Saturday, August 2, 2025

Psychiatry and antisemitism

In my most recent previous post, I did not explicitly say that psychiatry and antisemitism go together. They do, and I will argue that point here, publicly. Psychiatry and antisemitism are almost one and the same phenomenon, historically, philosophically, and politically.

In the 1930's, German psychiatrists actually piloted the killing machinery of the Nazi Final Solution. Tödliche Wissenschaft: Die Aussonderung von Juden, Zigeuneren, und Geisteskranken, 1933-1945, by Benno Müller-Hill (Rowalt Taschenbuch, 1984), is probably the best written documentation of this horrific fact. The author had conversations with the nearest surviving relatives or descendants of some of the most infamous German war criminals who had been directly involved in exterminating the Jews of Europe. 

One is seized by an unholy vertigo reading the transcripts of Müller-Hill's interviews, when after perhaps only three or four, the same reasonable words obviously repeat as if rehearsed, with nearly identical statements from one witness to the next, arguing so very earnestly that each of the doctors was a good family man, hardly even a Nazi, just doing his job in a very difficult time with no evil intent. 

Alfred Hoche, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, was one prophet of direct medicalized killing. He wrote that various psychiatric disturbances were indications of what he called "human ballast" or "lebensunwertung Leben" (life unworthy of life). From early euthanasia programs to the industrial operation of the infamous death camps, psychiatrists were front and center. The gas chambers of Auschwitz had been disassembled from German psychiatric hospitals and shipped to Poland, and the personnel who knew how to use them traveled there, too, to turn millions of Jews into smoke. 

Laypeople in the Twenty-first Century hardly considered themselves scientifically competent to second-guess doctors until the obvious disaster of the Covid pandemic inspired the whole Western public, a full century after the nascent dawning of the Third Reich, to variously rebel against elite authorities who had been so happy to consign them to some basket of deplorables. Such glib disrespect of common Americans who lacked Ivy League diplomas merely echoed the philosophical theories of German psychiatrists, who knowingly embarked on the Nazi program to purify a master Aryan race, logically requiring full elimination of the Jews and bringing epic disaster to the world by 1945.

It's more than worth mentioning... that the Jews are the oldest continuing ethnic group in Western Civilization. Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion by millenia. Whenever anyone in the West gets the idea that the human world should be remade, their attention is necessarily directed to the Jews. Psychiatrists have frequently considered themselves capable of remaking the human mind, and thereby the world. From Brock Chisholm to Jeff Lieberman, the leaders of this purported "medical specialty" have conspired to power above all other purposes. The power of organized religion has been the primary barrier standing in their way, and no organized religion has such a record of demonstrated staying power against materialism as Judaism. There is no symbol of antipsychiatry as potent as a single Jewish martyr standing on a gallows and reciting the Sh'ma.

Jeff Lieberman deserves special mention. He is Jewish, so we should naturally wonder how he can be antisemitic. In my experience, most American Jews are instinctively favorable toward psychiatry as a generality, partly because they believe it is a medical specialty. They identify with Freud (a Jew), and while Jews are only two percent of the U.S. population, 14% of American doctors are Jewish. Lieberman wore a white coat and draped a stethoscope around his neck at every opportunity, right up to the day he was ostentatiously exiled from the profession he had led, as a racist.

When a Jew tells the world the Lord is one, he strikes directly against the central ideal of medical psychiatry, namely that the lord is nothing. The individual is nothing, there is no soul, there is only the neurotransmitter and the receptor, there is only brain, only mechanics, mud. We must look into the mirror and make peace with the fact that we are staring at a machine. We will be replaced by machines.

It's just not true. Psychiatry is a lie. Antisemitism is one cover for the lie, inextricable from psychiatry itself.

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