Intelligence Profiling There Were Numerous

Intelligence Profiling

There were numerous attempts over the years to draw an accurate psychological portrait of Adolf Hitler. As one should expect, among the first, there is a document compiled for the American Intelligence during World War II. The Americans needed to know their enemy more intimately in order to understand his actions, and more importantly to foresee future ones and try to prevent the phenomenon from happening elsewhere. Its author, the psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, supported by a few other specialists, undoubtedly draws the conclusion that Hitler was suffering from a form neurosis. "A survey of the raw material, in conjunction with our knowledge of Hitler's actions as reported in the news, was sufficient to convince us that he was, in all possibility, a neurotic psychopath." (Langer, "Mind of Adolf Hitler").

It is clear to everyone today that no matter how neurotic a dictator can be, he won't be able to accede and hold to power unless there were not some major deficiencies in the minds of people of the respective country. Historical events have their important contribution, too. Hitler was the fruit of his own people and times. First, there are the circumstances of his childhood. As all the historians and psychologists concluded in their researches over Hitler's personality, the information about this period in his life is scarce and indirect. As Langer mentions in his report, only a few lines in "Mein Kanpf" refer to Hitler's childhood and they are not exactly referring to his own childhood, but generally speaking to that of the working class of the time he was born. The fact that he was very careful never to give details about his early stages of life and that the public never found out anything he didn't want people to know beside the official propaganda, is raising big question marks over his life as a child. The most important period in a human's life, according to Freud, the first few years, seem to have been spent on a battle field where the parties were the parents: "Among the five children there is a boy, let us say, of three... When the parents fight almost daily, their brutality leaves nothing to the imagination; then the results of such visual education must slowly but inevitably become apparent to the little one. Those who are not familiar with such conditions can hardly imagine the results, especially when the mutual differences express themselves in the form of brutal attacks on the part of the father towards the mother or to assaults due to drunkenness." (Langer, "Mind of Adolf Hitler"). He also seems ha have been his mother's favorite and the beneficiary of generous flows of love from her part, contrary to his father's severity. Langer also draws the conclusion that Hitler was influenced in a very serious degree by his father's personality and often confusing way of behaving. His father's deeds seem to contradict themselves in his attempt to present an entirely different image to the society than what he really was at home: an unreliable drunk who physically and verbally abused all the members of his family.

As Langer also points out in his study, Hitler looked in his first adult years as a soldier to the prominent male figures to replace his father authority, just as many Germans looked at him, later.

His sentimental involvements are also casting some light on the roots of his neurotic mind. His sexual life is impossible to be described because the reliable sources are claiming he was absolutely normal from this point-of-view, while others are trying to prove quite the contrary. Fact is that all his partners were women at least twenty years younger than he was and they all attempted suicide at one point or another. (Waite, Adolf Hitler's Guilt Feelings: A Problem in History and Psychology, p. 234)