Nations Have the Right to Kill by Richard A. Koenigsberg

He is Founder and Director of LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE, a scholarly publishing and marketing firm. Widely reviewed, commentary and reflections appear here. His influential, Nations have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War reveals a sacrificial dynamic at the heart of warfare. His psychoanalytic study, Symbiosis and Separation, was praised by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Francis Tustin and Thomas Ogden. Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Society was hailed as an “instant classic” and the “best critical analysis in English of Hitler’s thought”. Richard Koenigsberg, Ph.D., is a psychologist and historian, leading authority on Hitler, Nazism and the First World War. Why are the most self-destructive forms of human behavior undertaken in the name of mother-countries? If we wish to “awaken from the nightmare of history”-we need to go where human beings have not gone before by exploring the relationship between violence and love. We seem unable to face the reality that the most extreme forms of violence are performed in the name of a beloved object. Political mass-murder is undertaken by nations. This resistance perhaps stems from our attachment to countries as sacred objects. There is profound resistance toward exploring pathological behavior that is “normative”. One would imagine that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts would enter the arena to explore the causes and meanings of collective forms of violence and mass-destruction. Why have psychiatrists not developed a concept of collective psychopathology? Over 200 million people died in the 20th century as a result of war and genocide. Trump identified “Mexican rapists” as the primal danger, requiring construction of a “wall” to prevent these alien cells from entering the body politic. I examine the case of Donald Trump, who similarly asserted that the presence of a certain class of people within the body politic would lead to national destruction. The Final Solution was as a struggle to destroy Jewish pathogens, thus to save the life of the German nation. Jews were conceived as bacteria, virus and parasites-cells whose continued presence within the German organism would lead to its death. Hitler claimed that Germany possessed an immune system that automatically destroyed alien or not-self cells. Jews were pathogenic organisms-source of a “disease within the body of the people”. I focus on Hitler, who conceived Germany as a body politic consisting of the German people as cells of this body. Questions? Email present a method for studying the language of political leaders to reveal the unconscious fantasies that generate destructive forms of societal behavior like war and genocide.

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Nations Have the Right to Kill by Richard A. Koenigsberg