As a young poet just returned from Europe, Jorge Luis Borges wrote to a Spanish friend in 1921 about an ambitious—perhaps impossible—literary project, a collective and fantastic novel to be written with Macedonio Fernández and other literary friends. The plot, Borges said, would revolve around a fictional Bolshevik plan to gain power by spreading a “general neurosis” among the Argentine people.1 Borges, of course, never wrote this novel, and he probably could not have foreseen that anyone would envision the hypothetical plot as an actual threat to the nation. Yet this was exactly the threat that a group of fascists in Argentina identified as a Jewish conspiracy—even pointing to Borges himself as an actor in the plot. According to this group, Jews both epitomized collective neurosis and conspired to gain control of the country by spreading the disease. Freudian psychoanalysis was here both a means and an end.
Fascist ideas about the mystic, violent, and hierarchical self are in sharp contrast to psychoanalytic theory. For many fascists, psychoanalytic categories of the unconscious applied only to the enemy. In turn, by denying the sacred dimension of fascism and presenting it as the return of a Western form of barbarism, Freud opposed not only fascist ends, but fascist self-understanding. For Leopoldo Lugones, Freud symbolized the unacceptable: he questioned the idea of the sacred and therefore the politics that fascism represented. For Freud, Lugones wrote, “God is no more than the idealization, in itself bipolarized, of the Totem or beast-pet that some savage tribes possess.”2 He represented an “anti-religion” that emphasized the negativity of instinctual forces. Lugones regarded psychoanalysis as above all “anti-Christian” and thus antithetical to the eternal truth of a Christian fascism.
At the same time, Argentine clerico-fascists like Virgilio Filippo were worried about psychoanalytic perspectives on normality, desire, and pathology. In short, Freudian theories apparently posed a threat to transcendental truths about the self and the sacred. Filippo was one of the most important of Freudianism’s anti-Semitic adversaries during this period. Like many fellow Argentine fascists, he saw Freudian psychoanalysis as a threat to the nation. This perception was based on a particular vision of the “internal enemy” and a primarily secularized, racialized attack on the Jewish people that nevertheless incorporated elements of traditional religious anti-Semitism.
Filippo often quoted the anti-Semitic writer Dr. Albérico Lagomarsino on this question. Lagomarsino shared Filippo’s view of Freudianism, particularly regarding Jewish cultural and artistic activities. He asserted that various Jewish cultural entrepreneurs, by adopting “the psychoanalytic theory of Freud,” promoted the “sublimation of the libido” into artistic expression. For Lagomarsino, psychoanalytic theory produced a specifically Jewish “artistic exhibition” that diluted the spirit and gave preeminence to the senses. The principles of corporeality and carnality represented a “step backward” in artistic forms. He denounced them as specifically Semitic traits while still exhibiting a certain quasi-pornographic fascination with the “impurities” of the psychoanalytic art promoted by the Jews. Tellingly, Lagomarsino used carnivalesque, even orgiastic, images to represent what he labeled “Jewish art.” He described this art as characterized by indistinguishable naked bodies, “naked flesh in lascivious groups,” a swarm of female bodies, lightweight clothing, disconnected members, and the manipulation of light and music. In short, for Lagomarsino, “coitus turns out to be the proposed theme. This is modern art under Jewish administration!”3
Filippo believed that unbridled sexual license was one of Freud’s primary goals—that the father of psychoanalysis was resurrecting the Epicurean doctrines and thereby defending “free pleasure [libre gozo]” and constructing “a stairway” to descend into the “abuse of women” and the “ignominy of this century, the Judaic-Masonic-Communist discoveries.” The ultimate consequence was “Freud’s pretension to counteract God’s influence in the corporeal world.”4 Filippo was not alone in his horror over the sexual aspects of the Jewish conspiracy that gathered together all those that Filippo deemed “adorers of Satan and the Phallus.” Many Catholic anti-Semites suggested a secret relationship between Freud’s supposed discursive assault on the truth of Christianity and the “cancer of the tongue” that Freud developed later in his life. The fascist priest Leonardo Castellani said that he heard this rumored when he visited Vienna in 1935.5
During the years of fascism, sexuality was central to Jewish stereotypes spread by the global anti-Semitic Right. Hitler himself projected his own fantasies and fears onto the sexual and racialized threat of Judaism.
