Antisemitism is a mental disorder

Nachum writes: Jew hatred is better understood as a psychiatric disorder than just racism or a political ideology.

Guerre and Shalom is committed to understanding the root causes of antisemitism. In this series, we have given the baton to different authors to share their theories. In this sixth article in the series, Nachum Kaplan (a registered psychotherapist and a counsellor for Anxiety, Burnout & High Performers in Singapore) presents his psychological insights on the matter and concludes that antisemitism is a mental disorder. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

CAUSES OF ANTISEMITISM SYMPOSIUM:

Theory 1 (Daniel Clarke-Serret) - Nomadism:

The General Theory of Antisemitism

Theory 2 (Alan Mairson) - Narrative Darwinism:

Narrative Darwinism: A Unified Theory of Antisemitism

Theory 3 & Chapter 16 of The Genocide of Truth (Daniel Clarke-Serret) - The Concept of The Chosen People:

A Chosen People?

Theory 4 & Chapter 17 of The Genocide of Truth (Daniel Clarke-Serret) - The Perfection of Christ:

Christ: The 17th Root of The Great Genocide Blood Libel

Theory 5 (Peter L Biro) - The Virtuous Hatred:

A Canary's Song: Antisemitism in Our "Free and Democratic Society"

Theory 6 (Nachum Kaplan) - A Mental Disorder. See below.

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“Antisemitism is a mental disorder” by Nachum Kaplan

Antisemitism is a psychiatric disorder and not just a hateful ideology. This hypothesis solves the big problem of no one ever advancing anything close to a coherent, unified or general theory of antisemitism.

Given its many manifestations, it is hard to push all the variants of antisemitism into a single satisfying explanation. It is hard to develop one theory that explains antisemitism’s religious, racial, economic, conspiratorial and other features. It is also hard to make sense of the way antisemitism comes from the Far Right and the Far Left, the Christian and Muslim worlds, atheist autocracies and all those mad conspiracy theories.

If antisemitism is a disorder, however, there is no need for the elusive unifying theory. Depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and body dysmorphia do not have, or require, a single unifying ideological theory either. They are syndromes defined by recurring constellations of cognition, emotion and behavior that may arise through different developmental, psychological and biological pathways.

Perhaps antisemitism should be thought about in the same way.

I am a career journalist and commentator who made a midlife career change into psychotherapy. While I do not diagnose psychiatric disorders in my work, I treat people suffering from many of them, so I am far from ignorant about the human psyche.

The idea of antisemitism as a disorder was first advanced seriously at a symposium in San Francisco in 1944, a landmark gathering of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists held under the auspices of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation and the Emergency Committee on Psychology and Social Problems. Its participants were attempting to understand something that ordinary theories of political disagreement seemed spectacularly incapable of explaining: how a supposedly civilized society could become consumed by a fantastical hatred of a tiny minority.

The symposium laid the groundwork for the 1946 volume Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, edited by Ernst Simmel, a Jewish German psychoanalyst who had fled Nazi Germany. Influenced by Freud, Simmel and his contemporaries treated antisemitism not just as racism or political doctrine but as a psychological phenomenon involving projection, displacement, regression and the construction of the Jew as a symbolic object onto which intolerable fears and conflicts could be deposited.

That distinction matters. The antisemite is rarely responding simply to Jews as actual people, but to “the Jew” as a psychological construction.

The Jew becomes simultaneously capitalist and communist, rootless cosmopolitan and tribal nationalist, sexually degenerate and sexually repressive, pathetically weak and terrifyingly powerful, genetically inferior and mysteriously capable of controlling governments, banks, universities, Hollywood and the press. Ordinary hostility requires its object to possess reasonably stable characteristics. There is no such restraint on antisemitism.

Contradiction is not a bug in antisemitism. It may be one of its defining psychological features.

