The Phantasmatic Core of Fascism : Psychoanalytic Theories of Antisemitism and Group Aggression Amongst the ‘Political Freudians’

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The Phantasmatic Core of Fascism : Psychoanalytic Theories of Antisemitism and Group Aggression Amongst the ‘Political Freudians’ © Author, 2022 Published version Zolkos, Magdalena Zolkos, M. (2022). The Phantasmatic Core of Fascism : Psychoanalytic Theories of Antisemitism and Group Aggression Amongst the ‘Political Freudians’. Redescriptions, 25(1), 49-64. https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.367 2022 CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Magdalena Zolkos Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, FI [email protected] KEYWORDS: Psychoanalytic theory of fascism; German fascism; antisemitism; the social unconscious; Otto Fenichel; Ernst Simmel; Rudolf Loewenstein; Sigmund Freud TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Zolkos, Magdalena. 2022. “The Phantasmatic Core of Fascism: Psychoanalytic Theories of Antisemitism and Group Aggression Amongst the ‘Political Freudians’.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 25(1), 49–64. DOI: https://doi. org/10.33134/rds.367 The Phantasmatic Core of Fascism: Psychoanalytic Theories of Antisemitism and Group Aggression Amongst the ‘Political Freudians’ MAGDALENA ZOLKOS RESEARCH ABSTRACT The period predating and overlapping with World War II saw psychoanalytic authors respond to the authoritarian and fascist developments in Europe through scholarly and analytical writings. These authors, sometimes referenced as ‘political Freudians’, were interested in bringing psychoanalysis in a dialogue with progressive social and pedagogical movements of their times, focusing their critique on the persecutory, eliminatory and purificatory fantasies, which they saw as animating the fascistic movements in Europe. This article analyses selected texts by Otto Fenichel, Ernst Simmel and Rudolf Loewenstein and argues that these authors asked about the political and ethical stakes of the fascist constructions of its ideal subject; one that was armoured against the threats of dispossession perpetuated by racialized minorities. In different ways, these thinkers showed that projection, paranoia, scapegoating and egoregression became operative as group phenomena at that historical moment. By engaging with these texts, it becomes possible to not only understand better the history of how the critical psychoanalytic theorising developed at the backdrop of war-time European history, but also to consider the contribution that concepts of desire, irrationality, fantasy and affect make to the studies of fascism, historically, and perhaps today. 50Zolkos Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory DOI: 10.33134/rds.367 I—INTRODUCTION The historical development of twentieth-century European fascism and the formation of Freudian psychoanalysis not only had overlapping chronologies, but both have been discussed by scholarship as responses to the crisis of European modernity, and in particular the way it was precipitated and cast into relief through the events and consequences of World War I (see Kurzweil 1984; Forrester 2009; Roseman 2011). Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961) described this crisis as a breakdown of three Western paradigms of social and political life, which, as she argued, were closely fused in Greek and Latin antiquities: tradition, religion and authority. She further argues that in Western modernity, these paradigms have not merely been weakened, but have become inaccessible as frameworks of public life and collective experience (cf. Arendt 1961: 95–96). This opening remark is not meant to conflate psychoanalysis and fascism in any way,1 but, rather, to outline their historical, cultural and political backdrop as a moment of crisis that magnified, in Jeff Malpas’ words, ‘the horrifyingly contradictory aspects of human existence […] an almost complete loss of faith in progress’ (2006: 276). Taking this point as an opening into a discussion of selected psychoanalytic critiques and interpretations of German fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, I suggest that the historical moment immediately predating and overlapping with World War II saw psychoanalytic authors respond to the authoritarian and fascist developments in Europe through scholarly and analytical writings. These authors are sometimes referenced as ‘second generation’ of Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom were interested in bringing psychoanalysis in a dialogue with progressive social and pedagogical movements of their times. Sometimes called ‘political Freudians’ (see Jacoby 1983), the group included, amongst others, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Ernst Simmel, Siegfried Bernfeld and Frances Deri. They asserted Freudian psychoanalysis as a theory of modern society and of the social (and not solely a clinical inquiry into the individual psyche). While this had already been apparent with Freud, the psychoanalytic authors of the pre-war period focused their critique on European fascism, and on the persecutory, eliminatory