Personality Analysis of Adolf Hitler, Term Paper Example

Abstract

It is hardly surprising that a man who has had the impact on modern world events that Adolf Hitler had would be the subject of endless, and intense, psychological analysis.   Hitler has come to be universally viewed as a paradigm of evil, if so abstract a concept may be applied to a single human being.   Consequently, his career and influence are seen to have been manifestations of what must have been a deeply disturbed psyche; even “evil” cannot merely spring from nothing, so great minds have attempted to isolate the real psychological factors which so malevolently fueled the dictator.    Of the many theories and approaches employed in analyzing Hitler’s psychology, Jungian and Freudian schools appear to most reasonably assess it.  With Jung, there is the inescapable sociopathy evident in Hitler’s course, and Freud encompasses the psycho-sexual components in his history and make-up difficult to dismiss.

Introduction

As is well known, Adolf Hitler made a mark on the world of lasting impact.  In the 1930s, he orchestrated the enormous rise to world power of Germany, a previously impoverished nation, and began a series of European conquests which threatened to overtake the free world.    A crucial component of Hitler’s success was his profound antisemitism, which he employed to both eradicate massive numbers of Jews and other minorities, and fuel a militant German nationalist spirit.   Few, if any, figures in modern or ancient history so powerfully evoke an image of implacable, uncompromising ambition and evil.

However, when attempting to gauge the true essence of Hitler through psychological approaches, his aims and accomplishments are relatively irrelevant.   That is to say, ethically abominable or otherwise, what is most interesting is the scope of his achievement.   If Hitler was truly evil, the greater reality is that he exercised power at the very highest levels and altered forever Western civilization.   His actions were atrocious, but his actual achievements were extraordinary, and his personality must have been motivated by equally extraordinary forces.   It is therefore only appropriate that the greatest psychoanalysts should be called into play in examining Hitler’s essential character, through the legacies of their analytical thought.   As will be seen, Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, tellingly reveals a great deal of the sexual trauma at the heart of Hitler’s manias, while the similarly esteemed Carl Jung provides valuable insight into the core of sociopathy within the man.

A Freudian Perspective

Historians are endlessly fascinated by the uncanny fact that Freud and Hitler impacted so substantially on each other’s actual life.   More precisely,  the established and eminent Sigmund Freud was forced to leave his native Vienna when Hitler’s forces occupied the city in 1938, and the doctor and his family received more than one visit from Hitler’s Gestapo, or armed guard (Von Zuhlsdorff, Bott,  2005,  p. 74).   It is culturally and historically fascinating that, at the exact same moment in history, these two most influential figures were so nearly located.   That Sigmund Freud was directly affected by Hitler’s rise to power is problematic, however, certainly in regard to any analysis of Hitler by Freud at the time.   There could be no necessary distancing of subject from therapist, even in the sense of a detached appraisal, because Freud and his circle were literal victims of Hitler’s regime.   Consequently, it is not surprising that Freud is supposed to have completed accepted as fact stories of Hitler engaging in, or desirous of, sexual perversions.   Freud’s opinions regarding these sexual issues actually were incorporated in analyses of Hitler undertaken during the war (Roazen, 2002,  p. 115).   In seems, in fact, that the historical proximity between Freud and Hitler may have blurred the former’s views of the latter; it is difficult to accept that any analyst could be objective under the circumstances.

However, it is the Freudian work as a legacy that matters in this case.   In basic terms, Freud identified the id, ego, and superego as the primary components within the human emotional and mental being, and to these he attached potent correlations of how early sexuality infuses and comprises them.    Moreover, and throughout his career, Freud insisted on the enormous importance of the unconscious mind, wherein the hedonistic id resides, as influencing the behaviors set in motion by the “morally responsible” superego and the go-between of the ego.   Essentially, with Freud, man is born in a conflicted state and driven by contrasting desires and impulses, many of which must be suppressed because they violate societal norms (Erwin, 2002).   More particularly in regard to men, Freud emphatically believed that every boy fights a kind of internal war, wherein his love for his mother requires a defiance of his father.   Sexuality in Freud is never merely sexuality, but a complex and inextricable assortment of wants and obstacles.

