lundimatin, #498, 24/11/2025
The title says it all: this short article addresses the problem, identified early on by Wilhelm Reich, posed by the irrationalism espoused by far-right ideology for its criticism, and draws on the work of Alice Miller and Alain Bihr to identify its psychological roots in as schematic and down-to-earth a manner as possible.
Irrationalism is a characteristic explicitly claimed by historical fascism: reflection had to give way to action, and this action had to be guided solely by the interpretation, by the inspired leader, of the “correct sentiment of the people”. To this day, spokespeople for the far right still claim to “say out loud what everyone else is thinking”, revealing to themselves their unspoken feelings and defending their rights: including their right to have bad feelings, since their rhetoric dismisses with the same disdainful gesture, along with technical objections, the charitable morality of the “party of good”. How does one come to reject logic and good feelings? Where does the seductive power of far-right ideology come from? Can anti-fascism ignore the irrational motivations behind the support for fascism?
This problem was posed very clearly by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in a book entitled The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in the heat of the moment between 1930 and 1933, at the very height of Nazism. I will therefore begin by summarising the content of this book and discussing its influence on Alice Miller’s work on “toxic pedagogy”. However, the solution they propose seems to me to be far too general to be satisfactory. The studies of sociologist Alain Bihr, collected in 1998 under the title L’Actualité d’un archaïsme [The Relevance of Archaism], based on a more detailed description of far-right thinking, suggest more precise answers.
The problem of “The Mass Psychology of Fascism”
Wilhelm Reich’s analysis begins with an internal critique of the impotence of socialist movements against fascism. German socialism in the early 1930s, in particular, was unable to explain why the impoverished masses, who were supposed to be the most concerned by the proletarian revolution, were instead shifting to the right during the long-awaited crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy. Yet it was clearly demonstrated that the demands of fascism were contrary to their objective interests; why did these demonstrations have so little effect? This development seemed to undermine their entire political theory and prove the nationalists right in their criticism that they had excluded “the spirit” from their analyses. Just as they failed to understand popular support, they did not explain how fascism could have initially opposed the upper middle class, unable as they were to see it as anything other than a “guardian of Capital”. They were caught off guard by its mass movement character. The wholesale rejection of ideology and the strict economic determinism of Marxist analysis led to a neglect of psychological factors: this crude materialism prevented socialists from understanding what made “ideological” theories (such as nationalism) so successful among the masses. They failed to see that an ideology, when it produces a psychological character, can in turn become a material force and act in turn on the course of history. However, when widely shared conditions produce common characteristics in a large number of people, a mass psychology is possible that accounts for this subjective factor in historical processes. Mass psychology complements socio-economic analysis by explaining behaviours that it considers irrational, and which stem from the inertia of inherited psychic structures in relation to changes in economic conditions.
Building on Freud’s thesis that sexual desire is the deepest and most general driving force of psychic processes, Reich seeks the origin of irrational behaviour in the repression of sexual desires from childhood onwards, first in the authoritarian family, then in the religious community. His argument therefore takes two directions: on the one hand, Reich wants to show that sexual inhibition produces a character that is generally resistant to rebellion; on the other hand, that fascism offers a perverse outlet for these repressed desires. From learned servility towards the authoritarian father to submission to the political leader who takes on the same role, the attitude is the same: patriarchal power within the family is therefore indirectly the primary support for state authoritarianism. This supremacy of the father in the family is expressed in particular through the control he exercises over the sexuality of his wife and children, with the support of religion, which associates sexuality with feelings of guilt. Conversely, the nationalist myth mobilises the imagination born of sexual repression: men’s attachment to the “motherland” re-enacts the boy’s problematic attachment to his mother, while the representation of Western civilisation as Athena threatened with rape by Eastern satraps re-enacts the conflictual situation in which the ideal of pure abstinence is constantly threatened by animalistic desires. In the competition between socialists and fascists to reach the “apolitical” masses, the economic arguments of the former, however well-founded, come up against the fact that many people who actively refuse to take sides do so because they are preoccupied with more pressing problems, problems that are only “personal” in appearance, since they relate to family life and love life. Fascism, on the other hand, however weak its economic proposals may be, offers not a solution to these sexual problems, but a form of sublimation, in the manner of religion.
