ABSTRACT
The chapter recounts how fundamentalism as a term was born in America in the early twentieth century, derived from a series of pamphlets on “The fundamentals” of the Christian faith, published in the 1910s. These publications formulated a strict commitment to the belief that the Bible was infallible and historically accurate. When the debates sparked by fundamentalism reached Norway, the psychologist and philosopher Ingjald Nissen responded by providing an account of fundamentalism, both Christian and scientific, as characterised by the tendency to render concepts absolute and an unusual confidence in logical inference. In the early 1930s, he came to believe that National Socialism, which was on the rise, was related to a similar mentality. Nissen resorted to Adler’s theory of the inferiority complex; feelings of inferiority, he argued, would drive the individual to accept compensatory ideas, logical and conclusive reasoning being the most compelling. The compensatory superstructure protects the individual against feelings of inferiority, and its construction and flaws are more or less hidden from consciousness. This was also a psycho-social mechanism; the creation of feelings of inferiority in the masses that were fed with compensatory ideology could explain the large scale growth of National Socialism. This view guided Nissen’s 128analysis not only of Nazism, but also of dogmatic, scientifically inspired movements, such as the “orthodox” psychoanalytic movement. The author argues that Ingjald Nissen’s work exposes an important kinship between Alfred Adler and Hans Vaihinger’s ideas, and points to a possible reading of Nissen’s books as a warning against contempt for weakness and against holding strength and superiority as ideals. An obsession with masculine strength and a fear of weakness and the feminine can be observed in today’s fundamentalists and fascists, which could be seen as a frustrated and exaggerated version of tendencies found deep in mainstream culture.
