Fascist character reflects weak ego, externalized superego, and ego-alienated id

Evidence

The formula used, partly suggested by the evidence that had been gathered and partly governed by the interpretation and structuring of that evidence, could be described as a psychoanalytic one. It ran something like this: the fascist character was marked by a weak ego, an externalized superego and an ego-alienated id. The fascist’s ego went about on the crutches of stereotype, personification and discriminatory prejudice; he identified himself with power, and appealed to democracy, morality and rationality only in order to destroy them; he satisfied his instincts while upholding moral condemnation of them and their suppression in out-groups and outsiders. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 438

Categorization

• QUESTION: The author flags the theory as ‘partly suggested’ by evidence and ‘partly governed’ by interpretation — an ambiguity about how much is discovery versus projection that later chapters may adjudicate.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism by which identification with power converts calls for democracy and rationality into instruments of their destruction is a genuinely dark, hard-to-summarize claim about authoritarian psychology.
• XREF: Direct theoretical antecedent for Marcuse and Adorno’s later work on internalized versus externalized authority and surplus repression. — connects to: Ego-alien criticisms are detectable by language patterns like retraction; Imagined cruelty in literature mirrors fascism’s actual domination of humans. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 90; Irrational fascist euphoria serves capital yet carries dialectically usable content — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 209 (+8 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Ego-alien criticisms are detectable by language patterns like retraction; Imagined cruelty in literature mirrors fascism’s actual domination of humans. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 90; Irrational fascist euphoria serves capital yet carries dialectically usable content — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 209 (+8 more)