I have confined myself to summarising the general outline of Reich’s argument, and have not wished to discuss its details, which in my opinion are mostly ridiculous. Another interpretation along the same lines (and less extravagant in its secondary elaborations) has been proposed more recently by another psychoanalytically trained therapist, Alice Miller. In For Your Own Good, Miller argues that the characters of the Nazi leaders, like the popular support they managed to garner, stem from the “black/dark pedagogy” to which German children were and still are exposed on a daily basis. Unlike Reich, Miller does not focus solely on sexual repression, but extends her criticism to all forms of cruel, violent and contemptuous treatment within the patriarchal family. It is not simply that a pedagogy entirely and explicitly designed to break the child’s will, to forbid them any emotion or independent thought, produces beings who are terrified of thinking for themselves and who will easily tend to defer to a dictator who takes on the role of the father and imitates even his incomprehensible rages. The wounded child, forbidden to express their hatred and anger, and even more so to understand it, represses it without eliminating it: as an adult, they will be tempted to find a substitute object on which to direct it without breaking the taboo. People who are already discriminated against in society, and whom one can hate without fear of judgement, are then obvious scapegoats. Typically, they will be projected with the same characteristics of wickedness and filth that the child had to dissociate from himself or herself in the first place by internalising the cruel judgement of his or her parents. The epidemic nature of “black/dark pedagogy” explains why the majority of the German population, including its intellectuals, adhered to the “solution” discovered by a few men who had been particularly abused in their childhood, without realising its irrationality.
Without detracting from the merits of these psychoanalytic theories, it seems clear to me that the solution they propose is too general: like sexual repression, the oppression of children is age-old, and the characteristics it produces could serve as a basis for any form of authoritarianism. Fascism, on the other hand, is specific to the contemporary era, and is only a particular form of nationalism.
Three irrational springs for the support of fascism
In L’Actualité d’un archaïsme, Alain Bihr argues that far-right thinking, often presented by its detractors as archaic and delusional, actually has an original logic that could only have emerged with the “crisis of modernity”. He reduces the structure common to all manifestations of far-right ideology to three essential elements. First, all far-right thinking affirms the existence of an eternal and sacred collective identity. An individual’s belonging to their community is non-negotiable; their life only has meaning insofar as they endorse the values of their community. Any difference, whether external or internal, must be interpreted as a threat, and the threat is therefore constant. Secondly, they all represent the universe as an unequal hierarchical order, where not only do the strong dominate the weak, but where it is good that this should be so. Recognising a difference inevitably leads to establishing the pre-eminence of one side over the other. Thirdly, they all describe life as a constant struggle to defend one’s identity and supremacy over others. It is through war that the strong reveal their worth at the expense of the weak. A vision of nature, where each organism seeks to persevere in its existence in a competition to the death with others, and can be placed on a single scale of beings according to its success, constitutes the recurring model in which these three aspects are brought together. From these arise the typical axes of far-right politics, notably the demand that the state defend threatened identity against its internal and external enemies, leaving it to a single will to define that identity. Its enemies are also clearly identified: liberalism, for its emphasis on individual freedom at the expense of community norms; socialism, for its promotion of equality achieved through struggle within the community; and finally humanism, for its promotion of universal brotherhood beyond the limits of the community. “It opposes the republican triad of “liberty, equality, fraternity” with its own triad: “identity, inequality, pugnacity”.” It is understandable that such a programme requires certain good intentions to be set aside. But what is the appeal of this worldview? The following chapters probe the thinking of the far right: Bihr analyses in turn a strongly autobiographical novel by the French fascist Drieu La Rochelle, the political speeches of the former president of the Front National Jean-Marie Le Pen, the rhetoric of the inspirer of Action Française Maurice Barrès, and the social and psychological conditions for the reception of these speeches. I will not summarise each of these studies, but I believe I have been able to identify three irrational springs for the support of fascism.
Firstly, there is the loneliness of the individual in modern society. The formation of large nations has disrupted both village communities and major frameworks of thought, particularly religious ones. It has replaced them with greater anonymity, mobility, and the prospect of individual happiness, often identified with simple material comfort. Added to the suffering of mental loneliness is the feeling of the absurdity of the efforts required. The corresponding psychological response is a desire to belong to a warm community in which life has meaning, and the idea of the decadence of modern society. This response becomes truly irrational when societies composed of thousands of individuals are asked to fulfil this role of national, racial or regional “community”. Exacerbated, this communitarianism can produce the idea that salvation can only be found in self-sacrifice for the advent or defence of this community. No deviation or conscientious objection to the values of the community can be tolerated.
