Psychobiography/personology

In December 1620, Dorothy May Bradford fell off the Mayflower and drowned off the coast of Cape Cod. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, fictional and historical accounts began reporting her death as a suicide, suggesting without any real evidence that she was involved in a love triangle, or that she was not prepared to cope with the harsh realities of colonial life. The narrative of her alleged suicide is so pervasive that even scholars who reject the notion often mention it as a possibility. This essay argues that, in seeking to give Bradford a voice, readers inadvertently erase Bradford's agency, instead creating a caricature of a "Pilgrim" wife and mother. Reframing Bradford's death using the lens of psychohistory forces critics to interrogate the underlying stereotypes about Pilgrim woman-and motherhood that inform speculations about her death, as well as the latent misogyny in accounts that primarily identify colonial women as struggling with mental health issues. This essay explores the limits of analyzing Dorothy Bradford's mental health and challenges us to remember all of Plymouth's colonists as fully-realized people, with complex physical and mental health.

Jung’s archetypes have been subject to numerous research studies. The trickster is an aspect of the shadow archetype in its negative traits, representing the shadowy sides of flexibility, fluidity, wit and ingenuity. The trickster is viewed as an embodiment of contradictions and dualities and is associated with a force which serves as a balancing agent, challenging convention. The author reflects on the trickster archetype and its implications in the life of Michael Jackson, an American leader in the music industry, who became one of the most famous pop icons in the world, the “King of Pop”. By reflecting on his life development and on selected outstanding events, the author explores the way in which the trickster archetype affected the success and failure of the star. This chapter offers an analysis of the moves of Michael Jackson within the context and expression of the trickster archetype and his appeals to overcome boundaries of race, gender, generation and culture flexibly and fluidly with ingenuity, creativity and positive leadership. In the end, however, it is assumed that the strength and power of the trickster archetype active in this celebrity’s life led to failures and ultimately to his premature death. It is argued that the trickster archetype needs to be recognised, seen, acknowledged and understood in its depth to maintain the success of the leader or to transform leadership stories from those of failure to stories of success.

The chapter uses the methods of psychobiography and object relations theory to conduct a single-case study of the life and loves of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003). Leni's childhood home was dominated by her father, who had to be cajoled, and sometimes outright deceived, into supporting his daughter's desire to enter a career in the performing arts. Unfortunately, Leni's success was often her worst enemy: Just as she evaded her father Albert's censorious glance, so did she avoid the barbs of German film critics by gaining Adolf Hitler as her patron until the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. At this time, Leni lost not only her marriage and her film career, but even her sanity, if only for a short time. The chapter shows, through a Fairbairnian analysis, how Leni adapted to the disaster that was her early career by reinventing herself as a photographer of African tribes. Also, in her romantic life, she changed tacks. Compared with her late-in-life companion Horst Kettner, Leni's early romances were relatively shallow either because her counterpart was too involved in promoting her career (Harry Sokal) or too far removed from her working life (Peter Jacob).

Relacje Zygmunta Krasińskiego z jego ojcem Wincentym to temat wielokrotnie podejmowany przez badaczy. Pojawia się już w pierwszych monografi ach życia i twórczości poety, także w pracach biografów, wraca przy okazji opublikowania przez Stanisława Pigonia zbioru ocalałych listów do ojca, jako temat artykułów, a nawet osobnych opracowań 1 . Badacze piszą najczęściej o dramacie wzajemnych relacji, nadmiernym powiązaniu dziejów ojca i syna, zderzeniu odmiennych osobowości, zupełnym poddaniu się syna ojcu, "pokrewieństwie z konieczności" czy "wstrząsającej prawdzie wzajemnego uzależnienia" 2 . Przywołane określenia, chociaż wydają się trafnie opisywać złożony charakter tych relacji, nie pozwalają jednak wniknąć w ich istotę, pozostawiając nas na powierzchni wydarzeń.

