flight to the United Kingdom in 1941 provided a live Nazi for the British psychiatrists to examine and analyze and Adolf Hitler, whose psyche was plumbed through a data base of a thousand pages of material culled from interviews with those who knew him (and had fled Germany), newspapers that printed accounts of his activities, as well as pure inventions, such as the “first-hand” account of Hitler’s life by his (nonexistent) doctor Kurt Krueger, written by the American pornographer Samuel Roth.153
The players in this game of intelligence gathering ranged from Walter Langer and Herbert Marcuse in the United States to Henry Dicks and Anna Freud in the United Kingdom. Indeed, few of the major psychoanalytic thinkers of the time were not engaged in such activities. This is not a great surprise as psychiatrists and analysts were understood to be an essential part of the war effort given the success in dealing with forms of debilitating mental illness, such as “shell shock,” among the troops during World War I. But their role was enhanced by 1939 because the very idea of examining the inner life through analytic models (often bowdlerized and flattened) had become part of the common coin of mass culture during the 1920s. But the social scientists too, especially the émigrés, felt that this was their task. Thus Jacques Barzun in his 1938 Race: A Study in Modern Superstition defined racialism as “an alternative to madness for intelligent educated men balked in what they consider their legitimate ambitions.”154 His examples were the Nazi ideologue and pseudointellectual Alfred Rosenberg and the Nazi minister of agriculture, Richard Darré.155 That psychoanalysis was under attack from before World War I as a “Jewish science,” and that many of the German-speaking analysts were Jews, also added to the pressure to provide answers about the nature of the “Nazi mind” and the role of antisemitism in shaping that worldview. But this was true even of psychoanalytically informed clinical psychiatrists such as Henry Dicks, who diagnosed Rudolf Hess as a paranoid schizophrenic.156
The difficulty with providing these types of answers was the simple fact that the construct of a “Nazi mind” could not exist even within Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which rejected the very idea of race. No exemplary “Nazi” was possible; even Hess had to be seen as an individual. In addition, the pragmatic fact that such knowledge provided little or no predictive advantage did not stop the Allies from generating it and attempting to make use of it. Indeed, multiple studies of the “Nazi mind” were commissioned by the intelligence services, including studies of mass movements from émigré psychologists and psychiatrists from occupied Europe.157 Thus the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) in complex ways recapitulated a Marxist-Freudian analysis of the fascist mind from the standpoint of the Frankfurt School, which we shall discuss later, in a more subtle and critical manner.158 He sees the economic displacement of modern Germany as having loosed “the traditional binds” while exacerbating the “feeling of powerlessness and aloneness.”159 A “compulsive quest for certainty” and a “desperate escape from anxiety” allowed lower-middle-class Germans to submit to the power of a charismatic leader and focus their hate on those considered weaker than they. He writes, “The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society . . . in which the individual is not subordinated to or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine. . . . The irrational and planless character of society must be replaced by a planned economy that represents the planned and concerted effort of society as such.”160 This was at the core of what Fromm called the “authoritarian character” and could be overcome through social and psychological interventions.161
The émigré psychologist Erik H. Erikson’s analysis of the German mind as that of an adolescent mind run amuck paralleled Fromm’s understanding of the psychopathology of racism.162 All such studies by émigré psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts focused on the German manifestation of racism as antisemitism and provided for Anglo-American readers a rethinking of the implications of the relationship of madness and racism as a means of explaining the German mind in the 1930s as a manifestation of some greater source of psychopathology.
Certainly one of the most popular and controversial studies of racism and psychopathology during the war was Richard Brickner’s Is Germany Incurable? (1943).163 Brickner (1896–1959) was an American, rather than an émigré, a neuro-psychiatrist whose work was heavily impacted by Sigmund Freud (he writes that “Freud has contributed fundamentally to this book”) but whose expression of this influence owes perhaps more to Le Bon.164 Brickner built on the earlier claims of clinical psychiatrists such as Edward Strecker at the University of Pennsylvania, who sought to diagnosis the psychopathology of totalitarianism “beyond the clinic frontiers,” building on the crowd theory of World War I. Active in the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s, Strecker, in his Beyond the Clinical Frontiers (1940), sought to define the mind of the modern masses in their retreat from reality, of the “emotionalized group with a ‘mission’” into totalitarian fantasies such as racism.165 Likewise the émigré psychoanalyst Franz Alexander, who had been recruited from Berlin before the Nazi takeover to create a short-lived psychoanalytic institute at the University of Chicago, sought in Our Age of Unreason (1941) to answer the growing power of the Nazis and their racist philosophy through having
democracies finally recognize their historical vocation to assume leadership toward a new league of nations. This must be based at first both on justice and on armed force, the latter to be discarded only gradually at the same pace as the indispensable psychological ally in man’s personality gains strength. This internal ally, a slowly growing product of education, is an advanced form of humanism which does not stop at economic, linguistic, or racial borders.166
This is moral reeducation as psychological therapy.
