The Dictatorships of the 20th Century and their Origins in the Pre- and Perinatal Period

Psychotherapeutic experience has established adults can and do re-enact unprocessed childhood experience over the course of their lives. However, on the collective-psychological level, this has been studied almost exclusively within the framework of psychohistory. It is this reflection that allows us to shed more light on a number of incomprehensible aspects of political and social life, and to even find some inspiration for how to deal with these enactments. Pre- and perinatal, infantile, and early childhood experiences occur in an existential, emotional, pre-lingual level; retentive memory archives them in exactly this way. This article addresses how the violent acts of Stalinist communism and Hitler’s Nazism were re-enactments of violence and abuse that the members of the Russian and German societies experienced around and after birth, manifesting the perpetrator cycle intergenerationally.