Psychoanalysis expands the scope of its mission by focusing not only on events occurring within the clinical situation, but also upon events occurring outside the clinical situation: in social reality. My paper introduces methods and concepts for a systematic, psychoanalytic approach to the study of culture, society and history, and presents a case study of Hitler’s desire for the unification of Germany and Austria.

I hypothesizes that ideologies exist and persist to the extent that they perform psychic functions for individuals within a population. To study a particular ideology, therefore, is to reveal its psychic meaning—the needs, desires, fantasies, conflicts and human dilemmas to which the ideology responds.

In Life against Death: the Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, Norman O. Brown put forth a paradigm for the study of culture and history. The unconscious can become conscious, Brown suggests, through projection into the external world. Human culture represents a “set of projections of the repressed unconscious” and functions as a form of transference created by the repetition compulsion, constantly producing “new editions of the infantile conflicts.” Human culture, Brown theorizes, exists in order to “project the infantile complexes into concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered."

My paper analyzes images and metaphors contained within Hitler’s writing and speeches to uncover central fantasies that were the source of Hitler's ideology. Hitler projected his fantasies into Nazi ideology. Political acts represented the acting out of fantasies contained within an ideology. Hitler's political aspiration—to unify Germany and Austria—was rooted in a fantasy that he projected into reality. To understand why Hitler embraced this idea so fanatically—why the union of Austria and Germany meant so much to him—one needs to discover the meaning of this ideology: the nature and shape of the fantasy that Hitler projected into it.

I suggest that the fantasy of symbiosis or “oneness” is a central motive compelling people to project their desires and lives into the political arena. People seek to “identify” with nations, cultures and ideologies. They aspire toward a sense of omnipotence through the fantasy that it is possible to fuse their bodies and selves with a “body politic.”

The psychic state of symbiosis revolves around the longing for “oneness.” Under the spell of symbiotic fantasy, distinctions between self and Other blur. Hitler projected symbiotic fantasy into political units. Austria symbolized Hitler's body and Germany the body of his mother. Hitler's political ideology pointed toward destroying the boundaries separating Austria and Germany--so that the two separate bodies politic could fuse into a single body politic.