and purificatory fantasies, which they saw as animating the fascistic movements. This article contributes to the scholarship on psychoanalytic critiques of fascism in two ways. First, it draws attention to the diversity and heterogeneity of the discursive field formed by these responses, some of which, to mention only one element, adopted a Marxist view, while others followed a distinctly liberal (and anti-Marxist) orientation. Second, it emphasizes the historical importance of the critical insights of the authors that insisted that fascism occupied a Their emphasis on stigmatizing and exterminatory impulses within fascism put in a different light the question of minority populations, and that of aggressive drives. Finally, the argument that these writings offer a unique critical insight into the history of fascist popular movements and political ideology is meant to address a relative lack of attention to Freudian psychoanalysis in contemporary scholarship on fascism (exceptions include Damousi and Plotkin 2012; Pick 2012). Providing a uniform definition and characterization of fascism has been notoriously difficult for historians and political theorists alike (cf. Griffin 1991; Orwell 1944; Shenfield 2004). Circumventing these difficulties, this article focuses on those 1 There is an extensive academic literature on institutionalized psychoanalysis’ coexistence with authoritarian governments. For discussions of Nazi Germany, see Goggin and Goggin (2001), Rickels (2002), Frosh (2005), Peglau (2013). 51Zolkos Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory DOI: 10.33134/rds.367 aspects of German fascism that were considered pivotal by the public intellectuals associated with Freudian psychoanalysis as clinicians and theorists in the 1930s and 1940s. Characteristic of their interpretations was a tendency to read fascism as the unleashing of violent irrational forces amongst the ‘masses’. In his book on Freud as a political thinker, Eli Zaretsky names amongst these irrational forces ‘group paranoia, the role of projection in justifying aggression, [and] the futile longing for leadership’ (2015: 2). The question of psychoanalysis’ theoretical responses to fascism covers scholarship on the psycho-social appeal of dictatorial control and leadership, on the unconscious affect and the massification of modern society and on the subjective gratification derived from a ‘racially unified and hierarchical organized society’ (Saxena 2015: 43; see also Payne 2003, 2014; Frosh 2005; Rustin 2016; Jay 2019). The focus here is on three texts: ‘Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism’ by Fenichel (1940), ‘Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology’ by Simmel (1946), and Christians and Jews by Loewenstein (1951). It is important to note that in all three cases, the objective has been to investigate fascism’s development through the prism of the theory of the unconscious, rather than critically engage with Freudian psychoanalysis as such, by taking as their foci Freud’s texts on civilization, group psychology, Jewishness and antisemitism (see Freud 1953 [1930]; 1955 [1922]; 1964 [1939]). Because this essay seeks to unpack the conceptual nexus of fascism and antisemitism, it omits other texts produced in that period by the ‘political Freudians’, notably the work of Wilhelm Reich (which has seen a revival of interest in the recent years). Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (2013 [1946], which analyses the effects of sexual repression and patriarchal family on the emergence of authoritarian movements and state structures, it is only parenthetically interested in modern figurations of Jewishness and their importance for German fascism.2 In his book on the ‘political Freudians’ Jacoby draws attention to the former students of Freud (or of Freud’s immediate collaborators) who were affiliated with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and who were committed to exploring progressive sociopolitical implications of psychoanalysis (see also Steiner 2020). In particular, their social, clinical and scholarly nexus of psychoanalysis and Marxism, as exemplified by activities undertaken in 1920s and 1930s, aimed at making analysis accessible to and popularized amongst the working classes (for details, see Goggin & Goggin 2001; Danto 2005; Frosh 2005; Makari 2008). Fenichel, Simmel and Loewenstein came from secularized and assimilated German-speaking Jewish families. They were all educated as medical doctors, and, either before or during the war, emigrated from Europe to the USA (Fisher 2004; Zaretsky 2005). Fenichel and Simmel (the ‘political Freudians’ sensu stricto) differed from Loewenstein in their Marxist radical views, as well as in theoretical-psychoanalytic approach (Greenson 1966; Peck 1966). The essay ‘Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism’ was written by Fenichel as a presentation for a Zionist Prague organization in 1930s, and it reflects, and perhaps foreshadows, the professional and personal difficulties faced by Fenichel after National Socialists came to power in Germany (see Steiner 2020: 193). Stephen Frosh (2005: 63–90) has 2 Thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School are also excluded from this analysis. It should be noted that both Fenichel and Simmel collaborated with Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse during the period of the institute’s émigré period, and that their collaboration included research on discrimination (see Horkheimer 1948). Others working on fascism and antisemitism from psycho-social perspectives in that period were Berliner (1946), Orr (1946), Brenner (1948). 