Innovative musician, producer and songwriter Walter Becker (1950-2017) wielded humor to distance himself from a traumatic childhood and to bind himself to a peer group that shared his skewed, wry worldview. Following years of struggle at the fringes of the music business, Becker achieved worldwide success as co-founder of the platinum-selling band Steely Dan. By the end of the 1970s, however, Steely Dan was defunct, and Becker retreated to the Polynesian-American subculture of Maui, Hawaii, where he continued to write and record songs that tackled the orientalist theme of "East meets West" in his inimitable droll style. This chapter takes up Eysenck's psychology of humor as well as various social theorists' assessments of Romantic irony as spectacles through which to view Walter Becker's lifelong struggle to bend his potentially ego-diminishing sardonicism into positive relations with self and others. Positive Psychology 2.0 (PP2) will be called upon to frame the chapter's discussion section, in which it is concluded that Becker was able to mitigate the self-other corrosion that emanated from his hipster-satirist persona by integrating into his art the more earnest, sincere sentiments that sprang from life on his Maui estate, where sustained interaction with family, friends, and artistic collaborators reflected his embrace of a slow-paced, pastoral culture that the Manhattan-born bohemian had earlier dismissed as shallow and vacuous.

In 1978, Jim Jones and over 900 of his followers perished in what has been called "The Jonestown Massacre." This study uses methods of psychobiography and object relations theory to account for Jones' lifelong ambivalence toward those to whom he acted as caregiver. The author proposes a psychological schema he names "nurture failure" to account for Jim Jones' style of leadership, which mixed solicitude with violence in the context of a religious organization that promised to right all of society's wrongs. The means by which this utopia was to be brought about became more and more extreme until the infamous murder/suicide shattered the dream for good. The study's findings expand our understanding of the motivational dynamics that undergird religious leaders' often Januslike relations to their followers.

This short piece hopes to shed some much-needed light on the teachings of Jim Jones by applying the psychobiographical theory of nurture failure to the troubled religious leader's early years. The essay concludes  that hiding behind Jones' psychopathy was a childhood of abuse and neglect punctuated by occasional pulses of idealistic rhetoric from his mother. This combination became lethal once the child Jones began to think of himself as a messiah whose task was to save humanity from limitations that could be attributed either to a deficiency in the environment or to a deficiency in the wills of his followers.

Overall, Daily’s book is well-written, and supported by over three hun-dred endnotes. At bottom, however, it offers little original insight into Ellen G. White’s psychological profile, and, in my opinion, fails in its proposed task to be “honest and fair” and to let readers make up their own minds. Daily draws all the conclusions, taking his “con artist” mantra to its last implications, both to the detriment of Ellen G. White’s legacy, as well as his own as historian. Let the reader beware of taking Daily’s conclusions at face value. Daily’s weak case against White will likely result in stronger defences of her.

In a somewhat journalistic approach, this article explores the opportunities of (psycho)biographical analysis lying in the collections of the "Sammlung Prinzhorn". It argues, that studying the artworks of psychiatric patients of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allows for much closer approaches to the life and being of a person than any traditional biographical research.

Quine's Unconscious Autobiography " When one is alone and it is night and so dark and still that one hears nothing and sees nothing but...the slow irresistible approach of the wall of darkness which will eventually engulf everything you love, possess, wish, strive, and hope for-then all our profoundities about life slink off to some undiscoverable hiding place, and [dread] envelops the sleepless one like a smothering blanket (C.G. Jung)1 In this short paper I will discuss Quine's life, as described in his autobiography, what his description of his life revealed about his psychological attitude; and speculate about how his psychology may have influenced his philosophical outlook. To do this I will demonstrate how key facts about Quine's life as described in his biography are mirrored in his philosophical system. In particular it will be shown that Quine's inability to deal with emotions were mirrored by a strange avoidance of any real dealing with emotions in his philosophical theorising. One notable fact about Quine that becomes apparent when reading his autobiography is his persistent narrow obsessions in things like stamp collecting, and map making when he was younger. This behaviour continued throughout his life as evidenced by his travels which seemed more about ticking off that he had been to a new country rather than something to enjoy for its own sake. Quine even admitted as much: " I detect two deep traits which the reader will already have divined from my compulsion in childhood to compile, from my preoccupation with political boundaries, from my early collecting of stamps, and later collection of countries, and from my professional concern for mathematical elegance: namely I am orderly, and I am frugal " (Quine: The Time of My Life p. 476) Another notable feature of Quine's psychology was the difficulty that he had with dealing with intense negative emotions: " It was settled that Naomi would come to Harvard with me and we would marry. Nothing was said to my parents on the point. This was not from fear of disapproval, but from diffidence over matters of sentiment. Actually I was not eager for the marriage. At one point sitting with Naomi in a car in Portage Path, I even ventured to voice my doubts, but a stronger will prevailed. I tend to shy away from present emotional stress

This study employs a corpus-based approach to make justifiable psychodynamic interpretations based on the statistical relationships that exist between linguistic variables in written texts. The text examined is Hitler's (1943) "Mein Kampf", which was assessed on the strengths of associations between body boundary imagery, primordial thought language and emotional language. The results largely confirm the research hypotheses identifying the use of body boundary functions as a defence mechanism associated to borderline and narcissistic organization for separating trauma from conscious awareness and for containing a fragile self-image and body schema. The discussion interprets the language pattern by drawing on various psychoanalytic theories in conjunction with Hitler's biographical notes and Langer's (1973) psychohistorical study of Hitler's life.

