Dr. Koenigsberg's method for analyzing political rhetoric is an idea whose time has come. We now possess a technique for revealing the meaning of political utterances. We don't need to "psychoanalyze" political leaders. They reveal themselves--who they are and what they are saying--through the words they use.

Language possesses psychic meaning. The unconscious is contained within the text. It's not always necessary to look inward. Political leaders convey who they through the metaphors and images contained within their utterances.

Do you wish to comprehend what is happening now? Simply pay attention to recurring words and images, which reveal the fantasies of the leader, as well as the collective fantasy in which we now all of us are immersed.


Mary Helen Guider Shaw
Director of Publicity
Telephone: 630-212-0485
Library of Social Science

I. Ideology and Metaphor

Political ideas articulate psychological meanings. How to decipher the latent content of political speech?

Koenigsberg's method, analyzing metaphor, identifies recurring images and figures of speech in the rhetoric of political figures to reveal fantasies that an ideology seeks to express.

Ideologies are comparable to dreams that many people are having at the same time. The psychological study of ideology focuses—not on the idiosyncrasies of individuals—but upon how shared desires, anxieties and conflicts give rise to collective representations.

Koenigsberg's method grows out of his research on Nazism. HItler's Ideology Identified recurring images and metaphors in Hitler’s rhetoric, Koenigsberg concluded that Nazi ideology externalized a coherent fantasy: the German body politic was suffering from a potentially fatal disease.

The Final Solution grew out of Hitler’s perception of reality. Hitler and the Nazis sought to destroy Jews—imagined to be the source of Germany’s disease—in order to prevent the death of the body politic. Hitler was able to convey this fantasy to his closest colleagues and eventually to the German people. A sufficient number of Germans embraced and enacted this fantasy—the source of the history the Nazis created.
 

II. Embodiment

Phantasy refers to an intermediate mental state between body and mind. Impulses and desires give rise to mental corollaries. Thomas Ogden states that phantasy “never loses its connection to the body.” Phantasy content is traceable to thoughts and feelings about the “workings and contents of one’s own body in relationship to the workings and contents of the body of the other.”

If ideologies articulate phantasies and phantasies derive from the body, it follows that ideologies are bound to—not separate from—our bodies. How may we understand the relationship between body, phantasy and mental operations in the case of ideology? Textual metaphors, Koenigsberg suggests, conveys the presence of the body and allows phantasies about the body to enter social reality.

By virtue of embodied metaphors, the body with its phantasies makes its way into discourse. As dreams reveal the unconscious phantasies of individuals, so ideologies reveal phantasies shared by members of a group. To analyze an ideology is to interpret a collective dream.