Secondly, there is men’s insecurity about their own masculinity. Men learn to repress the expression of their feelings and empathy towards the feelings of others, to focus on work at the expense of their emotional relationships: conditioning that can only exacerbate their loneliness. Conversely, the ideal of unattainable masculinity, linked to social success, remains a constant source of humiliation for most of them. The corresponding psychological response is that they fantasise about an ideal community based on a Spartan model, where men recognise each other in their shared masculinity. The irrationality of this response, even more evident than in the previous case, consists in seeking the remedy in the evil itself. Exacerbated, this virilism can produce the idea that men must be warriors, and women, mothers and wives of warriors. No disability, nor any deviation from traditional gender norms, can be tolerated.
Thirdly, there is the guilt that accompanies white privilege. White people know that part of their comfort comes from colonial exploitation and its legacies. The corresponding psychological response is to hide this injustice from themselves by denigrating the people and cultures associated with colonised countries. But this representation is coloured by the previous elements. For a community of warriors, foreigners are enemies, ready to colonise in turn. African or Eastern barbarians are credited with extraordinary and threatening virility, the others with lascivious effeminacy. Finally, the figure of the Jew takes on particular importance through his real or imagined association with intellectual or financial circles: he becomes the embodiment of the cold abstraction of modern society. Exacerbated, this racism can produce the idea that the community must remain pure and, if necessary, purify itself of foreign ethnic elements. No member or cultural influence from outside the group can be tolerated.
If this analysis is correct, the conclusion is that those who are working today to promote small-scale conviviality and to deconstruct masculinity and whiteness on a personal level are contributing to the anti-fascist struggle. In fact, by recognising the importance of the intimate sphere, they are doing what the socialists of the 1930s failed to do.
Tristan Lefort-Martine
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good
Alain Bihr, L’Actualité d’un archaïsme
Tristan Lefort-Martine: The irrational springs of the support for fascism
lundimatin, #498, 24/11/2025
The title says it all: this short article addresses the problem, identified early on by Wilhelm Reich, posed by the irrationalism espoused by far-right ideology for its criticism, and draws on the work of Alice Miller and Alain Bihr to identify its psychological roots in as schematic and down-to-earth a manner as possible.
Irrationalism is a characteristic explicitly claimed by historical fascism: reflection had to give way to action, and this action had to be guided solely by the interpretation, by the inspired leader, of the “correct sentiment of the people”. To this day, spokespeople for the far right still claim to “say out loud what everyone else is thinking”, revealing to themselves their unspoken feelings and defending their rights: including their right to have bad feelings, since their rhetoric dismisses with the same disdainful gesture, along with technical objections, the charitable morality of the “party of good”. How does one come to reject logic and good feelings? Where does the seductive power of far-right ideology come from? Can anti-fascism ignore the irrational motivations behind the support for fascism?
This problem was posed very clearly by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in a book entitled The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in the heat of the moment between 1930 and 1933, at the very height of Nazism. I will therefore begin by summarising the content of this book and discussing its influence on Alice Miller’s work on “toxic pedagogy”. However, the solution they propose seems to me to be far too general to be satisfactory. The studies of sociologist Alain Bihr, collected in 1998 under the title L’Actualité d’un archaïsme [The Relevance of Archaism], based on a more detailed description of far-right thinking, suggest more precise answers.
The problem of “The Mass Psychology of Fascism”
Wilhelm Reich’s analysis begins with an internal critique of the impotence of socialist movements against fascism. German socialism in the early 1930s, in particular, was unable to explain why the impoverished masses, who were supposed to be the most concerned by the proletarian revolution, were instead shifting to the right during the long-awaited crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy. Yet it was clearly demonstrated that the demands of fascism were contrary to their objective interests; why did these demonstrations have so little effect? This development seemed to undermine their entire political theory and prove the nationalists right in their criticism that they had excluded “the spirit” from their analyses. Just as they failed to understand popular support, they did not explain how fascism could have initially opposed the upper middle class, unable as they were to see it as anything other than a “guardian of Capital”. They were caught off guard by its mass movement character. The wholesale rejection of ideology and the strict economic determinism of Marxist analysis led to a neglect of psychological factors: this crude materialism prevented socialists from understanding what made “ideological” theories (such as nationalism) so successful among the masses. They failed to see that an ideology, when it produces a psychological character, can in turn become a material force and act in turn on the course of history. However, when widely shared conditions produce common characteristics in a large number of people, a mass psychology is possible that accounts for this subjective factor in historical processes. Mass psychology complements socio-economic analysis by explaining behaviours that it considers irrational, and which stem from the inertia of inherited psychic structures in relation to changes in economic conditions.