Religious-mystical and psychotic altered states of consciousness (ASC) are assumed to share common phenomenological and psychobiological features, including regressive cognition and changes in body boundary awareness. This study aimed to assess the frequency and strength of associations between primordial thought language and body boundary imagery in the discourses of mystical and psychotic-mystical ASC. The mystical discourse examined here is Saint Teresa of Avila's (1567) mystical writing "The Way of Perfection", and the psychotic discourse is Daniel Paul Schreber's (1903) autobiographical writing "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness". The mystical text differs from the psychotic text in the frequency of primordial thought language and penetration imagery. Positive associations were also found between primordial thought language and penetration imagery, and barrier and penetration imagery, whereas the psychotic text yielded a positive association between barrier and penetration imagery only.

In Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813–1855) philosophical psychology, love is not a feeling or a shared mental state per sé; instead, love is a self-relation that is grounded in a unified and transcendent principle beyond self and society. This chapter seeks, through a Kleinian psychobiography of Kierkegaard, to sketch an outline of a psychology of love beyond the paradigm of persons-in-relation, which is dominant in social science research today. We will draw upon Søren Kierkegaard’s troubled relationship with his father Michael Kierkegaard to illustrate just how the transcendent function of the superego in Freud, which was taken over somewhat by the overarching concept of phantasy in Kleinian thought, can be seen as a gesture toward radical transcendence. In our concluding remarks, we will touch upon Donald W. Winnicott’s “non-communicating self” as a perhaps unconscious elaboration of Freud’s transcendent primal father.

The dark sides of personalities have gained importance during the past two decades. Psychobiography deals with the life of extraordinary individuals throughout the life span by applying selected theories to analyse specific life aspects. This study uses Theodore Millon’s (1990, 2011) personality theory to explore the life of Ferdinand Karl Piëch (1937–2019), an Austrian engineer and business executive who was the chairman of the executive board of the Volkswagen Group (1993–2002) and the chairman of the supervisory board from 2002 to 2015. Piëch was also known for having a complex and controversial personality. This study aims to explore the life and work of Ferdinand Karl Piëch through the lens of Millon’s personality theory. This study has four specific aims. Firstly, to provide an accurate and objective description of Piëch’s life history. Secondly, to formulate an accurate description of Piëch’s personality on the basis of existing biographical data. Thirdly, to interpret Piëch’...

This study applied psychobiography to explore the personal development of Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera – and particularly focus on psychological disintegration. For the evidence, we examined primary and secondary works on his life history with special attention to his literary works. Findings indicate that his early writings were autobiographical in nature, chronicling lived poverty, war and violence experiences. Later writings were somehow surrealistic and unstructured, marking a culmination of significant personal disintegration that started in early childhood. Other ancillary biographical evidence suggests self-perceptions as a cult-like figure, and what appears to be a limited social interest.

Albert Camus (1913–1960) stands as one of the famous pioneers in the French history of existentialism. He was a novelist, political activist, essayist and editor, as well as a journalist and playwright. Although he was described as philosopher, he often denied this ascription. Through his professional and creative expressions, Camus focused on questions of existentialism, the aspect of the human fate, and meaning in life, death and suicide. These existential questions have experienced a strong revival during the Covid-19 occurrence. This psychobiographical approach aims at understanding Albert Camus' life and work in the context of the terror management theory of Becker and Wong's 4 pillars of PP2.0 theory, namely virtue, meaning, resilience and well-being. Both theories have gained importance during the pandemic. Based on the findings of the research study, implications for future research in the context of the pandemic are given. Finally, this article provides recommendations and best practices on how to approach the Covid-19 pandemic from a terror management theory and PP2.0 perspective in the light of Albert Camus' philosophy. The contribution of this psychobiography is two-fold: first, it expands psychobiographical research on Albert Camus from absurdist and existentialist theories and thereby expands the theoretical framework of psychobiographies. Second, it aims at strengthening the importance of theoretical psychobiographical investigations and their application in real-world scenarios to address complex contemporary challenges on the basis of existentialist positive psychology theories.

