The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

family; that it turns an original biological tie of the child to the mother—and [48] of the mother to the child—into
an indissoluble sexual fixation and thus creates the inability to establish new relationships. 5 The core of the
family tie is the mother fixation. The subjective, emotional core of the ideas of homeland and nation are ideas of
mother and family. The mother is the homeland of the child, as the family is its "nation in miniature." Thus one
understands why the National Socialist, Goebbels, took the following as a motto for his Ten Commandments, in
the National Socialist Volkskalender for 1932: "The homeland is the mother of your life, don't ever forget it." The
Angriff wrote on the occasion of Mother's Day in 1933:
MOTHER'S DAY. The national revolution has blown away everything that is petty. Ideas are leading again and are leading us
together, family, society, nation. The idea of Mother's Day will honor that which signifies the German idea: The German Mother!
Nowhere has the woman and mother as important a role as in the new Germany. It is she who preserves the family life from which
spring the forces which will lead our nation ahead again. She, the German mother, is the sole bearer of the German national idea.
The idea of "mother" will always be the same as "being German." What could unite us more strongly than the idea of honoring the
mother?
As untrue as these sentences are, economically and socially speaking, they are correct with regard to human
structure. Nationalist feeling is the direct continuation of family attachment and, like the latter, is based on the
unconscious, deeply anchored mother fixation. This cannot be explained biologically. For this mother fixation
itself is a social product. The attachment to the mother would be replaced at puberty by other attachments, for
example, by natural sexual relationships, if it were not made permanent by the general suppression of natural love
life. Only this socially caused perpetuation makes it the basis for nationalist feeling in the adult and makes it a
reactionary social force. The fact that the industrial workers develop nationalist attitudes to a
________
5 The "Oedipus complex" discovered by Freud, then, is not so much the cause as the result of the social inhibition of infantile sexuality. The parents, however,
quite unconsciously execute the intentions of society.
[49] much lesser degree is to be ascribed to the difference in their family situation.
This statement by no means implies a biologizing of sociology. For we do not forget for a moment that the
difference in the industrial worker's family situation is itself conditioned by his position in the production process.
One must ask oneself why it is that the industrial workers are especially accessible to internationalism while the
lower middle class tends equally strongly to nationalism. Only the inclusion of the specific family situation in its
dependence on the economic process explains this. The Marxist theorists display a peculiar aversion to
considering the family situation as a factor which is equally as important as the economic factors in the formation
of structure; more than that, it is the decisive factor for the anchoring of the social system in the psychic structure.
This aversion is caused by their own family attachments. The fact that the family fixation is the most intensive
and most highly emotionally charged cannot be overestimated. 6
The basic identity of familial and of nationalist ideology goes further. The families are set against each other
precisely as are the nations. In either case, the ultimate basis lies in economic motives. The lower middle class
family is always under the pressure of economic worries. The economic tendency to expansion on the part of the
lower middle class family with many children thus reproduces the imperialist ideology of the "Lebensraum" of
the nation. This is why the lower middle class individual is so easily accessible to imperialist ideology. He tends
to identify
________
6 He who has not overcome his fixation on family and mother, or is not able at least to exclude it from his judgment, should not engage in the study of
ideology formation. Brushing these facts aside by calling them "Freudian" betrays scientific cretinism. Talking without knowing the facts is not scientific
argumentation. Freud discovered the Oedipus complex. Without this discovery there could be no revolutionary family politics. But Freud is as far from a
sociological interpretation of the family fixation as the mechanistic economist from a comprehension of sexuality as a social factor. To deny facts which every
worker knew even before Freud discovered the Oedipus complex, instead of pointing out a possible erroneous application of natural science, is inadmissible.
Fascism cannot be overcome with slogans but only with knowledge. Errors occur and can be corrected, but scientific narrow-mindedness is reactionary.