Hitler conforms very nicely to this aspect of Freud.   It is known from Hitler’s own account of his life that he was deeply attached to his mother, and that he had ongoing, and occasionally severe, conflicts with his father.   The classic, Freudian Oedipal scenario is inescapable, as the young Hitler alternately defied his father and tried, in vain, to please him.   It could easily be argued that Hitler’s lifelong inability to come to terms with the role of his father in his life led to an exaggerated need to dominate, and consequently assert a far more powerful “paternalism” by way of reaction.   There is also the factor of Hitler’s thwarted personal ambitions, largely dismissed by his father.   Rejected twice as an artist by the Vienna Academy, Hitler seems to have deeply identified himself as a true artist, and his failures to achieve standing, or even bare recognition as an art student, in the field indicate levels of frustration which probably manifested themselves in the path he eventually took.   In strictly Freudian terms, art served as a separating mechanism from his father, creating profound schisms in his relation with him when he was a young man, and probably bonding him more closely with his beloved mother.

What is equally revealing, however, is how Hitler approached art.   Freud maintains the vast importance of dreams as guides to unconscious and/or deeply repressed desires, and art may be viewed as an extension of this process.   Hitler was, as his surviving work demonstrates, far more comfortable in a methodical and segmented mode of composition.   Moreover, portraiture was of little interest to him; architecture was his abiding passion, and he displayed considerable talent in commercial representations of inanimate objects, buildings, and landscapes.   Freudian perspective is blatant here,  for it can be safely inferred that the introverted young man Hitler was inclined to distancing himself from human relationships through his art (Zalampas,  1990,  p. 32).   This, in turn, ties in with what must have been a drastically repressed sexuality; human contact of any intimate kind was alien to this Hitler, who preferred the safety of inanimate representations in his art.   It is reasonable to then perceive how a very driven man could order mass executions.   As people existed for him only in an abstract, and usually disagreeable, way, they could not exist as actual victims.

Finally, latter-day Freudian analysts have consistently attempted to link Hitler’s sexuality with his role as dictator and tyrant.  The parallels are too convenient to be ignored, even by non-Freudian parties, and it does seem that Hitler suffered from relatively severe psycho-sexual disorders.   For example, he was obsessed with his niece, Geli Raubal, and in a distinctly sexual way.   The incestuous element of the obsession has fueled endless speculation regarding a classically Freudian transference occurring.  Hitler, somewhat disturbed by his own passions, internalized them and rendered his disgust and fears of his own sexual being onto a more amorphous, and certainly more advantageous, target: the Jews (Rosenbaum, 1999,  p. 137).   This element, as is true of so much of Hitler’s being as a man, appears to be a kind of hyper-Freudianism.   His actions reflect Freudian motivations and disturbances, and the scope of his ambition and power rendered them global realizations of dysfunction.

The Jungian View

It is not unusual that Jung and Freud greatly influenced one another.   Sharing an epoch and actually meeting, they apparently shared as well common ground in psychoanalysis, which was the emerging science of the early twentieth century.   Like Freud, Jung divided the psyche into three primary parts.   Most especially, Jung was as one with Freud in giving enormous weight to the power of the unconscious in human behavior.   He parted company with Freud, however, over one chief element within his theory; Jung subscribed passionately to a belief in a “collective unconscious”, which may be defined as a residual legacy of the external world.   Jung simply refused to discount the vast influences of the world on any individual’s emotional and mental processes.

