The Characteristics Of Hitler's Depression And Indolence

7.3.3 Depression and indolence.
The contrast between Hitler’s savage effectiveness, drive and ambition later in his life and this period of drift and passive homelessness has been difficult, biographically, to assimilate. Langer interprets the distinction as a qualitative difference in personality brought about by the psychiatric illness a biological depression. Thus for three or four months between 1909 and 1910 Hitler became a different man, subjectively depressed and hopeless and biologically with altered brain chemistry that materially altered his personality and characteristic way of reacting to his environment. Within this hypothesis – his depression may have been triggered by the combination of the death of his mother and his twice being rejected by the Viennese Academy of Art combined with the narcissistic wound of being penniless in a city with a prominent and affluent middle class with whom he identified but was excluded from, following the drying up of his allowances.

A second possibility is that rather than being depressive, that the period of vagrancy was an exacerbation of his indolence, which was also characteristic. Kershaw links his characteristic daily routine as Chancellor with that when living at home having left school age 16, sleeping late, working desultorily and not at all regularly, the same habit as during

In the first war, this was the Allies; the resolution of his hysteria seems to have been through the creation of an “othered” political class of jewish people and democratic liberals. In the early days of the NSDAP it was the communists, then the Communist/Jewish conspiracy”. Melanie Klein describes the power and ingrained character of such thinking in her description of the “paranoid schizoid position” , the phantasy that safety can only be achieved through the attack and destruction of the bad and dangerous