A dangerous romantic nut

Although declassified several years ago, the report, written in 1943, has not been widely cited or available to the public, said historians and librarians at Cornell.

Murray diagnoses in Hitler neurosis, hysteria, paranoia, Oedipal tendencies, schizophrenia, ‘‘infinite self-abasement’’ and ‘‘syphilophobia,’’ which he describes as a fear of contamination of the blood through contact with a woman. The document refers only vaguely to its sources, and presents no scientific evidence for its findings.

‘‘There’s a whole lot of what we would now think of as psychobabble in Murray’s article,’’ said Dr Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University School of Medicine, after reviewing the profile. One example, he said, ‘‘was the suggestion that as a child Hitler witnessed his mother and father having sex, which in those days was given great weight as a source of psychological turmoil.’’ The theory has since been discredited.

Murray did not have the benefit of genetic studies, or of more carefully distinguished categories of mental illness established later. ‘‘Almost anyone who appeared crazy was called schizophrenic back then, and people didn’t make distinctions between schizophrenia, for example, and manic depression,’’ or bipolar disorder, Stone said.

In a more recent psychological profile of Hitler, the neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Fritz Redlich argued in his 1998 book, ‘‘Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet,’’ that while paranoid and troubled, the dictator was probably not mentally ill.

Murray himself was a controversial figure. Returning to Harvard after the war, he was involved in psychological experiments from 1959 to 1962 in which a stress test similar to one the OSS used to assess recruits was administered to unwitting student volunteers.

Among them was the young Theodore Kaczynski, a student at Harvard who later became known as the “Unabomber”. Lawyers for Kaczynski, who pled guilty in 1998 to the letter bomb attacks, traced some of his emotional instability and fear of mind control to his role as a subject in those tests. Still, historians say, the spirit of Hitler is alive and infused with morbid detail in Murray’s pages. A frustrated romantic who loved painting castles and temples, who was enthralled with architecture, the growing boy developed also ‘‘a profound admiration, envy and emulation of his father’s masculine power and a contempt for his mother’s feminine submissiveness”. According to Murray’s account, ‘‘Hitler’s conspicuous actions have all been in imitation of his father, not his mother.’’

The 1943 psychological assessment also includes advice for how the government should handle Hitler were he to be captured and what name to give him when talking to his defeated countrymen.

Barring a deadly palace coup or insanity, Murray speculated that Hitler would arrange to have himself killed by a German or a Jew, to complete the myth of the hero betrayed. Or he would retreat to his bunker and, in dramatic fashion, shoot himself. In the spring of 1945, as far as historians can determine, that is exactly what he did. —NYT