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Before turning to the catastrophe called Adolph Hitler, we begin by quoting Nietzsche as related in Erwin Staub’s volume: The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence.

With the disappearance of the tail in the evolutionary process along with the gradual appearance of greater cortical development, the thinking brain became also an ontological one. That is, Homo sapien of course retained its animal concern with survival but added to its existential awareness, that of an expectation and tension about death. And from this knowledge and expectation of the certainty of one’s ultimate demise was born what became known as “ontological anxiety,” defined as an existential concern regarding one’s “being” (Kellerman, 2009a)—a concept philosophically discussed by Kierkegaard and also psychologically elaborated by Rollo May (1950, 1983).

This study involved the testing of a new rating instrument designed to measure emotional behavior, and the examination of the correlations between dominance and certain classes of emotional behavior. The sample population was a troop of 7 olive baboons. The rating scale was found to be very effective. Wide individual differences in scores on the 8 dimensions of the scale were detected. Also, there was high interjudge reliability indicating that independent observers can agree on the temperamental characteristics of primates. “Mean time being groomed,” a duration/frequency ratio, more fully reflects the dominance relationship between two animals than any other single index. “Mean time being groomed” was found to correlate significantly with the dimensionsprotection, deprivation, rejection anddestruction. More dominant animals showed less sociability and more aggression than the submissive animals, who showed a great deal of both sociability and fearfulness.

Rorschach measures have been widely used to define two broad personality and affect dimensions, labeled as extratensive and introversive. Extratensive profiles are defined by such characteristics as lability, expansiveness, impulsivity and emotional dyscontrol. Introversive profiles are characterized by the qualities of control, constriction, rigidity, and guardedness. This basic dichotomy is described in detail and related to a theoretical model of emotions, which assumes that specific emotions are the precursors or bases for specific diagnostic conditions. Illustrations of such emotion–diagnosis connections are joy–mania, anger–aggression, fear–passivity, and disgust–paranoia. The projective measures described reveal an inherent systematic organization of Rorschach scoring categories that becomes apparent when considered within this theoretical model of emotions and diagnoses.