52Zolkos Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory DOI: 10.33134/rds.367 written persuasively about the devastating effects of Nazism on Jewish and socialist psychoanalysts in Germany, including a group of clinicians and social reformists that collaborated within the framework of Fenichel’s Kinderseminar in Berlin (Goggin & Goggin 2001: 53–65; Zaretsky 2005: 217–248; Makari 2008). Many of them were forced into exile; Fenichel migrated to Norway and Czechoslovakia, and subsequently to the USA, where his precarious legal and professional status resulted in what is frequently described as a ‘tempering’ of his Marxist views (Danto 2005: 266; Pick 2012: 21). Fenichel correspondence with his closest collaborators and friends in Rundbriefe, or the ‘circular letters’, offers a poignant testimony to these hardships (Gifford 1985; Harris & Brock 1991). Ernst Simmel’s writings on fascism concerned, in Danto’s words, ‘the twin predicaments of mental illness and structural oppression’ (2009: 337). In Berlin, and after his migration to the USA in Los Angeles, Simmel was equally committed to social activism and clinical work. His 1932 article ‘Nationalsozialismus und Volksgesundheit’ combines his political interests with clinical expertise in order to scrutinize the psychic appeal of violence and war in the context of mass psychology. In ‘Nationalsozialismus und Volksgesundheit’, Simmel used the term ‘murderous drives’, which he later developed in ‘Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology’ (1989; see also Pick 2012: 88–89). ‘Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology’ was first presented at the Psychiatric Symposium on Antisemitism in San Francisco in 1944, which was also a forum of collaboration between the ‘political Freudians’ and members of the Frankfurt School (Jacoby 1983: 64). Rudolf Loewenstein differed in his theoretical, analytic and political orientation from Fenichel and Simmel perspectives. This is partly due to his ego psychology approach (Makari 2008), and partly to his liberal political views, and the broadly humanistic framing of the book, Christians and Jews, which ends with a call for greater religious tolerance and ecumenical collaboration in order to eliminate the ‘anti-Jewish bias’ that, as Loewenstein argued, continued in Europe after 1945 (see Ages 1973; Ostow 2018). Loewenstein was a student and translator of Freud into French, who moved to Paris in 1925, before emigrating to the USA in 1942. In France, Loewenstein played a key role in the formation of French psychoanalysis and was an analyst of Jacques Lacan. In the USA, he established a collaboration with Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris and became one of the founding figures of the psychoanalytic school of ego psychology (see Roudinesco 1990). II—OTTO FENICHEL: ANTISEMITISM AS DEFLECTION FROM POLITICAL ACTION AND AS ANACHRONISM Otto Fenichel’s analysis of German fascism in his essay on ‘Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism’ (1940) is framed by a dual objective of representing social phenomena as more than simply an aggregate of individual dynamics of the psyche and of historicizing what Fenichel saw as a distinctively modern character of Nazi antisemitism. Fenichel thus explicitly set the aim for the text to shed light on ‘the current and external stimulant’ (1940: 25) for the proliferation of the antisemitic views and sentiments in Germany and Austria in 1930s. Fenichel thus zoomed onto the question of increased public openness and receptivity to propagandistic exclusionary discourses, which he located at ‘the specific historical conjunctures [of] the political and economic context’ (Fisher 2004: 60). 53Zolkos Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory DOI: 10.33134/rds.367 In Fenichel’s Marxist-psychoanalytic perspective, the on-going tactics of activating and magnifying collective animosity of the working-classes towards the Jewish minority groups by fascist leaders cannot be reduced to processes of ‘mass-suggestion’ or to rational calculations of socio-economic gains (1940, 25). Rather, the psychoanalytic prism brings together within the rubric of antisemitism elements of ideology, social movement and political mediation of the unconscious (cf. Klafter 2020). Since the nineteenth century antisemitism had served as an effective tactic of re-directing and deflecting revolutionary affects and energies, for Fenichel it thus bound with the historical emergence of the politically conscious working classes. Construing Jews as objects of hostility and disgust ‘resolved’ and channelled elsewhere the psychic tensions of the proletariat.3 In this account, the working classes were positioned in a dual and