Such views were broadly popularized by Brickner, who diagnosed the German character as “paranoid” and prescribed “a vast educational program” for post-war Germany.167 At the core of the reeducation he proposed must be the family, as for Brickner “the child is father to the man.”168 He picks up a thread from the work of individuals such as Trotter, looking at the German character as manifesting “aggression” throughout its history:
Massive evidence summarized in this book shows that the national group we call Germany behaves and has long behaved startlingly like an individual involved in a dangerous mental trend. . . . Clinical experience can identify the specific condition that Germany’s mental trend approaches. It is paranoia.169
Thus aggression is a symptom of an underlying mental illness, which is universal but which can be exacerbated, for these “tendencies may be stimulated and whipped into action.”170 It is the group that manifests these symptoms: “group means a number of individuals or objects that share certain identifiable characteristics: all the component elements have in common the possession of telephones or a belief in spiritualism or attach a special emotional significance to blond hair in females.”171 Once so activated the herd mentality is triggered: “A useful metaphor for this phenomenon, which has often been observed but never accurately described, is ‘paranoid contagion.’ The word contagion thus means no that paranoid thinking is a disease lime measles that can be caught from another person, but that it is an inflammable potentiality that can be easily ignited.”172 And “German culture has developed a set of densely paranoid values.”173
Paranoia has a wide range of symptoms. Megalomania is one of them: “This trait arises from the paranoid’s conviction of his own a priori world-shaking importance, of the supreme value and significance of his every act and thought.”174 This trait is manifest in Hitler’s belief that the Nordic race has a right to dominate the world:
The paranoid’s feeling that God and Destiny attend his every move and are supporting any special mission upon which he feels impelled to embark, has often been expressed by Hitler: “I am certain that my name will never be forgotten as that of a great man of this country. I believe it was the will of God—the will of the Supreme Power was fulfilled through me.”175
Control is also a symptom of the German form of paranoia: “the need to Dominate everybody with whom he comes in contact, to control every situation in which he finds himself, as a means towards putting into concrete terms this superiority he knows he possess, is part and parcel of the paranoid’s megalomania.”176
Brickner’s final symptom is Anna Freud’s identification with the aggressor and its projective form as a persecution complex. “Because he himself is so important, he is obviously destined to rule others who are less important. Because of his superiority and potential power are so unmistakable in his eyes, he feels nobody could miss them. All other people are naturally consumed with jealously of him and hostility toward the inevitable consummation of his supremacy.”177 It is the fear of others that spurs the racism of the Germans!
Brickner’s example is an account, reported in the media, of a discussion that Hitler had following the “Night of the Long Knives,” in June and July 1934, when Hitler ordered the mass murder of the leadership of the Sturmabteilung paramilitary wing under his longtime supporter Ernst Röhm:
Hitler expressed this attitude magnificently in a statement after the blood-purge of 1934. Speaking of private meetings among his victims that his under cover men had reported, he said he would have such men shot, even if it should turn out that they had discussed “nothing but ancient coins or the weather.” The very fact that something should go on without his knowledge is intolerable to the paranoid.178
The final symptom of the paranoid state is what Brickner labels “retrospective falsification.” “Nearly every speech of Hitler’s leads off with a long period of blustering instruction for the world in the past history of Germany. The general theme is that Germany has never been defeated in a war.”179 That includes World War I. The Nazi government, to prove that “all Jews are cowards,” claimed that the many German Jews decorated for valor during World War I had actually purchased their awards from the needy widows of “Aryan” heroes for shamefully small sums and that all such certificates were forgeries.180 For Brickner antisemitism is a reflection of such paranoid thinking and thus Nazi antisemitism is a reflex of the German mindset: “There are several good paranoid reasons for German hatred of Jews. The first is projection. . . . The second reason is that the numerically insignificant Jews—five hundred thousand among sixty million Germans at the time Hitler came to power [provided a convenient scapegoat for the projection of German anxieties].”181 Brickner writes that “the systematic butchery of the Jews now in progress is merely the end-product of that kind of thinking.”182 The reduction of Auschwitz to a form of madness that can be cured is problematic even in the 1940s.
Brickner’s text generated a heated debate in the noted literary magazine The Saturday Review. Thinkers such as Bertrand Russell and Erich Fromm were asked to respond to his thesis. Russell simply ignored Brinkner’s claims, writing instead about the need for post-war reeducation and reform of education institutions. As an émigré Jew Fromm did not have that luxury. He grappled with the idea that Germans were psychologically predisposed to paranoia and came to a rather startling conclusion given his own interest in the social construction of German racism:
The increasing literature dealing with a psychiatric approach to the German national character suggests a twofold danger. On the one hand that psychiatric concepts are used as rationalizations for political slogans, thus depriving us of valid knowledge, which we need for the conduct of the war and for realistic and rational plans for peace. On the other hand, that they become a substitute for valid ethical concepts; that they tend to weaken the sense for moral values, by calling something by a psychiatric term when it should be called plainly evil.183
Fromm has raised the stakes here, as he had provided a psychological explanation for racism in his own work, and introduced a problem that will become more and more important after the end of the war: are we dealing with a form of madness for which there may be a therapy and which may have a specific etiology or are we dealing with a form of moral bankruptcy, evil not in the sense of the demonic but in the Enlightenment sense of moral choice. Evil seems to be tangential in modern philosophy and psychology dealing with racism and prejudice through the 1930s. Yet following 1945 it reappears in the debates about madness and racism with ever-greater force. Perhaps understandably so, for as the philosopher Susan Neiman states, evil “threatens the trust in the world that we need to orient ourselves within it.”184 And the 1930s was the era of a search, for good or for ill, for precisely that trust so badly lost after 1919, even though, as Neiman observes, this loss of trust seems to us today “both intelligible and contingent, the lethal fruit of old-fashion imperialism and modern technology.”185 It did not appear so then.