This article explores the impact of L. Ron Hubbard's family relations on his religious philosophy, particular attention being given to the Xenu doctrine and its "R6" christology. The possibility that Hubbard was abused as a child is examined, as is the Scientology founder's probable mental disorders. ERRATUM: "Gerry Anderson" in footnote 1 should be "Gerry Armstrong."

Psychobiography is a qualitative, idiographic research
method; it is the explicit and systematic application of psychological
theories and models in writing biographies and
analyzing the life history, activity and personality of historically
significant persons. This method has been used in the
investigation of eminent creativity for more than a hundred
years from now. It was originally created by Sigmund Freud;
he and his followers made it popular among psychoanalysts
in the first half of the 20th century, meanwhile American personality
psychologists like GW Allport, HA Murray or Erik
H Erikson also contributed to its development. Due to the
hegemony of quantitative-positivist research in the 1960s
and the 1970s this method was not favored, but-owing to
the success of narrative psychology-from the 1990s we can
perceive the renaissance of life history approach and psychobiography
in personality psychology. In this article I will
try to demonstrate that the application of psychobiography
in the training of psychologists could have countless beneficial
effects. The most important reason for it that using psychobiography
in training could alleviate some major intellectual
contradictions between university training and clinical
practice, and it could also contribute to the development of
psychology as a “rigorous science”. In order to understand
the importance of this question first I have to analyze the
scientific differences between clinical practice and academic
research on ontological and epistemological levels.

Keywords
Psychobiography, Training of psychology students, Clinical
practice, Epistemology

The Spanish Flu was only one short episode in a long line of illnesses for Edvard Munch (1863-1944), but it gives us an example of an artist who incorporated a pandemic into his art, and, once we relate his paintings about the 1918 Pandemic to his central works, we see just how this greatest of Norwegian artists used his creative work to frame his own past into a more positive, or at least consoling, view of life.

This volume offers insights into contemporary trends and perspectives in psychobiographical research. It applys new theoretical and methodological frameworks and presents discourses on psychobiography from transdisciplinary backgrounds and various socio-cultural contexts, displaying the new state-of-the-art, new trends and themes in psychobiography. The book outlines psychobiography’s outstanding contribution to psychology from 36 internationally reputable authors. It also presents the ideas of five outstanding psychobiographers through interview excerpts. This book is a must for researchers, lecturers and practitioners in the field of psychology and social sciences interested in the use of new psychological theories and methodologies in life-span research.

Robert Langs is well known in Jungian circles for his early studies of derivative communication, communication styles and the analytic frame. Less well known is Langs' more recent research rooting psychic conflict in death anxiety and death-related trauma. Freud on a Precipice introduces the reader to Langs' latest work in the form of an interesting and at times gripping narrative. Furthermore, the book is of special interest to Jungians because it creatively uses or parallels certain ideas of Jung and simultaneously invites a new application of Jungian theory to the roots of psychic conflict.

This article reviews the history of the development of the psychobiography in Taiwan.It is a story about Shing-Shiang Ting"s encounter with psychobiography .It is also a story about psychobiography which occurs in the Department of Psychology at Fu-Jen Catholic University. It attempts to establish a" new psychobiography" through reflecting between present and past, east and west. Furthermore, it is also a story which goes from strength to strength of psychobiography.

Innovative musician, producer and songwriter Walter Becker (1950-2017) wielded humor to distance himself from a traumatic childhood and to bind himself to a peer group that shared his skewed, wry worldview. Following years of struggle at the fringes of the music business, Becker achieved worldwide success as co-founder of the platinum-selling band Steely Dan. By the end of the 1970s, however, Steely Dan was defunct, and Becker retreated to the Polynesian-American subculture of Maui, Hawaii, where he continued to write and record songs that tackled the orientalist theme of "East meets West" in his inimitable droll style. This chapter takes up Eysenck's psychology of humor as well as various social theorists' assessments of Romantic irony as spectacles through which to view Walter Becker's lifelong struggle to bend his potentially ego-diminishing sardonicism into positive relations with self and others.