paradoxical relation to political authority: they simultaneously sought to rebel against those who held power and desired to obey. As a ‘condensation of [these] most contradictory tendencies’, antisemitism channelled the proletarian urge to ‘rebel […] against the authorities’, as well as offered an opportunity for a ‘cruel suppression and punishment of this instinctual rebellion, […] directed against oneself’ (Fennichel 1940, 31). There is thus a link between the mass antisemitic sentiments and the fear and terror experienced by the subject at their own ‘rebellious drives’ (Bergmann 1988: 13; see also Falk 2008). While notably in a later edition of his text, Fenichel downplayed the notion of antisemitism as a counter-revolutionary deflection (likely in order to distance his own position from Wilhelm Reich following Reich’s conflict with both the socialist groups and the psychoanalysts), he nevertheless continued to give attention to the political mechanisms of minority populations scapegoating through antisemitism, whereby the ruling classes were able to ‘load their sins onto the Jews’ (1940: 26). ‘Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism’ articulates the nexus of a Marxist reading of history and the psychoanalytic concept of the drive. Fenichel’s view on antisemitism is that the figuration of Jewish otherness has produced exclusionary discursive and material effects as regards land ownership and industrial production (1940: 28). Harris & Brock (1991) notes here a similarity between Fenichel’s point and the language used by the pioneering European Zionists in the early twentieth century; it is also known that Fenichel was a reader and an admirer of Arnold Zweig (see Zweig 1921, 1988 [1922]). ‘Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism’ also clearly echoes Leo Pinsker’s critique of the Jewish othering by European societies in his 1882 Auto-Emancipation (see Barlett 2005).4 At the same time, Fenichel complicates the Marxist interpretation of Jewish othering by means class subordination when he pairs it with the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘unconscious root’ of Jewish hatred, which Freud outlined in Civilization and Its Discontents (1955 [1922]) and in Moses and Monotheism (1964 [1939]). Freud posited a symbolic link between the castration complex and the association of Jews with the fears of material dispossession (cf. Frosh 2005: 39–40). Pointing out the linguistic (metonymic) shift from the Jewish circumcision to the threatening figure of a castrating stranger, Freud argued underpinning the social mechanisms of Jewish othering and exclusion modern amongst European societies was the fear of a violent ‘cut’ to be executed by the minority populations upon the subject (1955 [1922]: 36). 3 For non-psychoanalytic interpretations of antisemitism as a ‘deflection’ for the working-class see Hausheer (1936) and Alexander (1987). 4 Pinsker writes, for example: ‘to the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country’ (1906: 6). 54Zolkos Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory DOI: 10.33134/rds.367 This ‘cut’ took different discursive forms—dispossession of economic assets, cultural corruption or defilement of ‘racial purity’—but its phantasmatic core was the loss of precious properties of the subject (cf. Jonte-Pace 2001: 107; Falk 2008: 67). The originality of Fenichel’s intervention comes to the fore, in my view, in the discussion of what he calls ‘Jewish anachronism’, and by which Fenichel understood the social constructions of minority, and the role that these constructions had played historically in the development of European fascism. Fenichel suggested that the European Jewish populations were construed as having retained and rendered visible for their host societies certain characteristics and ‘peculiarities’, which these societies had relegated to the past in effect of the civilizing process (cf. Freud 1953 [1930]). Using the term of ‘archaic foreignness’ (of the European Jews), Fenichel postulated a kind of ‘plural temporality’ that emerged historically from the continued presence of what majority societies saw as their ‘inchoate past’—a trace and a return of what is believed to have disappeared (1940: 29). As such, the argument was that for the modern European societies the Jewish populations and other minority groups identified by ethnicity came to signify ‘[the] old primeval powers with which one had, oneself, lost touch’ (1940: 31). They were associated with ‘magical thinking’—a shorthand for othering perceptions of Jewish ‘unintelligible language’ and their ‘ununderstandable God’—which the modern societies were to abandon in their purported embrace of rationality and secularism. The minority figure became synonymous with uncanny contents ‘not only because they [the majority populations] cannot understand [the Jew] and therefore can imagine all sorts of sins in him, but still more so because they can understand him very well somewhere in the depths […]’ (1940: 31). In this rather creative take on the Freudian notion of the return of the repressed, Fenichel argues that ‘the [repudiated] instincts […] come back to them in these incomprehensible people