Ha, ha, or perhaps Freud weaponized a young Hitler when his parents brought the six year old to him to help with his recurring nightmares.
Of course, the appointment didn't go through. Of course, I mean Freud with his numerous and colossal fuck ups with patients, treating a young Hitler who would go onto entrance and drag the whole of Europe and the rest of the world into the caverns of his subconscious is just too easy. I mean the great theorist of the unconscious treating the future great manipulator of the unconscious is something that is just too...easy.
What would have happened if Sigmund Freud had persuaded Adolf Hitler on to his psychoanalyst's couch? Might World War II, with all its appalling loss of life, have been avoided?
This is the intriguing question posed by a play on Radio 4 called Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mr Hitler.
In calling the subject 'intriguing' I must declare an interest: I wrote this play, with my long-time collaborator Laurence Marks.
We started working on it over ten years ago, originally as a screenplay, after Laurence found an obscure little memoir called Hitler's Youth written in the Fifties by Franz Jetzinger.From this we discovered that, as a small boy, Hitler was taken to the local doctor, suffering from recurring nightmares.
Probably these were caused, at least in part, by the beatings and humiliations administered by his father Alois, a customs officer.
The doctor, (who happened to be Jewish), realised there was nothing he could prescribe which could help young Adolf. Instead he suggested that Klara Hitler take her son to Vienna, where a psychiatrist had just set up the first child psychiatric clinic in Austria.
That psychiatrist, of course, was Sigmund Freud. In fact Hitler was never taken to see Freud - presumably his father thought psychiatry was bunkum, and that a sound thrashing never did anyone any harm. But we wondered, as playwrights should: suppose, just suppose, Klara had taken her son on that train ride to Vienna?
Thus in our play young Adolf is seen by the eminent psychoanalyst, who quickly realises the child has been beaten regularly. Freud implores Klara to stop Alois mistreating the child, but in our play, as in life, she is no match for her brute of a husband, and Alois, embarrassed and humiliated, refuses to let Adolf see Freud again.
In fact - and in our drama - after his parents died, Hitler did return to Vienna when he was a teenager to study art. However, he was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, twice - its verdict being that although he was a competent draughtsman his figure work was poor and lacked a sense of proportion.
Rather than slink back to his smalltown home, young Hitler spent several years in Vienna, scratching a living and reading voraciously - philosophy, mythology, perhaps psychology, too.
It is during this period that in our play we imagine him buying Freud's Interpretation Of Dreams, then boldly introducing himself to the psychoanalyst, in the hope Freud can help him overcome his recurring nightmare of being whipped with his father's belt.
We knew we were taking a sizeable risk attempting this play. To deal dramatically in any way with the life of Hitler is to risk accusations of bad taste.
That we invest our imaginary Hitler-Freud exchanges with a degree of bleak comedy is to court even stronger criticism.
We were also aware that we had no special expertise in the field of psychoanalysis. We tried to compensate by closely consulting with a leading academic, and a brilliant therapist, who both gave us the confidence to speculate whether history might have been different if Hitler had come under the influence of Freud.The key question therefore was: 'Could Freud have helped Hitler?' More importantly, could he have saved Hitler from becoming the murderous monster who still fascinates us so much today?
First we had to consider what Freud would have made of a still unformed Adolf. He would, of course, have identified Hitler's key problem to be his unresolved hatred for his father.
Adolf was certainly brutally treated by Alois. His sister Paula told the biographer John Toland: "It was my brother Adolf who especially provoked my father to extreme harshness, and who got his due measure of beatings every day. He was a rather nasty little fellow and all his father's efforts to beat the impudence out of him were in vain."
Toland recorded that Alois was a drunk 'who often beat the dog until it would cringe and wet the floor'. He even beat Adolf's docile mother, Klara.
When Adolf was 11 he tried to run away from home. His father learned of his plans and locked him in an upstairs room, only for the boy to try to squeeze through a barred window. He couldn't quite make it, so he took off his clothes to try to wriggle through.
When he heard his father's footsteps, he quickly withdrew from the window and draped his nakedness with a table cloth.
This time Alois did not whip the child. Instead he burst into laughter and summoned Klara to come and see the 'toga boy'. The ridicule hurt the young Adolf Hitler more than any beating. But whatever his childhood miseries, as a psychiatric patient Hitler would have presented far more serious challenges than a simple history of child abuse.We know that as a teenager in his home town he had problems socialising, preferring to play with much younger children, organising them in war games in the woods.
He also had intense difficulty forging personal relationships, especially with women. For four years as a student in Vienna he virtually stalked a well-bred Austrian girl, Stefanie, telling his best friend August Kubizek that he would marry her; but not once did he pluck up the courage even to talk to her.
In this period of his life, Hitler was happy to accompany August Kubizek, a music student, to recitals at the homes of wealthy Viennese Jews, where he behaved impeccably. Clearly, Hitler would have had no difficulty in consorting with Dr Freud.
Indeed, in our play, we imagine he becomes almost obsessed with the bourgeois perfection of the Freud family home, even developing a crush on Freud's precocious daughter, Anna. Only 12 or 13, she might have been captivated by this brooding, self-taught young man, with his grand plans to write an opera and become a great painter.
When Anna mentions that the family is about to go to the mountains for the summer, Adolf foolishly believes he has been invited, too.
He turns up unexpectedly, to be firmly put in his place by the doctor. It is at this moment in our play that Hitler's admiration for Freud, as a benign father-substitute, turns into anger and hatred.