Simmel saw antisemitism as a mass neurotic reaction in which inner conflicts, fears and unconscious drives could be displaced onto Jews as symbolic scapegoats. The psychoanalytic vocabulary is dated, but the psychological mechanism is not. Modern psychology still studies displacement, motivated reasoning, scapegoating, paranoia, identity threat, projection and conspiratorial cognition, even if it uses slightly different terminology.

Newer research is surprisingly congenial to the old intuition.

A 2022 meta-analysis covering 127 independent samples and hundreds of correlations found that conspiracy belief is associated with paranoid ideation, schizotypy, narcissism and lower cognitive ability, among other variables.

Other research has found that conspiracy thinking is associated with both vulnerable and grandiose narcissism, although probably for different reasons. Vulnerable narcissism tends to come with greater suspiciousness and sensitivity to threat, making conspiratorial explanations psychologically attractive. Grandiose narcissism, by contrast, appears to connect more strongly with the desire to feel exceptional—to believe that one sees what ordinary people cannot.

Across the wider literature, conspiracy belief also commonly travels with distrust, paranoia, unusual beliefs and other socially destructive personality traits.

This does not mean everyone who believes a conspiracy theory is mentally ill. That would be an absurd overreach. It means that conspiracism’s psychological architecture overlaps conspicuously with phenomena that psychiatry already recognizes.

That matters enormously for antisemitism because conspiratorial thinking is not peripheral to it. It is one of its oldest and most durable forms. Jews poison wells, murder Christian children for ritual purposes, control international finance, started communism, control capitalism, engineer wars, manipulate governments, control the media, import immigrants, orchestrate revolutions, start pandemics and, of course, secretly control America.

The details change but the cognitive architecture barely does.

Contemporary research even gives us reason to distinguish ordinary prejudice from this more elaborate conspiratorial structure. A study of belief in Jewish conspiracy theories in Malaysia, for example, found associations with authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, racism and anti-Israel attitudes, while also demonstrating that culturally specific ideological forces matter.

The important point is not that one psychological variable explains antisemitism. Quite the opposite. Antisemitism appears capable of recruiting several psychological vulnerabilities simultaneously.

In his 1990 book Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, psychiatrist Theodore Rubin picked up Simmel’s theme of antisemitism as a “symbol sickness,” arguing that it could express deep psychological conflicts involving envy, projection, low self-esteem and other disturbances. Rubin interpreted Hitler’s hatred partly through paranoia and grandiosity while also examining Jewish self-hatred.

The underlying question they were trying to answer has not changed: At what point does antisemitism become pathology?

Virulent antisemitism belongs in that conversation.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5) and the bible of psychiatric and psychological disorders, explicitly warns against confusing social deviance with mental disorder. A political, religious or sexual belief is not pathological simply because society finds it offensive. A mental disorder requires clinically significant disturbance reflecting some dysfunction in psychological, biological or developmental processes.

That is an important safeguard. Psychiatry has an ugly history whenever political disagreement becomes medical diagnosis.

Yet notice what the DSM does not say. It does not say beliefs can never reveal pathology, only that deviance alone is insufficient. The relevant question is whether the belief arises from or expresses dysfunction in cognition, emotional regulation or behavior.

That is where extreme antisemitism becomes interesting.

It is easy to dismiss antisemitism as just another hateful ideology, which is what political leaders do when they “condemn antisemitism and all forms of racism and bigotry blah blah blah.” Yet when a person becomes fixated on an entire group—spinning elaborate conspiracies about Jewish world domination, attributing wildly disparate social problems to Jews, treating contradictory evidence as further confirmation of Jewish cunning, or fantasizing about harming or eliminating Jews—the phenomenon has traveled some distance beyond ordinary dislike or regular racism.

The clinical resemblance becomes difficult to ignore.

Consider delusional thinking. Delusions are characterized by unusually fixed beliefs maintained with extraordinary conviction despite persuasive counter-evidence. Clinical psychiatry properly distinguishes delusions from beliefs widely shared inside a culture or subculture, which prevents us from simply diagnosing every bizarre political movement as psychotic.

