The struggle for democracy

The Struggle for Democracy is a book published in 2002 by the psychoanalyst Arno Gruen . Although it was started in May 2001, the work is strongly influenced by the events of September 11, 2001 . It deals with the causes of human destructiveness and its manifold forms.

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Gruen describes the peculiarities of right-wing radicalism on the basis of numerous quotes from neo-Nazis and looks behind the mentality of these people and tries to manifest what has made them what they are. He notes that violent criminals do not think about their past by themselves and recognize themselves as victims of their family situation, but instead as victims of current conspiracies.

In Gruens' view, right-wing radicalism, like all forms of human destructiveness, goes back to childhood and forms of upbringing that prevent children from developing healthily and separate them from their feelings. Gruen describes this as "alienation from one's own".

According to Gruen, the reason for this lies in the obedience and lovelessness that such children experience from their parents. Because of his infantile weakness, the child has to suppress the awareness of the lack of love on the part of his parents, because he could not live with the thought of not being loved.

When looking at the general violence in our society one must - of course - also deal with the people who rebel against grievances. Gruen again cites upbringing as the reason for the difference between conformists and rebels. While the neo-Nazi experienced a strongly authoritarian upbringing , the left-wing rebel was spoiled by his parents and, according to Gruen, also experienced a form of abuse and lovelessness that was only hidden behind a loving facade. Gruen describes empathy as the “antidote to the inhuman” . It is essential for living together in a society and is the only effective protection against atrocities.

Arno Gruen refers in his book to an investigation by the English psychiatrist Henry Dieks , who was a brigadier general in World War I and who carried out his work with a thousand German prisoners of war. He found that about ten to fifteen percent of prisoners were "hardcore" Nazis, that about forty percent were in the middle, neither on one side nor the other, and that ten to twelve percent were opponents active in the army the Nazis were. He also mentions a statement from Winnicott , an English psychoanalyst, who had come to a similar conclusion: about thirty percent of the population have a childhood that really jeopardizes "their own" and walled in, and another thirty percent have a childhood development in which their personality is seen and encouraged by parents, and then there is those forty percent in the middle who have a mixed development in which they have experienced both encouragement and rejection. Gruen writes literally: “I think our big problem and our big task is that we have to try to reach the people in the middle, the people who experienced affirmation and negation in their childhood and therefore full of conflicts with theirs own freedom. We have to be attentive to these people and confirm and strengthen their positive inner parts. That, I think, is the real work in maintaining democracy. "