Throughout Donald Fagen’s life, he used the concept of bohemianism to position himself vis-à-vis his family, peers, and the mainstream culture as a whole. A psychobiographical examination of the subject with an object relations emphasis found that Fagen used his role as a successful musician to confer on himself a sense of legitimacy and to distance himself from the strictures of conventional, “bourgeois” existence. However, by the end of the first phase of his band Steely Dan’s recording career, Fagen found himself in a musical, romantic, and social dead end, his bohemianism’s promise of self-contained aesthetic completion being revealed as a mistaking of the ideal for the real. This chapter shows that Fagen recovered meaning in life, and thus a multilayered positivity, through psychotherapy, which led to the singer’s reentry into the worlds of music, family, and friendship by tempering the perfectionism and isolationism concealed within his bohemian self-image. Ironically, Fagen’s reality principle gained in strength as he loosened his grip on his mistaken self-identification as a bohemian; Fagen’s self-reformulation late in life allowed him to turn a category error about the artist’s role in modernity into a positive adaptation to a society that requires an adult to play multiple, often contradictory, roles.

Systems psychodynamic (SP) perspectives have become vibrant in psychological and interdisciplinary research settings. Individuals are described within systems and system dynamics to deepen the understanding of the conscious and unconscious dynamics impacting on cognitive, symbolic, affective and behavioural processes within such systems. In across-the-lifespan research studies of individuals, psychobiographical research has become transdisciplinary since the 20th century. This lifespan research, which focuses specifically on exploring the life of historically and contemporary relevant and extraordinary individuals, considers the lives of writers, artists and entrepreneurs, and their creative works, by using psychological theories. An SP perspective, with its roots in psychoanalysis, fosters an understanding of the dynamics between individuals and system elements across the lifespan and might contribute to a deeper understanding of the (un-)conscious dynamics within individuals and s...

Krankheit 14-1 Moses Mendelssohn und die Krankheit der Gelehrten : psy-chologisch-biographische Studie / Hans-Joachim Schwarz ; Renate Schwarz.-1. Aufl.-Hannover : Wehrhahn, 2014.-410 S. : Ill., graph. Darst. ; 23 cm.-ISBN 978-3-86525-355-2 : EUR 34.00 [#3507]

This paper explores the personality profiles of the Nigerian politician as antithetic to the enthronement of participatory democracy in Nigeria. It contends that the antidemocratic and corruptive behaviour of the Nigerian politician is hinged on a lack of sterling personality traits of these Nigerian politicians. The paper argues that although the behaviour impede on national growth and development; nonetheless, the behaviour are a result of entrenched poverty, political ignorance and political alienation of the civic public. The paper, thus, suggests political education, self-enfranchisement and friendly and virile political environment for the production, development and growth of Nigerian politicians with deep vision and sublime mission to turn around the political misfortunes of Nigeria.

Though Charles Baudelaire often has been named as the quintessential modern poet, few scholars have been able to shed light on the poet’s religious beliefs as they relate to his art and life. A psychobiographical examination of the subject with a Kleinian emphasis found that Baudelaire forged a personal space for meaning making via his notion of “sacred prostitution”, according to which the human being in his finitude relates to the divine through aesthetic productivity and pious praxis, the goal being expiation of sins, or, in Klein’s language, reparation. The chapter traces how Baudelaire’s familial and professional struggles were partially solved through his attempts to forge a dynamic equilibrium between such classic religio-philosophical binaries as conventional-unconventional and intimacy-aloofness.

The article presents a model of personalist biography that stands in opposition to the postmodernist one. The personalist biography model refers in terms of anthropology to Viktor E. Frankl, the founder of logotherapy (‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’) and the key thinkers of the personalist movement: Karol Wojtyła, Mieczysław Krąpiec, Józef Tischner and Czesław S. Bartnik. Stressing the subjective aspect of biography, the personalist model allows for capturing the personal character of the created biographical portrait of a given person while also taking into account the postulates formed by the critics of biographical writing in its traditional and later structuralist forms, especially the postulates related to the requirement of biographer’s objectivity and neutrality. The personalist biography model also takes into consideration the insights of the French theorists on the inevitable involvement of the researcher in the reconstructed picture of a life and the consideratio...

Family, school, church, community—each and all failed to nurture the innocent boy Jim Jones. Through various formative experiences, Jones realized that, though he could not depend upon anyone to fulfill his needs, another path lay open to him: through the power of his own thought, he could ignore his own deprivation while meeting the needs of others. This article explores how Jim Jones translated his own quasi-religious experiences early in life into socio-religious doctrines that he later used in founding Peoples Temple.