That qualification makes the antisemitism question more interesting, not less.

Research comparing paranoia and conspiracy thinking finds significant similarities: both involve hostile attribution, heightened perception of malevolent agency and unusual pattern detection. Yet there is an important distinction. Paranoid beliefs usually concern harm directed personally at the believer, whereas conspiracy beliefs are more often socially shared and concern threats directed against a group.

So antisemitism can be understood as occupying an uncomfortable psychological borderland: it is a delusion-like cognition capable of becoming socially normalized.

A false belief does not become cognitively healthy because 10 million people repeat it.

History supplies plenty of examples of societies collectively normalizing ideas that, at an individual level, would sound deranged. The existence of cultural reinforcement explains how such beliefs spread; it does not necessarily tell us anything reassuring about the cognitive processes involved.

Harvard psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint made essentially this argument in the debate over extreme racism. The American Psychiatric Association has never classified racism itself as a mental disorder, in part because prejudice can be culturally learned and socially normative. Poussaint nevertheless argued that extreme racist beliefs can become symptoms of psychiatric pathology and proposed a possible delusional-disorder subtype he called “Prejudice Type”: a delusion in which a group sharing a defining characteristic is assigned extraordinary and threatening significance.

Poussaint was not arguing that every racist requires psychiatric treatment. He was arguing that the word prejudice can cease to describe the phenomenon adequately.

This clearly applies to antisemitism.

The psychologist Gordon Allport long ago developed his famous continuum of prejudice: antilocution, avoidance, discrimination, physical attack and extermination. People begin by talking about the hated group, proceed to separating themselves from it, discriminate against it, attack it and, at the extreme, seek its elimination.

Poussaint specifically argued that the exterminatory end of this continuum—where fantasies about an entire race become sufficiently elaborate to justify mass murder—can reasonably be understood as delusional.

Yet there is another dimension that Allport’s behavioral progression does not fully capture, which is the hated group’s transformation into an existential threat.

Modern social psychology has explored this, too. Stephen Reicher and colleagues have described how collective hatred develops through social identification, exclusion of an outgroup, representation of that group as threatening, idealization of the ingroup and ultimately the redefinition of violence against the outgroup as virtuous self-defense. People committing atrocities do not necessarily believe themselves evil. Quite often they have constructed a psychological universe in which evil consists of failing to destroy the enemy.

Antisemitism has repeatedly demonstrated precisely this ability. The Jew is not merely disliked. He becomes explanatory and responsible for the world’s ills. The strange genius of antisemitism is its capacity to convert Jews from a tiny minority population into an all-purpose causation theory.

This is where conspiracy psychology becomes useful. Conspiracy theories provide something emotionally valuable in that they transform complexity into agency. Randomness becomes intention, failure becomes sabotage and humiliation becomes victimization. Historical processes involving millions of people become the work of hidden actors pulling strings.

Research on narcissism helps explain the psychological attraction. Studies have repeatedly found associations between narcissistic traits and conspiracy beliefs, with proposed mechanisms including paranoia, gullibility, need for dominance, need for control, need for uniqueness, and the desire to protect an inflated self-concept from threatening information.

Collective narcissism adds another layer: the conviction that one’s group is exceptional but insufficiently recognized can create fertile ground for theories explaining that lack of recognition as the work of malicious outsiders.

Thus the antisemite acquires an extraordinary psychological bargain. Nothing need ever be his fault or genuinely complicated. Defeat need not mean failure. Poverty need not require examining bad institutions. Political disappointment need not involve mistaken choices. Social alienation need not demand introspection. Jews’ existence provides an omnipotent external agent capable of explaining whatever requires explanation.

This is why antisemitism so often resembles paranoia while also satisfying narcissistic needs. The believer simultaneously becomes the victim of an unimaginably powerful conspiracy and one of the enlightened few clever enough to perceive it.

He is persecuted and special.

What an extraordinarily useful belief.

