Fortress Fantasies and the Sworded Self: A Psychoanalytic Glimpse into the Fantasy Lexicon of Mein Kampf

The fantasy terms extracted from the opening of Mein Kampf suggest a submerged narrative brimming with latent violence, wounded idealism, and compensatory grandiosity--what Freud might have identified as the language of a psyche still negotiating its earliest wounds. The imagery begins with "fortress imprisonment" and "relentless work," metaphors not merely of external circumstance but of inner structure--one imagines a child's psyche locked in a lonely keep, defending itself from an encroaching, perhaps chaotic world. Fortressness implies walls; imprisonment implies a crime, or at least a punishment. The author's symbolic self is simultaneously jailer and captive, judge and judged.

The introductiion of the "movement" as something "beneficial" and requiring "clarity" and "evolution" evokes a redemptive fantasy: a mission to repair an internal disorder through external structure. The movement is no mere ideology--it is the surrogate family, the substitute breast, the healing narrative to make sense of suffering. But it is also haunted: the fantasy words speak of "slanderous rumors," "outsiders," and "Jewish media"--projections of the unwanted self onto the Other. These projections preserve the illusion of internal purity, by displacing shame and confusion onto scapegoats.

Within this symbolic lexicon, there is a divided self. The "individual development" is not presented as organic but as "indispensable" and "clarified"--as if identity must be surgically imposed. One hears the echo of unmet childhood needs: the longing to be seen, understood, and integrated. That the author addresses those "devoted...with their hearts" whose "minds...strive" for understanding is perhaps a narcissistic mirroring, a wish for loyal inner objects who finally validate the unloved child.

The fantasy swells toward mythic proportions in the language of destiny: "happy destiny," "fate," "life mission," "any means necessary." Here the fatherless child (Hitler's father died when he was young; his relationship with him was reportedly abusive) may be seen grasping for symbolic lineage and divine ordination. The "plow turns into the sword"--an image at once agrarian and violent--evokes a traumatic confusion between nurturing and destruction, between the feeding breast and the striking hand. "Tears of war" water the bread of the future: an alchemy in which grief becomes nourishment, death becomes rebirth. It is a disturbing but potent example of how trauma fantasizes itself into history.

At the center of all this is a paradoxical plea: for unity ("similar blood...unified state"), for wholeness ("collective work," "building blocks,") and for permanence ("firmly established principles"). But these images only thinly veil the panic of fragmentation. The narrator may not simply be constructing a political program, but desperately narrating an internal collapse--using the nation as a metaphor for the self.

And in that, we may glimpse something tragic: a child, once deprived, humiliated, or unseen, turning language into steel, imagination into ideology, and memory into myth. The unconscious speaks not just in slips but in symbols--fortresses, swords, and sons lost to the empire of the unloved heart.

Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf, Foreword and beginning of Chapter 1):

On the 1st of April, 1924, I had, on account of the decision of the Munich People's Tribunal, from that day onward, begun my fortress imprisonment in Landsberg am Lech.

As a result, an opportunity appeared to me, after years of relentless work, for the first time, to undertake a project that many had demanded and that I myself regarded as beneficial for the movement. Consequently, I have decided to clarify, within two volumes, not only the objectives of our movement but also to illustrate its evolution. One will be able to learn more from this than from any purely doctrinal work.

I also had the opportunity to offer a depiction of my individual development, insofar as it is indispensable for understanding both the first and second volumes, and can also be used to counter the slanderous rumors about me propagated by the Jewish media.

I am not addressing these writings of mine to outsiders, but rather to those people who are adherents of the movement, who are devoted to it with their hearts and whose minds now strive for greater understanding.

I realize that the masses are more capable of being won over by the spoken word rather than by the written word, that every significant movement upon this planet owes its growth to prominent orators and not great writers.

Yet, for the consistent and uniform representation of an ideology, its fundamental principles must be firmly established. In this regard, these two volumes shall be regarded as building blocks that I contribute to the collective work.

Chapter 1

Today, I view it as a happy destiny that fate precisely assigned to me Braunau am Inn as my place of birth. This little town is, after all, on the border of the two German states, and for us younger people, their reunification feels like a life mission that must be accomplished by any means necessary!

German-Austria must return again to the great German motherland, and certainly not due to reasons based on economic considerations. No, no: Even if this union were economically inconsequential, or even if it were harmful, it would still need to happen. Similar blood belongs in a unified State.

The German people do not possess a moral right to engage in colonial political activities as long as they are incapable of gathering their own sons into one united empire.

It is only when the borders of the Reich include every last German but can no longer guarantee the security of their food supply that the moral right will arise, born out of the need of our people, to seize foreign land. The plow turns into the sword, and from the tears of war springs the daily bread for future generations.

So, this small border town appears to me to symbolize a great responsibility. However, in another respect, it also stands as a warning in our modern era.