Psychoanalysis and Politics: A Contribution to Psychology and Morals

摘要

In this brief book, "a pioneer work of applied psychology in the field of morals, ethics, politics, and statecraft," the author attempts to explore the unconscious processes that influence political desires and beliefs. Long a philosopher and psychoanalyst, he had been influenced by successive attitudesto morals, which followed and contradicted each other. He was led to renounce the doctrine of ethical relativism when it had become emotionally untenable in relation to the morals of the governments of Hitler and Mussolini. His search for a satisfying alternative was implemented by an experience as a member of the German Personnel Research Branch Selection Centre, an official group charged with the selection and placement of suitable leaders for positions of trust and responsibility in the new democratic Germany. In this survey two contrasting groups emerged. The members of one group displayed a humanist conscience, those of the other group an authoritarian conscience. The man with the humanist conscience "felt tyranny to be the greatest evil, was shocked and shamed by what Germany had done, and was deeply grieved and acutely conscious of a sense of personal responsibility and guilt." The authoritarian conscience was displayed by the man who denied any conscious sense of guilt but who was obsessively loyal to whatever authority he served, and demonstrated a deep sense of duty of obedience to whomever was over him. He demanded of his subordinates an equally uncritical obedience to himself. The authoritarian conscience predominated in the survey. This was also the type of conscience in prewar Germany, where those who held authoritarian posts were trained to accept any moral code imposed on them from above, whether by the Hohenzollerns, the Weimar Republic, or by Hitler.