ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to cast a strong light on the diversity and lack of consensus in explanatory narratives about fascism. It explores the elucidatory outcome of psychoanalytic interpretation in the clarification of mazy ideas that dominate theory and research on perversion. The chapter attempts to explain the rise and spread of fascism by means of perverse mechanisms. In the early 1950s, the Frankfurt School axioms had an impact on the nascent, at the time, field of socio-psychological research in North America. Their influence is conspicuous in the configuration of the famous “authoritarian personality” theory, the product of collaboration between different researchers. In the light of such theoretical works that emerged during or soon after the end of the Second World War, different discursive means contoured the nexus between fascism and perversion. The validity of the stereotype and its precarious impact on the social representation of a rather complicated ideological construct, such as fascism, is questionable.
