During the 1920s, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. He pledged that he would rebuild Germany. Unfortunately, he didn’t follow his promise. In December of 1942, Hitler turned Germany into a nightmare. Meanwhile, a psychoanalyst, Walter C. Langer, was asked to profile him through. Langer found that Hitler had two sisters and three brothers that died at a young age. His father was twenty-two years older than his wife. He was a drunk man who would beat his son. Hitler’s mother was over protective of him and would spoil him.
He had a strong relationship with his mother. Hitler was devastated when his mother died of breast cancer. He turned his mother’s grave into a sacred shrine. Langer suggested that Hitler was a perfect fit for the Oedipus complex because of the strong relationship he had with his mother and the hatred he had with his father. Langer also found that Hitler had a fear of syphilis. This fear was rooted in a fear of genital injury during childhood. Hitler used to live in a rather poor apartment and his mother was excessive on cleanliness and tidiness.
Langer suggested that Hitler’s toilet training period might’ve gone wrong because of his mother’s obsessive cleaning. Hitler and his lover Eva were never intimate. For Sigmund Freud, sex was crucial for was drove and determined people. In Freudian analysis, an anally retentive personality would not be interested in sex. Hitler had a close relationship with his niece. He was more than uncle to his niece. She committed suicide in 1930. An informant, Otto Strasser, was close to Hitler and his niece. Strasser said that Hitler would lock his niece up because she wouldn’t do what he wanted her to do.
Hitler would make her undress and urinate on him. Langer suggested that Hitler found a way to deal with the psychological consequences of perversion by adopting the ideology anti-Semitism. Hitler used the defense mechanism and projected upon the Jews. For Langer, Hitler’s hatreds were driven by fear and insecurities. Two years before the end of the war, Langer predicted that Hitler would commit suicide. Langer was correct, Hitler took a cyanide pill and shot himself to the head. Today the United States still uses Langer’s profiling method.
