ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud's comments on the Soviet Union, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany cannot be taken as a critique of authoritarianism per se. He argued that throughout history breakthroughs to a higher and more rational cultural system had been initiated by outstanding individuals who devoted themselves to a higher purpose and managed to mesmerize the masses to do the same. Freud justified his authoritarian position by the universalization of the father-son relationship into a prototypical mould underlying all political formations. As he emphasized in Civilization and Its Discontents, utilitarian considerations of interest and expediency are not strong enough to overcome what he called the 'primary mutual hostility of human beings'. Freud's explanatory scheme invokes the resurrected primal father as the ground of social cohesion which brings people together. Freud's models of the mind and his theories of therapy, history and society posit a tripartite dialectic, in which one pole is formed by absolutist types of rule, whose demands are excessively austere.
