There have been hundreds of psychoanalytic writings on anti-Semitism. One of the latest is Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry [Springer, 2020], 374 pages of essays on how psychiatry can save the world from anti-semitism.
The book says, “Unfortunately, and unpredictably, there is no doubt or question that antiSemitism, both covert and overt, is once again rearing its hateful face in the United States and many other countries around the world. Is it chutzpah to suggest that the missing perspective that could lead to its elimination, or at least more permanent reduction, is psychiatry?”
Chutzpah: audacity, nerve, and supreme self-confidence.
[From the Hebrew word ?u?p?h (????????), meaning “insolence”, “cheek” or “audacity”.]
It is chutzpah indeed for psychiatrists to suggest that psychiatry is the world’s savior for this scourge.
Frankly, I cannot see it without remarking that this idea must stem from a massive guilty communal conscience, since it was psychiatrists themselves who operated the concentration camps in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
In psychiatry, history always repeats itself.
In November 2010, Dr. Frank Schneider, president of the German Association of Psychiatrists issued a public apology for psychiatry’s creation of the ideology that developed Nazi euthanasia and their role in the selection of those to be murdered as well as murdering others themselves.
German psychiatrists created the “racial hygiene” movement, which began with the work of eugenicist Alfred Ploetz in 1895. The idea stemmed from English psychologist Francis Galton who in 1883 coined the term “eugenics,” which he defined as “the science of improving the stock.”
Almost 40 years after Ploetz wrote The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak, his theories gained supremacy with the passage of the 1933 Sterilization Act in Nazi Germany and the concept of “lives unworthy of living.” This led to psychiatrists in Germany murdering tens of thousands of people that were “racially or mentally unfit,” long before the Holocaust began, and these same psychiatrists helped establish the killing centers during the Holocaust. Millions of people were killed during the Holocaust in Germany.
There were hundreds of psychiatrists in Germany directing and carrying out the atrocities prior to and during the Holocaust. “In my opinion, you cannot say that there are only a few bad apples within psychiatry who did National Socialism’s groundwork, but it is a problem with the entire profession.” [Hans-Walter Schmuhl, The Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists in National Socialism, Springer, 2015; the same publisher cited above.]
These psychiatric atrocities did not stop with the end of World War II. In fact, many of psychiatry’s same oppressive actions of the Nazi era — kidnapping, involuntary incarceration, enforced treatment and the forcible taking of children — are still occurring today and are frighteningly rampant in every civilized country, including the United States.
A documentary produced by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), The Age of Fear: Psychiatry’s Reign of Terror, reveals shocking new facts surrounding the hidden psychiatric influence behind the horrors Hitler and his henchmen unleashed on those they deemed “unworthy of life” during the Third Reich in Nazi Germany. The documentary is a lesson from history: the untold story of the mass murder programs before the Holocaust, and the psychiatrists who conceived, organized and ran them, telling the true story of psychiatry whose reliance on brutality and coercion has not changed since the moment it was born in Germany.
