Wounded Monster
Hitler's Path from Trauma to Malevolence
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA ISBN: 0761824162

Few authors who have written about Hitler have understood the deeply damaging effects of psychic trauma on his private life and the way he functioned in the public sphere. Nearly all major biographers have neglected the importance of Hitler's childhood trauma and his later combat trauma during World War I. In Wounded Monster, Dorpat demonstrates how extreme emotional and physical abuse from his father, and his unusually long combat service during the Great War became the most formative influences of his life, resulting in severe, life-long, psychiatric disorders, including Borderline Personality Disorder and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. It is the first book to apply contemporary trauma theory to explain Hitler's malevolence.

This psychiatric biography of Hitler is the only work to discuss the central importance of his vulnerability to shame emotions, as well as the trauma-induced construction of an extensive repertoire of mainly unconscious mechanisms (including fight and flight) for the avoidance of feelings of shame.