In viewing Adolf Hitler through Jungian eyes, then, a very interesting scenario begins to shape itself.    As is well known, Hitler rose to extraordinary power because the circumstances in Germany were opportune for such a rise.   The nation had never recovered from the devastation of World War I, the economy was collapsed, and the country’s esteem was at an all-time low.  This was all an overt manifestation of a collective essence, and there can be no way to gauge how, as Hitler grew to maturity, this environmental and widespread attitude affected him.   It may be that, in Jungian terms, he increasingly identified himself with it, and saw the downtrodden state of Germany as expressive of his own discontent and frustrations.   It is, in fact, likely that Hitler internalized the misery of the country in a truly spectacular manner, for only then could he create so potent a resonance in his followers.    He embodied the broken, but nonetheless determined and proud, spirit of Germany for a people who were desperate to assert themselves once again.

Of course, this could not be accomplished by normal means.   Neither Freud nor Jung is actually capable of explaining the range of Hitler’s achievement, for that seems to eclipse basic human motivations of any kind.    The reality is, however, that Hitler’s power was essentially a remarkable result of a continued and consistent application of the disorders which inspired him.   More in keeping with strictly Jungian thinking, in that Jung presaged modern theories of what constitutes a sociopathic personality, Hitler seems to have invented himself as a sociopath.   Moral compunctions of any kind did not impede him because they did not exist for him and, as noted, the extermination of vast numbers of people is easily facilitated when the people are not fully real to the exterminator.    That Hitler’s ideologies and fervent ideas about racial purity were, at best, hypothetical concepts was of no real importance because he himself, as a true sociopath, took on the role of absolute believer:  “According to Jung’s analysis, an ‘accurate diagnosis of Hitler’s condition would be pseudologia phantastica, that form of hysteria which is characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one’s own lies’” (Hill,  2006,  p. 89).   Only such a man could so effectively sway an entire nation, and actually serve to induce similar levels of a moral void within it.   For Hitler, the reality was precisely what he chose to represent it as.

Jung does seem to join forces with Freud in the single most pivotal component within Hitler’s personality, that of his unconscious.  From boyhood on, it appears that Adolf Hitler’s life was a series of either deliberate or subconscious repressions, beginning with his inability to confront his real issues with his father and his devotion to his mother.   As a young man, he continued to defy the paternal authority, even as he coveted his father’s approval (Rosenbaum,  p. 216).   Equally telling is how this parental conflict served to create further layers of delusion/repression in Hitler; that is to say, he was able to blame his father for his failure to emerge as an artist, even after his father’s death left him free to study, and he faced rejection by the Vienna Academy.   In this way, it seems that Freudian grievances were permitted to survive within his psyche long after the influences ceased to be.   All of this severe repression, artistic, social, and sexual, created an engine of a single-minded purpose that would, in the course of time,  drastically alter the world and create misery and death for untold millions.

Conclusion

Adolf Hitler was a great man, in the sense that he had a nearly unparalleled impact on the world of his time.   He has since gone on to become a universally viewed archetype of absolute evil.   He was, however, a man, first and foremost, and one with a persona shaped as those of other men are.   When the sheer degree of Hitler’s impact is set aside, it is then possible to employ the work of two great psychoanalysts and psychiatric pioneers to examine the inner workings of the man’s psyche.   Each is helpful in identifying the elements that motivated Hitler.

Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis,  uncovers a great deal of the sexual trauma and Oedipal dysfunction at the heart of Hitler’s manias, while the equally esteemed Carl Jung provides valuable insight into the core of sociopathy within Adolf Hitler.

References

Erwin, E.  (2002.)  The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture.  New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, Publishers.

Hill, C. O.  (2006.)  The Roots and Flowers of Evil in Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Hitler. Peru, IL: Carus Publishing Company.

Roazen, P.  (2002.)  The Trauma of Freud: Controversies in Psychoanalysis.  New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Rosenbaum, R.  (1999.)  Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of  His Evil. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Von Zuhlsdorff, V., & Bott, M.  (2005.)  Hitler’s Exiles: The German Cultural Resistance in America and Europe.  New York, NY: Continuum Group.

Zalampas, S. E.  (1990.)  Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of His Views on Architecture.  Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.