Building on Freud’s thesis that sexual desire is the deepest and most general driving force of psychic processes, Reich seeks the origin of irrational behaviour in the repression of sexual desires from childhood onwards, first in the authoritarian family, then in the religious community. His argument therefore takes two directions: on the one hand, Reich wants to show that sexual inhibition produces a character that is generally resistant to rebellion; on the other hand, that fascism offers a perverse outlet for these repressed desires. From learned servility towards the authoritarian father to submission to the political leader who takes on the same role, the attitude is the same: patriarchal power within the family is therefore indirectly the primary support for state authoritarianism. This supremacy of the father in the family is expressed in particular through the control he exercises over the sexuality of his wife and children, with the support of religion, which associates sexuality with feelings of guilt. Conversely, the nationalist myth mobilises the imagination born of sexual repression: men’s attachment to the “motherland” re-enacts the boy’s problematic attachment to his mother, while the representation of Western civilisation as Athena threatened with rape by Eastern satraps re-enacts the conflictual situation in which the ideal of pure abstinence is constantly threatened by animalistic desires. In the competition between socialists and fascists to reach the “apolitical” masses, the economic arguments of the former, however well-founded, come up against the fact that many people who actively refuse to take sides do so because they are preoccupied with more pressing problems, problems that are only “personal” in appearance, since they relate to family life and love life. Fascism, on the other hand, however weak its economic proposals may be, offers not a solution to these sexual problems, but a form of sublimation, in the manner of religion.
I have confined myself to summarising the general outline of Reich’s argument, and have not wished to discuss its details, which in my opinion are mostly ridiculous. Another interpretation along the same lines (and less extravagant in its secondary elaborations) has been proposed more recently by another psychoanalytically trained therapist, Alice Miller. In For Your Own Good, Miller argues that the characters of the Nazi leaders, like the popular support they managed to garner, stem from the “black/dark pedagogy” to which German children were and still are exposed on a daily basis. Unlike Reich, Miller does not focus solely on sexual repression, but extends her criticism to all forms of cruel, violent and contemptuous treatment within the patriarchal family. It is not simply that a pedagogy entirely and explicitly designed to break the child’s will, to forbid them any emotion or independent thought, produces beings who are terrified of thinking for themselves and who will easily tend to defer to a dictator who takes on the role of the father and imitates even his incomprehensible rages. The wounded child, forbidden to express their hatred and anger, and even more so to understand it, represses it without eliminating it: as an adult, they will be tempted to find a substitute object on which to direct it without breaking the taboo. People who are already discriminated against in society, and whom one can hate without fear of judgement, are then obvious scapegoats. Typically, they will be projected with the same characteristics of wickedness and filth that the child had to dissociate from himself or herself in the first place by internalising the cruel judgement of his or her parents. The epidemic nature of “black/dark pedagogy” explains why the majority of the German population, including its intellectuals, adhered to the “solution” discovered by a few men who had been particularly abused in their childhood, without realising its irrationality.
Without detracting from the merits of these psychoanalytic theories, it seems clear to me that the solution they propose is too general: like sexual repression, the oppression of children is age-old, and the characteristics it produces could serve as a basis for any form of authoritarianism. Fascism, on the other hand, is specific to the contemporary era, and is only a particular form of nationalism.
