[Nationalism, hatred of foreigners and antisemitism. Psychoanalytic considerations]

Widespread social crisis phenomena such as unemployment, shortage of housing or lack of prospects are not sufficient to explain aggressive nationalism and the revival of xenophobia in present-day Germany. While from a psychoanalytic viewpoint xenophobia and anti-Semitism have been extensively examined, the same can by no means be said of the phantasm of the "nation". With reference to a case study, the author demonstrates that the adoption of nationalist ideologies (which in Germany specifically are very much bound up with the traditional notion of the nation as a biological organism) can serve both to prevent the outbreak of neurosis at the individual level and to effect what Freud called the "spurious" healing of existing neuroses. Psychologically speaking, the phantasm of the "nation" provides scope for the realization of the desire for pre-ambivalent fusion with an object that has rid itself of everything heterogeneous, alien and autonomous.