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.6
While they shared some of Hitler’s paranoid sexual fantasies, many Latin American fascists believed that he ignored the revealed Christian truth. However, for Argentine clerico-fascists the “Jewish problem” was still not merely theological but also racial. For Fr. Julio Meinvielle, the solution to the “problem” in Argentina had to be Catholic, not what eventually became the Nazi Final Solution.7 For him, Nazi anti-Semitism was detached from superior political interests. And yet he also regarded Nazi violence as an outcome of God’s global plan against the Left.8 Given that Meinvielle accused the Jews of everything he didn’t like, nacionalista violence could only be an anti-Semitic remedy. But this violence could not be pagan. For Meinvielle, there existed “a pagan mode that will reject the foreign because it’s foreign; a Christian mode that will reject it in the measures in which it could be detrimental for the just interests of the country; a pagan mode that will reject and will hate the Jew because he is Jewish; a Christian mode that, knowing the solvent mission which the Jew occupies in the heart of Christian peoples, will limit his influence so that it doesn’t cause harm.”9
The Mexican fascist magazine Timón presented Hitler as fighting Jews in the name of truth, but his methods were not those of the “Catholic Majority of the world.” The Mexican fascist Fernando de Euzcadi maintained that people could feel this “truth” in their spirit.
The fact, however embarrassing it may seem, however humiliating it may be for the consciences, is in the spirit of all as a sad and disconsolate truth. And neither does humanity ignore the victim of the Jewish dictatorship, that the firm will, the emphatic energy of a patriot, is enough to destroy, to its foundations, the entire judaizing organization of a country. The Fuehrer of Magna Germany, who is a clairvoyant man of action, had no tremors in the pulse or weaknesses in the conscience. . . . The Jewish ‘taboo’ did not have force before the will of a man of iron solidly supported by his people.10
That said, Hitler was not an examplar for Latin America. De Euzcadi argued that “the Catholic world has other weapons: those of their faith, those of belief and the blush of the white man, of clean blood, before humiliation and renunciation.” He stated that history was behind an “anti-Semitic crusade” that was not only “floating in the wind of a religion. It is the solid fencing of centuries of civilization, it is the fight for the convictions that we gently hear in the cradle of maternal lips. It is the gallantry of virility before the zigzagging baseness of the reptile.” For those who believed these anti-Semitic lies, the stakes could not be higher: “To be or not to be: either Catholicism crushes Judaism, or Judaism by crushing Catholicism will drag with it the remains of two centuries of greatness stained by the mud of our cowardice and our diminished faith.”11
But how could fascists fantasize that if their truth was so powerful Jews could crush it? Argentine fascists believed Freud and psychoanalysis were new powerful elements in a conspiratorial anti-Argentine alliance of Communists, Masons, and Jews. Filippo was an important mouthpiece for this ideological discourse during the 1930s. For fascists, there was a line in the sand that they would not cross: thus, the Jews were sexually abnormal and the fascists were not. Filippo found Freudianism’s legitimization and reification of desire extremely problematic.12 In turn, he coined a term for the part of the self that he wanted to be demoted, the “oneiric ego”: “the ego of the inferior part, visceral and unconscious.”13 To Father Filippo it was clear that this “oneiric ego” was absolutely Jewish in its unmediated sexual, unconscious premises, whereas the “conscious ego” was purely Catholic and Argentine in its capacity to determine the will of individuals.
Thus, Filippo was committed to exposing Freud as an advocate of what he believed to be libidinal power. The famous psychoanalyst, like Albert Einstein, was a major figure in the framework of “dominant materialism” that, according to Filippo, undermined the national and Catholic capacity to master, by total repression, the disturbing forces of the unconscious.14 Similarly, many Italian fascists identified a binary between the normal and the Jewish ego. For fascists, Freud had “submerged morality in the swamp of the libido.”15 In a symptomatic article titled “Down with Freud,” the fascist Alberto Spaini referred to Freud as a false “Jewish pontiff” who put in question the immutability of the soul. Mussolini himself also referred to Freud as the “Maximus pontiff” of psychoanalysis.16
An interesting example of this depiction of psychoanalysis as attacking eternal truth was published in the Argentine Catholic journal Criterio by “Juan Palmetta,” a pen name for Leonardo Castellani. This priest mocked Freudian psychoanalysis. Castellani’s insidious anti-Semitic humor is a window into the phobic world of this fascist interpretive community. For Castellani, Freudian “pansexualism” was an evident, almost given, fact that he labeled “Freudian sexology.” He argued that this was a “damaging” alternative religion, with Freud as the “Holy Spirit.”17
The idea of Freud questioning the immutability of souls and the truths they engendered and replacing them with his own sacred truth was intolerable to fascists. And yet it was notable that they were willing to engage with Freud to an extent on his own terms. Fascists stressed that Freud’s theory of the unconscious had no place vis-à-vis the power of the mystical nature of the self. They saw the will as the expression of the soul and the producer of the truth. If their own version of the unconscious was the point of origin of their totalitarian voluntarism, they insisted that Freud made it seem to be an animal form outside history.
