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The essence
of metaphor according to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is
"understanding one thing in terms of another." The organization
of knowledge occurs when a "source domain" gets mapped onto a
"target domain," allowing us to make meaningful deductions. The
research of Lakoff and Johnson focuses on how "Structures of our
bodily experience work their way up into abstract meanings and structures
of thought." Bodily experiences get mapped onto schemas that shape
cognition and perception.
My study of Hitler's Ideology (2008, see below) represents an analysis of
embodied metaphors contained within Hitler's writings and speeches.
Nazism revolved around Hitler's conception of Germany as an enormous
national organism or body politic. Hitler imagined that Germany was suffering
from a "disease within the body politic" caused by Jewish
bacteria. In order to save the life of the nation, it was necessary to
destroy the source of Germany's disease. Genocide represented the acting
out of an immunological fantasy.
Insofar as knowledge is organized when a source domain gets mapped into a
target domain, it follows that Hitler's perception of a disease within
the body politic articulated a disease that Hitler experienced within his
own body. What was the nature of Hitler's (psychosomatic) disease? How
does the suffering of human beings get projected into culture, creating
diseases such as war and genocide?
JUST RELEASED (2008) FROM INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING:
Hitler's Ideology: Embodied Metaphor,
Fantasy, and History
By Richard A. Koenigsberg
PLEASE ASK YOUR LIBRARY TO ORDER A COPY
ISBN: 978-1593118563
![The Fantasy of Oneness and the Struggle to Separate]()
INDIVIDUALS: Please email [email protected]
for information on how you can order your own, personal copy at a special,
discounted rate.
REVIEWS:
"When political figures refer to national crises as 'cancers,'
Richard Koenigsberg feels its no accident. He feels such expressions are
echoes of a nation's hidden belief systems. If you can understand the underlying
fantasies that provide politicians with such rhetoric, then you can
understand the country. This book presents an ingenious technique for
identifying the psychological origins of political and social
events." --The Village Voice
"This work deserves to be an instant classic. With care and caution,
Koenigsberg remains close to the data. Koenigsberg suggests that what is
at stake is larger than an explanation of Hitler, Nazism, or even
nationalism: it is, rather, an explanation of culture itself. Koenigsberg's
genius has unlocked many of the secrets of a timeless drama."
--Howard F. Stein, Professor of Anthropology, University of Oklahoma
Hitler's Human Body and the Body Politic
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