Tyrannical Minds

Psychological Profiling, Narcissism, and Dictatorship

Dean A Haycock

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781643131115
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An incisive examination into the pairing of psychology and situation that creates despotic leaders from the author of Murderous Minds. Not everyone can become a tyrant. It requires a particular confluence of events to gain absolute control over entire nations. First, you must be born with the potential to develop brutal personality traits. Often, this is a combination of narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, paranoia and an extraordinary ambition to achieve control over others. Second, your dangerous personality must be developed and strengthened during childhood. You might suffer physical and/or psychological abuse. Finally, you must come of age when the political system of your country is unstable. Together, these events establish a basis to rise to power, one that Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi all used to gain life-and-death control over their countrymen and women. It is how the leaders of the Islamic State hoped to gain such power. Though these men lived in different times and places, and came from vastly different backgrounds, many of them felt respect for each other. They often seemed to recognize their shared, "dark" personality traits and viewed them as strengths. Only in rare cases did they show signs of mental disorders. "Getting inside the heads" of foreign leaders and terrorists is one way governments try to understand, predict, and influence their actions. Psychological profiles can help us understand the urges of tyrants to dominate, subjugate, torture and slaughter. Tyrannical Minds reveals how recognizing their psychological traits can provide insight into the motivations and actions of dangerous leaders, potentially allow to us predict their behavior?and even how to stop them. As strongmen and authoritarian leaders around the world increase in number, understanding the most extreme examples of tyrannical behavior should serve as a warning to anyone indifferent to the threats posed by political extremism.

ENDNOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage, (1961) 1989), 331.

ONE

1 Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York, Basic Books, Inc., 1972.), 8.

2 William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull (eds). C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 127–128.

3 McGuire and Hull, C. G. Jung Speaking, 20.

4 Dinitia Smith, “Analysts Turned to P.R. To Market Themselves,” The New York Times, December 9, 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/12/09/arts/analysts-turn-to-pr-to-market-themselves.html.

5 Peter Hoffmann, German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 106–125, and Danny Orbach, The Plots Against Hitler (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

6 Henry A. Murray, “Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler,” Cornell University Library/Law Collections/Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection, accessed March 3, 2017, http://lawcollections.library.cornell.edu/nuremberg.

7 Robert Neuman and Helga Koppel, The Pictorial History of the Third Reich (New York: Bantam Books, 1962), 34.

8 Memorandum, George Allen to the Officer in Charge [Interrogation of Frau Paula Wolf], July 12, 1945, 101st Abn. Div. CIC Det. Memorandum to the Officer in Charge July 1–25, 1945, Box 13, U.S. Army: Unit Records, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library.

9 Dr. Bloch was known as “the poor man’s doctor.” For 37 years in Linz, Austria, he treated patients who had little status or wealth. He charged only what his patients could afford to pay him, which often was nothing. In an article in Colliers published in 1941, Bloch said he wondered how the “gentle boy” he knew could become the Führer. Allowed by Hitler to emigrate to the United States, Bloch died in 1945 after asserting that he was “100 percent Jewish.” Before he died, he wondered: “What does a doctor think when he sees one of his patients grow into the persecutor of his race?” George M. Weisz, “Hitler’s Jewish Physicians.” Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, 5, no. 3, (2014): e0023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4128594/

10 Ron Rosenbaum, “Hitler’s Doomed Angel.” Vanity Fair, September 3, 2013, accessed December 28, 2017, www.vanityfair.com/news/1992/04/hitlers-doomed-angel.

11 David Gardner, “Getting to Know the Hitlers,” The Telegraph, January 20, 2002, accessed February 10, 2018, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1382115/Getting-to-know-the-Hitlers.html.

12 Andrew Jacobs, “Mao’s Grandson Rises in Chinese Military,” The New York Times, September 25, 2009, A4.

13 Larry Rohter, “Maker of ‘Shoah’ Stresses Its Lasting Value,” The New York Times, December 6, 2010, C1.

14 Romain Leick and Martin Doerry, “‘Shoah’ Director Claude Lanzmann ‘Death Has Always Been a Scandal,’ Part 3: ‘There Is No Why Here,” Spiegel Online, September 10, 2010, accessed December 4, 2017, www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/shoah-director-claude-lanzmann-death-has-always-been-a-scandal-a-716722-3.html.

15 Leick and Doerry, “‘Shoah’ Director Claude Lanzmann.”

16 Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vii.

17 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Adolf Hitler Issues Comment on the ‘Jewish Question,’” Timeline of Events, accessed February 16, 2018, www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/before-1933/adolf-hitler-issues-comment-on-the-jewish-question.

18 and death camp statistics provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed February 19, 2018, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193.

19 Philip Hyland, et al. “A Psycho-Historical Analysis of Adolf Hitler: The Role of Personality, Psychopathology, and Development,” Psychology & Society, 4, no. 2, (2011): 58–63.

20 The account of Hitler’s “hysterical blindness” is taken from Thomas Weber, Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Dalya Alberge, “Hitler’s War Boast Exposed as a Myth,” The Independent, October 21, 2011, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/hitlers-war-boast-exposed-as-a-myth-2373590.html.

21 John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York: Alfred A Knopf, Inc., 1997), 43.

22 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris (New York: WW Norton and Company, 1998), 240.

23 Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, 43.

24 Michael M. Sheng, “Mao Zedong’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder and China’s Road to Disaster,” in Profiling Political Leaders, Cross-Cultural Studies of Personality and Behavior, eds. Ofer Feldman and Lindo O. Valenty (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2001), 120.

25 Dina Kraft, “Hitler Wrote 1923 Book Praising Him, Scholar Says.,” The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2016, A6.

26 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, (1925) 1943), 510.

27 Dorothy Thompson, Kassandra spricht: Antifaschistiche Publizistick 1932–1942 (Leipzig and Weimar, 1988), 41–43 in Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 264.

28 Philip Oltermann, “Eastern front plays greater role than D-day in German memories,” The Guardian, June 5, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• One: Hitler’s Bedfellow
• Two: An Arcane and Secretive Field
• Three: Dangerous Combinations of Traits
• Four: Predict the Tyrant
• Five: “The Nature of His Rule was So Personal”
• Six: Was Mao Zedong a Monster?
• Seven: The “Black Box”
• Eight: “There Must Be People Who Have To Die.” “My People Love Me.” —Idi Amin and Muammar Gaddafi
• Nine: “I Know They Are Conspiring To Kill Me Long Before They Actually Start Planning To Do It.” —Saddam Hussein
• Ten: It Can’t Happen Here
• Eleven: Could It Happen Here?
• Twelve: Conclusions and Warnings
• Appendices
• Sources and Recommended Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Author