For the Brazilian Salgado, Freudian theory belonged to an artificial liberal past, namely, the nineteenth century. But it had now become a theory for communists, who were not really interested in workers but only in “Leninist demagoguery.” They were “authentic bourgeois” who “boasted” of having found “the greatest novelty on the subject of philosophy, of sociology, of politics: Freud.” Salgado contrasted Freudian theory to his own “Integralism,” according to him “a conception absolutely rooted in the twentieth century.” Unlike Freudian psychoanalysis, Brazilian fascism could not be understood by “macacos [monkeys], servile imitators, and passive taxpayers, by individuals unable to comprehend the time in which they live.”18 This fascist comprehension of time was deeply intuitive. In fascism, the race was “revealed” in the “intuition” and “intelligence of the subconscious.” While psychoanalysis defended a theory of the unconscious as the “irruption of a primordial gorilla,” fascism asserted and continuously made present the “primordial will to live.”19
The fascist attack against psychoanalysis was done in the name of a subject without reason. It implied a domestication of the self and a denial of objective truth in the name of absolute truth. Fascists saw psychoanalysis as a significant threat because for them there was no tension between its democratic rejection of an eternal order of truth as dictated by the church or an authoritarian leader and its affirmation of the alienation of the bourgeois order. As Adorno observed in 1944, this was the perception of psychoanalysis displayed in “the fascist unconscious” of the terror magazines.20
In their interpretation of Freudian theory as a form of self-alienation, fascists defended the “man who celebrated his superiority” while denigrating “the Freudian man,” the man of the libido. If the former epitomized a superior form of masculinity, uncontrolled and unreflexive sexual drives prevailed in the latter. For many fascists, psychoanalysis questioned the basic tenets of the fascist revolution, proposing alternate theories of history, truth, and myth. Fascists disputed the Freudian notion of the unconscious as “the depository of all the garbage of the spirit.” For them, psychoanalysis proposed its own myths of transcendence and destruction. In a notable moment of projection, the fascist Alfonso Petrucci claimed that “the doctrine of the Jew Freud is new only in form and is part of the eternal fight of the subterranean world against that of light.”21
For fascists, Freud wanted only “destruction.” In contrast, the fascist revolution combined “destruction” and “construction.” As the fascist professor Domenico Rende stated, the Freudian theory of the unconscious was “essentially against the fascist doctrine.” Fascists like Rende held the anti-Semitic view that only Jews could be the subject of abnormal behavior. Psychoanalysis was an outcome of the disease it was supposed to address, but fascism would “cure” non-Jews of psychoanalysis.22 Many fascist fellow travelers agreed with these positions. For example, Carl Jung, formerly a disciple of Freud and then a member of the intellectual resistance against psychoanalysis, believed that the Jewish psyche—but not the “Aryan” psyche—should be controlled. For Jung, the Jewish unconscious was problematic, while the Aryan soul was a source of self-discovery and civilization. He saw German fascism as delving into its “depths.”23
Fascism represented an attempt to blur the line between the inside and the outside, that is, to lift the barrier between the inner wishes of the mind and the external world. It was, in simple political terms, a rejection of reality checks. The fascists conceived their process as a form of radical historical agency, a fascist form of extreme historical voluntarism. For the Nazis, the primacy of the will encompassed a mythical historical continuum from darkness to light and from medieval settings to Hitler’s modern leadership, as infamously dramatized at the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl’s film The Triumph of the Will.24 Both Nazism and fascism rooted their understanding of the national in a notion of the historical that often deviated from the historical record, precisely because it was full of mythic elements. For Italian fascists, Rome occupied (at least before the Italian racial laws of 1938) the same mythical dimension Nazism found in the imagined past of the race.
As the historian Saul Friedlander argues, “Nazism mobilized an apparently senseless set of images that nonetheless constantly evoked a longing for the sacred, the demonic, the primeval—in short, for the forces of myth.”25 But if for Freud myths functioned allegorically, as metaphors for the workings of the unconscious, fascism literalized myths as ideal expressions of the workings of the soul. Sorel emphasized these powerful political and analytical dimensions of mythical thinking.26 Mussolini and Hitler went one step further; they not only used myths but also embraced them as superior truths, as sources for the act of fascist meaning-making.