Obsession provides another psychiatric analogy. In Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), individuals suffer from intrusive thoughts and urges toward repetitive behavior. Antisemitic rumination is plainly not OCD: the thoughts are generally ego-syntonic rather than unwanted, and hatred is not a diagnostic compulsion. Yet the repetitive cognitive pattern is nonetheless striking. The antisemite returns again and again to the same explanatory object, interpreting unrelated events through it and seeking information that reinforces it.

The internet has industrialized this process. A person can now spend 10 hours a day inside a self-reinforcing epistemic system in which every war, billionaire, professor, movie studio, bank, politician and newspaper eventually leads back to Jews. Evidence against the theory becomes evidence of the conspiracy’s sophistication. Absence of evidence proves how thoroughly the evidence has been concealed.

The belief becomes effectively unfalsifiable. Psychologically, that is important because healthy cognition requires some mechanism by which beliefs can lose.

There are also parallels with personality pathology, though again parallels are not diagnoses. Antisemitic conspiracy thinking may involve grandiosity, suspiciousness, lack of empathy, externalization of blame and aggressive entitlement. Research on conspiracy belief broadly finds associations with narcissism, paranoia, schizotypal traits and so-called Dark Triad characteristics, although effect sizes vary and none of these relationships means most conspiracists possess a personality disorder.

This qualification is essential because psychiatric labels have been abused for ideological purposes before. The Soviet Union, and Russia today, notoriously pathologized political dissent, locking dissidents in mental asylums by defining disagreement with the state as evidence of mental abnormality.

Psychiatry becomes totalitarian the moment disagreeing with me becomes diagnostic evidence.

That is not the argument here.

Ordinary disagreement about Jews, Judaism, Zionism, Israel or Israeli policy is obviously not psychiatric pathology. Nor does moral repugnance establish mental illness. A belief can be wicked without being clinically disordered.

The narrower contention is that extreme antisemitism displays a cluster of cognitive features already familiar to psychopathology: paranoid attribution, grandiose explanatory systems, pathological externalization, unfalsifiable conspiratorial reasoning, obsessive rumination and a collapse in reality-testing about the intentions and power of a target group.

There is also a serious objection to medicalizing antisemitism as doing so can appear to excuse evil as involuntary. However, explanation and exculpation are not synonyms.

Psychiatry routinely distinguishes between the causes of behavior and responsibility for behavior. A person may possess psychopathology and remain entirely capable of understanding that an action is wrong. Legal insanity is an exceptionally narrow doctrine precisely because mental disorder alone does not abolish moral agency.

Understanding why a mind becomes receptive to hatred does not require forgiving what that person does with it.

Indeed, treating antisemitism purely as ideology may allow us to underestimate its emotional utility. Facts alone frequently fail because the belief is not being held merely as a factual.

Bibliography:

• Simmel, E. (Ed.). (1946). Anti-Semitism: A disease of the mind: A psychiatrist explores the psychodynamics of a symbol sickness. International Universities Press.

• Allport, G. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley

• Rubin, T. I. (1990). Anti-Semitism: A disease of the mind. Continuum Publishing.

• Sullaway, M., & Dunbar, E. (1996). Clinical manifestations of prejudice in psychotherapy: Assessment and treatment. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 3.

• American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (DSM-5)

• Poussaint, A. F. (2002). Yes: It can be a delusional symptom of psychotic disorders. Western Journal of Medicine, 176(1):4 .

• Poussaint, A. F. (2015). Is extreme racism a mental illness? MDedge Psychiatry, July 16, 2015.

• Stasielowicz, L (2022). “Who Believes in Conspiracy Theories? A Meta-Analysis on Personality Correlates.” Journal of Research in Personality.

• Swami, V (2012). “Social Psychological Origins of Conspiracy Theories: The Case of the Jewish Conspiracy Theory in Malaysia.” Frontiers in Psychology 3.

• Reicher, S.D., S. Alexander Haslam, and Rakshi R. (2008) “Making a Virtue of Evil: A Five-Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2, no. 3.