113 Pina Bauscht lehet szeretni és nem szeretni, de az biztos, hogy olyan saját uni-verzumot teremt, melynek hatása alól nem lehet kibújni. Felmerül a kérdés, hogyan jött létre ez a sajátos kozmosz, mi az a forrás, ahonnan elindult, ami arra predesztinálhatta, hogy a 20. század egyik legjelentősebb és legsajátosabb táncszínházi formavilágát teremtse meg? Melyek azok a mozgatórugók, melyek a Németországban született táncost korunk egyik legerőteljesebb hatású ko-reográfusává, színházi emberévé tették? Ha meg akarjuk mindezt érteni, először meg kell vizsgálnunk, mi az, amit teremtett, mik a legfontosabb és leglényegibb jellemzői a munkájának, vagyis mi az, ami Bauscht, Bausch-sá teszi? A legfontosabb talán, hogy fő kifejezőeszköze a test, mindaz, ami a test köré fo-nódik, a mozgás, illetve hogy nőként szinte férfimunkát végez, amikor már nem táncosként, hanem koreográfusként, külső teremtő erőként működik egy főleg férfiak által dominált színházi világban. Bízik a testben mint erőben és tömeg-ben, ahol azonban a fő rendezőelv inkább valamely tektonikus erő, mintsem emberi akarat. Nagyon lényeges a bizalom, hit abban, hogy a dolgok összerende-ződnek. Ez a hit jelenik meg, amikor olyan színházi formanyelvet teremt, mely egyedülálló, melynek nincsen előzménye. Bausch színházteremtő, öntörvényű személyiség. Nem az a lényeges mála, hogy mi történik, hanem hogy hogyan, illetve az az esetlegesség, ahogy a dolgok egymás mellé kerülnek, a ritmus, a mintázat, ahogy a darab szövedéke megteremtődik. " Egy adott tér, tánctér új-radefiniálása. A táncosok falba csapódó futamodásaik egyben egy gyönyörű em-beri mozgás hirtelen megszűnését is ábrázolják. A tánc abszolút negatívját. A dí-szlet egyszerre akadály, nyom, jel. (…) Látszik, hogy Bausch nem egy már létező szőnyeget terít ki elénk, hanem újat sző: ám a szövés mozdulatait is, egytől-egyig ábrázolni próbálja. " (Forgách, 2000, 111. és 112.) Az ő tekintete lesz a mérték, a dol-gok végső elrendezője. Meghatározóak a képek és egy különös perspektíva, egy sajátos tér-idő megteremtése. A képek nem leírnak, hanem egyfajta tudatalatti áramlásból keletkeznek, sokszor a szétesés és pusztulás árnyékában. Pina Bausch számomra azért zseniális, mert olyan, mint egy ontológiai kutatás a test és a színház nyelvén. Ahogy ő is megfogalmazza, nem az érdekli, hogyan mozgunk, hanem hogy mi mozgat. Mi választja el a mozgót attól, aki/ami nem

"Reminiscent of the Freudian psychoanalytic assumption that perceives that “the ego is primarily and foremost a bodily ego” (Freud, 1923, p. 26), the corporeal turn of embodiment in cognitive linguistics situates the human body at the intersection between mind and language as a source of unconscious semiotic processes that emerge in early infant socialization experiences concurrent with the development of a coherent self-image, body boundary schema and adaptive affect regulation (Violi, 2012). Psychodynamic theories propose that the development of a weak self-image and body boundary schema, and maladaptive affect regulation stem from dysfunctional early socialization experiences. This study explores the relationship between body boundary imagery, primordial regression and emotion language in Hitler’s (1939) “Mein Kampf”. Special attention was given to the use of body boundary imagery and the fear of penetration with the body container as a double-image of rigid political categories. The Body Type Dictionary (BTD) (Wilson, 2006) assessed the frequency of body boundary imagery and the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) (Martindale, 1975, 1990) measured the frequency of primary process language and emotion language. The strength of associations between the linguistic variables confirmed the research hypotheses indicating that Hitler’s use of body boundary functioned to contain a weak body schema and fragmented self-image, as well as dichotomous cognitive differentiation between “inside and outside, self and others, friends and allies” (Chilton, 1996, p. 415). The discussion interprets Hitler’s intra-psychic processes as embodied in the language pattern by drawing on Langer’s (1973) psychohistorical study of Hitler’s life and psychoanalytic theories."