who live as strangers in their midst’ (1940: 32). By depicting the Jew as both a neighbour ‘in the midst’ and a bearer of unassimilable strangeness, Fenichel shed light on antisemitism as a deflection of the working classes from transformational and resurgent political projects and as a social projection operating as a ‘weapon in class-warfare’ (1940: 39). While the attempt at bringing together psychoanalytic insight into the dynamics of othering of minority groups with Marxist notion of history as class antagonism ultimately ‘troubled’ Marx’s conception of antisemitism, Fenichel urged his contemporary readers to consider the unconscious affects as a psychosocial scaffolding of European fascism. III—ERNST SIMMEL: ANTISEMITISM ‘PASSES OVER HUMANITY’ Ernst Simmel’s critique of fascism unfolds through two trajectories of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory: first, the analysis of the distortions in psychic life whereby the subject reverts to infantile stages of ego development and, second, the analysis of the modern element in group formations. Simmel’s essay ‘Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology’ was first published in the German Marxist journal Der sozialistische Arzt in 1932 and was subsequently revised and re-published in English a decade later. Simmel built in it on the idea that Freud developed in Civilization and its Discontents that civilization [Kultur] is a set of dynamic processes that society ‘passes through’ as (if) through phases or stages. Key to this critical theory of modernity—critical in the sense that it questions discourses presenting modernity as an unambivalent achievement or ‘progress’—is that in narrating civilization Freud employs the literary device of analogy, situating the cultural process in relation to his theory of the libidinal stages 55Zolkos Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory DOI: 10.33134/rds.367 of character development as a kind of ‘model’ or a ‘figure’ for articulating the former (cf.1953 [1930]: 96). The language used both in theorizing the libidinal development and civilization is that of ‘passage’ or ‘passing’: just as sexual organization ‘passes through’ [durchläuft] different developmental phases, civilization is described to ‘pass over’ [abläuft] society (1953 [1905]: 151; 2002; cf. 1953 [1930]: 96–97). What is well known about Freud’s work on libido and civilization alike is that at hand is not an image of unobstructed passage or a linear progression—the subject can be ‘blocked’ or ‘stuck’ at different libidinal phases and anachronism abound in modern societies. Simmel’s texts follows closely Freud’s analogous figuration of the individual psyche and modern society as a staged ‘movement’ and uses the language of ‘passage’, which disappeared in Joan Riviere’s translation of Civilization and Its Discontents (she translates ablaufen features as ‘undergoing’; see Freud 1953 [1930]).5 The starting point of Simmel’s text was similar to Fenichel’s ‘Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism’: employing the Freudian concepts of the ‘civilizing process’ in connection with the sociological Marxist analysis of modern antisemitism. But the subsequent direction of Simmel’s argument is different as ‘Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology’ presents antisemitism as a civilizational ‘by-product’ or an unsuccessful ‘passing through’ rather than the subject’s regression to base feelings as a withdrawal from, or suspension of, the civilizing process. That argument hinges on Simmel’s use of the language of ‘passing over’ or ‘passing through’ from Civilization and its Discontents in relation to the European history of antisemitism with the effect of complicating the idea of a rational modern subject, who shapes history consciously and autonomously. As such, the proliferation of antisemitic views and attitudes in 1930s Germany—antisemitism connotes here both fascistic social movements and an affective emergence—assumes a national subject shaped by a ‘by-product’ of civilization (1946: 66). Importantly, this is not to suggest a determinist view of history whereby the subject is absolved of responsibility. By linking fascism and the affective concentration of fear and hatred (in relation to the Jewish populations), Simmel identifies the ‘primary frictions’ of civilization at work in European history and highlights the tension between the desire for freedom and group demands for conformity. Not unlike Fenichel in ‘Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism’, Simmel sees the ideas about antisemitism as ideology or as an economic discourse of material profitability as an insufficient explanation of the historical alignment of fascism and antisemitism in 1930s Germany. Rather, he points to elements that (according to Simmel) have been missing from sociological analyses of antisemitism, namely phantasy and affect. As such, for Simmel, modern antisemitism has a tripartite genealogy. It is individual because it marks a subjective retreat to a state dominated by ego-preservative instincts and hate; it is collective insofar as it is accompanied by the subject’s submersion 5 It should be noted that Riviere downplays