It is almost too ironic that the Freuds' summer house really was in the beautiful village of Berchtesgaden, where later on the Fuhrer would build his own mountain retreat, the Eagle's Nest.
Hitler storms out of Berchtesgaden and the Freuds' lives in our play until after World War I. In reality, for several years up to 1914 he slid down the social scale, selling his sketches for a few kronen apiece and living in doss houses.
When he joined the German Army at the outbreak of World War I - he refused to fight for Austria, saying he despised the racial impurity of Austria's Hapsburg Empire - he won the Iron Cross for his bravery as a runner, working alone taking despatches back and forth across the lines.
As the war ground to its dismal climax, Hitler was temporarily blinded by poison gas. He was recovering in a military hospital when a mob of mutinous German soldiers waving red Communist flags invaded the wards and declared that the Kaiser had fled, and Germany had surrendered.
Hitler was struck blind again - a hysterical psychological blindness, presumably, afflicting a man who literally couldn't bear to see his adopted homeland defeated. "I staggered and stumbled back to my ward and buried my aching head between the blankets and the pillow," he later said.
In the play, we take the liberty of bringing Freud, who was employed in the aftermath of war as an inspector of hospitals, into Hitler's ward, where he encourages Adolf to try to regain his health in order to serve his country.
Less than a year later Hitler was back in uniform, almost certainly working as a government informer spying on the activities of those of his fellow soldiers who continued to flirt with Communism.
It was during this time that Hitler joined the tiny political group that evolved inside a dozen or so years into the National Socialist government of Germany.
Although at that time Hitler didn't appear 'mad' in any obvious sense, comrades described him as 'odd' and 'peculiar'.
One soldier said Hitler was an isolated figure who spent long periods sitting alone holding his head in silence. Then suddenly he would leap up and vent a tirade, usually attacking the Jews and Marxists for undermining the war effort.
For Hitler, as for millions of his fellow countrymen, Germany's surrender was so psychologically destabilising that he preferred to convince himself that the war was lost only because a coalition of socialists and Jews sued for peace, 'stabbing in the back' an undefeated German army.
After the war, however, we have him turning up once more at Freud's apartment. This time it is because he is eager to lay his hands on Freud's new book on mass psychology.
Freud was fascinated by the way in which leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky, in revolutionary Russia, used their oratory and their influence of the media to control people yearning for simple solutions in an increasingly complex world.
It is tempting, and credible, to imagine Hitler seizing upon the book as a rabble-rouser's manual. Certainly he developed quickly into a phenomenal and mesmerising public speaker.
So the question is: In the light of Hitler's warped but profound sense of self and destiny, could Freud have 'cured' him? Our technical advisers thought Freud would have defined Hitler as a type of paranoiac. His paintings of Vienna were devoid of human life, as if he was trying to depopulate the world before filling it with his own creations.
Later, after Hitler comes to power, we have him visit the aged Freud, now dying of cancer, to taunt him with the 'triumph of my will'. The Professor has to concede that Hitler is his greatest triumph as well as his greatest failure, for a scared beaten boy was brought to him, who has become the most powerful man in the world.
Yet Freud tells the Fuhrer that the violence he perpetrates upon his innocent victims is essentially a fruitless attempt both to appease his father and overpower him.
We realised from the start that we faced a dilemma familiar to all creators of 'what if?' stories. Audiences for such tales expect novel outcomes. They want to believe, for example, that if King Charles I hadn't been beheaded, England would still be a country of cavaliers and absolute monarchs.
But to suggest Hitler's monstrousness could ever have been 'analysed away', that Freud might have diverted the adolescent Adolf from his genocidal path to become, for example, an art teacher, would be more than wildly speculative: it would feel almost obscene, an insult to the millions of victims of Hitler's war.
Besides, millions of people around the world today regularly consult a dizzying variety of therapists in the hope of obtaining psychological comfort. Most of these individuals find the process helpful, but one can visit a Freudian psychoanalyst five times a week for 20 years without ever being declared 'better'.
Laurence and I know it has become the convention in some quarters to decry the British obsession with World War II. It particularly irks today's blameless Germans that we seem to hark on about the war almost as much now as 30 years ago, when Basil Fawlty did his silly Hitler impression in front of his traumatised hotel guests.
Critics suggest that as a nation we are fascinated only because the war was the last occasion when the United Kingdom did something unarguably good and worthy and brave.
There may be some validity in the criticism; certainly the idea of a 'just war' is a dangerous one. Tony Blair's romantic notions of a 'just war', have led Britain into the carnage and confusion of Iraq today.
However, I feel it would be strange not to be fascinated, and apprehensive, at how someone like Hitler could come to power in a supposedly civilised country.
In any case, Hitler isn't a merely British pre-occupation: the mystery of his inexplicable evil draws every kind of writer; he is the subject of Norman Mailer's latest hefty novel, and I'm told there are more biographies of Hitler in print than of any other historical figure.
Laurence and I have an extra reason to be interested in the life of the Fuhrer. Like all British-born Jews, we wouldn't even have been conceived if Hitler had overcome this country's resistance.
We're all fortunate that today the idea of a Hitler invading our country and rounding up the Jews - not to mention the gypsies, homosexuals and mentally ill - seems almost as unlikely as it did to Freud and the comfortable bourgeois Jews of Vienna in the 1920s, when Hitler was just one of many irritating rabblerousers strutting around Bavaria.
• Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mr Hitler is on Radio 4 at 2.30pm today.
" So just... you know... be forewarned.)
