Daniel Goldhagen (1996) observed that the Nazis were in the grip of a “hallucinatory ideology” and that their writings about Jews were so divorced from reality that anyone reading them might conclude that they were the product of the “collective scribes of an insane asylum.”

Although their beliefs seem insane, Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels were not. Further, the ideologies these leaders put forth were embraced by many Germans and came to define an entire culture. How may one characterize beliefs that seem fantastic and generate destructive acts of extraordinary magnitude—but that are embraced by many people within a society?

Freud (1930) hoped that we would develop a “pathology of cultural communities.” Perhaps the time now is ripe to interrogate collective or societal forms of destruction and self-destructive that heretofore have been taken-for-granted or imagined to be inevitable. I propose that psychopathology may be coterminous with the normative; that societies may engage in forms of behavior that are highly maladaptive; that “disorder” may not be separate from the historical process.

When an entire culture embraces an ideology that seems bizarre and is massively destructive, you can't call the people who embrace this ideology psychotic. On the other hand, the actions of these people do possess a psychotic quality.

What do we call activities that possess a psychotic quality carried out by people who seems normal because the entire culture lives within the psychosis? Human beings haven't explored this question yet: the issue of shared psychosis as the basis of culture and history. We don't know anything. We've only just begun.