the rich causative and agential associations of Freud’s civilizing imaginary as she inverts the subject and object of the sentence ‘[die] Kulturentwichlung erscheint uns als ein eigenartiger Prozess, der über die Menscheit abläuf’ (‘[the] development of civilization appears to us as a peculiar process which mankind undergoes’, 1953 [1930]: 96). Riviere also translates the German verb ‘ablaufen’ as ‘undergo’, rather than ‘pass’; the latter would render visible the connection between Freud’s notion of civilizing process and the idea that human sexuality metamorphoses and consolidates by moving through phases or stages (a connection that Simmel recognizes). David McLintock’s more recent translation is lexically and grammatically closer to the original: ‘[the] evolution of culture seems to us a peculiar kind of process passing over humanity’. The concept of subjective, affective and ideational ‘passing’ in Freud is in my view deserving of more scholarly attention; I have identified only two short discussions: in Brennan’s theory of affective transmission (2004) and in Wegman’s work on psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology (2013). 56Zolkos Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory DOI: 10.33134/rds.367 within the psycho-social dynamics of a mass, and it is also symptomatic of the ‘disturbance of interaction’ between the individual and society (1946: 34). Whereas at the collective level, antisemitism corresponds to what Gustave Le Bon called ‘crowdmindedness’ of modern individuals (2006 [1896]), at the level of individual psyche, it exemplifies the broader discriminatory and aggressive tendencies that manifest in modern society. Simmel calls it an ‘infantile regression’ to the oral stage (1946: 33), which in psychoanalytic theory is associated with the desire for violent incorporation of the other (biting, devouring, etc.). This ‘pathological symptom formation’ enables the return of the subjugated, repressed and sublimated aggressive instincts (Simmel 1946: 33). By placing European fascism at the interstices of the research into modern mass psychology and the psychoanalytic discourse of ego regression, Simmel depicts that the nexus of fascism and anti-Semitism as a psycho-social shift from the ‘inner ego-superego conflict’ to the ‘outer ego-object conflict’ (1946: 52). In result, the text carefully traces the quotidian and socially normalized expressions of antisemitism, including prejudicial or stereotyping language, which for Simmel is continuous with acts of violence. Whether ‘ideational aggression’, or what Simmel also calls ‘a pogrom of words’, turns into ‘physical aggression’, or ‘a pogrom of actions’, is a matter of power constellations, and not two distinct phenomena (1946: 52). Simmel’s text shows that the psychoanalytic engagements with fascism by the ‘political Freudians’ were not reducible to questions of individual psyche but were works of political critique and serious attempts at grappling with fascism as a mass phenomenon. Arguing against the psychoanalytic interpretations of the fascistic subject as neurotic, Simmel postulates instead that, in contrast to suffering of neurotics, fascists are not displaying signs of social maladaptation. On the contrary, Simmel describes them as strikingly ‘normal’ and ‘well-adapted’ and displaying a remarkable capacity to, as he puts it, ‘go on about [their lives]’ (36). One way of interpreting that part of Simmel’s argument is as an early contribution to the historical and philosophic debates about fascism that took on the question of authoritarian or fascistic ‘personality’, as evidenced in the work of Adorno on authoritarian personality, or by Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann’s ‘banality’ and ordinariness (1963), or, more recently, by Goldhagen’s thesis about the pervasiveness of eliminationist fantasies within broad segments of German war-time populations (1996). Simmel stressed that participation in organized anti-Jewish activities and persecutions required, in his words, a ‘break with reality’, whereby the ego came to interpret the social world through ‘the irrational imagery of his unconscious’ (1946: 42). Rather than group neurosis, then, at hand was a phenomenon of mass psychosis or collective delusion. Insofar as such ‘delusion’ feeds on the lack of knowledge (scientific or social), modern and earlier (premodern) antisemitisms are alike in one key aspect – the mechanism of projection. While the recurring epidemics in medieval Europe had fuelled allegations of Jewish culpability (‘well-poisoning’, etc.), the nineteenth and twentieth century pogroms rest on the social portrayal of Jews as culprits of economic crises and pauperization. The Jew has become an internally contradictory figuration, which successfully was mobilized in the projections of European Jews as both exploitative capitalist benefactors and ideologues and as committed communists with no respect for private property or land ownership of the German farmer. This mode of othering was not neurotic, but psychotic, as one of the features of psychosis are irrationality and delusion prevailing over reality. 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