Three irrational springs for the support of fascism
In L’Actualité d’un archaïsme, Alain Bihr argues that far-right thinking, often presented by its detractors as archaic and delusional, actually has an original logic that could only have emerged with the “crisis of modernity”. He reduces the structure common to all manifestations of far-right ideology to three essential elements. First, all far-right thinking affirms the existence of an eternal and sacred collective identity. An individual’s belonging to their community is non-negotiable; their life only has meaning insofar as they endorse the values of their community. Any difference, whether external or internal, must be interpreted as a threat, and the threat is therefore constant. Secondly, they all represent the universe as an unequal hierarchical order, where not only do the strong dominate the weak, but where it is good that this should be so. Recognising a difference inevitably leads to establishing the pre-eminence of one side over the other. Thirdly, they all describe life as a constant struggle to defend one’s identity and supremacy over others. It is through war that the strong reveal their worth at the expense of the weak. A vision of nature, where each organism seeks to persevere in its existence in a competition to the death with others, and can be placed on a single scale of beings according to its success, constitutes the recurring model in which these three aspects are brought together. From these arise the typical axes of far-right politics, notably the demand that the state defend threatened identity against its internal and external enemies, leaving it to a single will to define that identity. Its enemies are also clearly identified: liberalism, for its emphasis on individual freedom at the expense of community norms; socialism, for its promotion of equality achieved through struggle within the community; and finally humanism, for its promotion of universal brotherhood beyond the limits of the community. “It opposes the republican triad of “liberty, equality, fraternity” with its own triad: “identity, inequality, pugnacity”.” It is understandable that such a programme requires certain good intentions to be set aside. But what is the appeal of this worldview? The following chapters probe the thinking of the far right: Bihr analyses in turn a strongly autobiographical novel by the French fascist Drieu La Rochelle, the political speeches of the former president of the Front National Jean-Marie Le Pen, the rhetoric of the inspirer of Action Française Maurice Barrès, and the social and psychological conditions for the reception of these speeches. I will not summarise each of these studies, but I believe I have been able to identify three irrational springs for the support of fascism.
Firstly, there is the loneliness of the individual in modern society. The formation of large nations has disrupted both village communities and major frameworks of thought, particularly religious ones. It has replaced them with greater anonymity, mobility, and the prospect of individual happiness, often identified with simple material comfort. Added to the suffering of mental loneliness is the feeling of the absurdity of the efforts required. The corresponding psychological response is a desire to belong to a warm community in which life has meaning, and the idea of the decadence of modern society. This response becomes truly irrational when societies composed of thousands of individuals are asked to fulfil this role of national, racial or regional “community”. Exacerbated, this communitarianism can produce the idea that salvation can only be found in self-sacrifice for the advent or defence of this community. No deviation or conscientious objection to the values of the community can be tolerated.
Secondly, there is men’s insecurity about their own masculinity. Men learn to repress the expression of their feelings and empathy towards the feelings of others, to focus on work at the expense of their emotional relationships: conditioning that can only exacerbate their loneliness. Conversely, the ideal of unattainable masculinity, linked to social success, remains a constant source of humiliation for most of them. The corresponding psychological response is that they fantasise about an ideal community based on a Spartan model, where men recognise each other in their shared masculinity. The irrationality of this response, even more evident than in the previous case, consists in seeking the remedy in the evil itself. Exacerbated, this virilism can produce the idea that men must be warriors, and women, mothers and wives of warriors. No disability, nor any deviation from traditional gender norms, can be tolerated.
Thirdly, there is the guilt that accompanies white privilege. White people know that part of their comfort comes from colonial exploitation and its legacies. The corresponding psychological response is to hide this injustice from themselves by denigrating the people and cultures associated with colonised countries. But this representation is coloured by the previous elements. For a community of warriors, foreigners are enemies, ready to colonise in turn. African or Eastern barbarians are credited with extraordinary and threatening virility, the others with lascivious effeminacy. Finally, the figure of the Jew takes on particular importance through his real or imagined association with intellectual or financial circles: he becomes the embodiment of the cold abstraction of modern society. Exacerbated, this racism can produce the idea that the community must remain pure and, if necessary, purify itself of foreign ethnic elements. No member or cultural influence from outside the group can be tolerated.
If this analysis is correct, the conclusion is that those who are working today to promote small-scale conviviality and to deconstruct masculinity and whiteness on a personal level are contributing to the anti-fascist struggle. In fact, by recognising the importance of the intimate sphere, they are doing what the socialists of the 1930s failed to do.
Tristan Lefort-Martine
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good
Alain Bihr, L’Actualité d’un archaïsme