Fascism is a psychic plague: authoritarianism as a disease of the soul.

Fascism is less a political ideology than a form of collective psychosis – a “disease of the psyche,” as Carl Gustav Jung defined it in the 1930s, when he observed the rise of Nazism in Europe. It is not merely a regime of power, but an emotional possession of the masses, an eruption of unconscious and archaic forces that find, in politics, the perfect stage to manifest themselves.

Jung viewed totalitarianism as a collective psychic epidemic: an emotional contagion that spreads when societies lose their symbolic and spiritual reference points. In his essay wotan (1936), he describes Nazi Germany as dominated by an ancient archetype – the Germanic god Wotan, lord of war and trance. “A god took possession of the Germans,” he wrote. It was the irruption of instinctive, irrational forces that transformed an entire people into a mass to be manipulated by autocratic leaders.

These psychic epidemics, Jung warned, are more dangerous than physical ones: “The greatest threat to civilization does not come from bombs, but from collective mental illnesses that can destroy a nation.” When fear, resentment, and the need for belonging become the driving forces of public life, reason dissolves and the individual abdicates their autonomy. The result is fascism – or, more broadly, authoritarianism as a symptom of psychic imbalance.

Authoritarianism as a symptom of imbalance

History shows that, in times of crisis, societies seek messianic leaders: figures who promise to restore lost order, return security, and redeem the nation. This emotional appeal, more than a political one, stems from collective anxiety and symbolic collapse. Authoritarianism, therefore, is the mirror of a sick social soul.

Wilhelm Reich, a contemporary of Jung and a dissenter from Freud, arrived at a similar diagnosis by a different route. The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), he defined fascism as “the political expression of the authoritarian character structure.” For him, totalitarian regimes flourish in societies where repression – sexual, emotional, and moral – produces submissive and resentful individuals. Repressed vital energy is converted into obedience and hatred. “The emotional plague,” Reich wrote, “is the disease that transforms fear into devotion and frustration into fanaticism.”

If Jung saw fascism as an eruption of the collective unconscious, Reich saw it as a crystallization of individual repression. Both, however, converged: authoritarianism is born from the same psychic terrain – the inability to deal with freedom, the shadow of fear, the refusal of complexity.

From mass psychosis to diffuse control

After 1945, thinkers from the Frankfurt School – Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse – realized that the instinctual forms of fascism had survived within democracy itself. Modern authoritarianism, they said, disguises itself under the mask of freedom. Marcuse's concept of "repressive tolerance" describes this new regime in which control is exercised not through coercion, but through the saturation of desire. The individual believes himself to be free, but thinks, consumes, and desires what the system prescribes.

More than half a century later, this logic has intensified. Digital networks, the spectacle of polarization, and the rhetoric of fear recreate, on a global scale, the same emotional dynamics of classical totalitarianism. Hatred, resentment, and the need for belonging become mental viruses spreading at high speed. Fascism reappears – not as a party or doctrine, but as a diffuse psychic state.

The antidote: consciousness and individuation

For Jung, the only antidote to psychic epidemics is individuation – the process of strengthening individual consciousness and ethical discernment. Only an autonomous psyche can resist the seduction of the masses and recognize the destructive power of dark archetypes. Reich, in turn, believed that true freedom required transforming the social and family structures that reproduce fear and repression. Both knew that the fight against authoritarianism begins within each person. Every time an individual renounces their moral responsibility and surrenders their autonomy in exchange for security, space is opened for the return of the dark gods of history.

Fascism, in short, is less a political regime than a fever of the soul. When fear dominates and reason gives way, the contagion spreads. Recognizing its psychic roots is to understand that no society – however democratic it may consider itself – is immune to relapse.

As Jung warned, "psychic epidemics are infinitely more dangerous than physical ones, for they kill not bodies, but entire cultures."