One great thing about Orthodox Judaism is that it tends to act as a prophylactic against the crazy intellectual trends that beset the high IQ (particularly high IQ non-Orthodox Jews) such as feminism, Freudianism, Marxism, pacificism, extreme environmentalism, animal rights, pacifism, unlimited immigration, etc. Orthodox Judaism keeps you so busy and makes so many demands on you that there simply isn’t time to indulge in fancy fads unless you are particularly perverse. A normal Orthodox Jew finds his friends among fellow Orthodox Jews and there’s simply no Orthodox community for this craziness except in rare instances (usually among the well-educated Modern Orthodox).
Jews seem particularly prone to charismatic leaders. Orthodox Jews often these among their rabbis. Lubavitchers, for instance, venerate The Rebbe. Non-Orthodox Jews often seek out secular Jewish intellectuals to lead them.
Jews have always had a special fascination with Freud’s theories—no one more so than my own mother
BY BARBARA KAY
“The Jewish psychiatry of the communists is . . . a Godless criminal atheist doctrine of Frankenstein medicine that will condemn a man for having faith in God. How stupid and perverted are our medical people to base a medical system on a man named Sigmund Freud, who stated that man’s natural instinct was to murder his father so as to have sex with his mother?”
The passage above comes from a white-supremacist website, perhaps one that twenty-two-year old Dylann Roof frequented in his previous life—that is, before he was tried, convicted, and condemned to death for massacring nine black parishioners at prayer in a South Carolina church in 2015. Roof had filed a pre-trial motion stating that he would not call on any mental health experts in court because he does not believe in psychology, which, he confided to his journal, “is a Jewish invention and does nothing but invent diseases and tell people they have problems when they don’t.”
Because Roof’s crimes were so horrific, his anti-Semitic theories around psychology aroused relatively little attention in the media. No doubt, most observers imagined this claim about Jews and psychology to be just another bit of hateful piece of nonsense to emerge from a clearly hate-addled mind. Yet in this one arcane area, Roof’s paranoia is based on more than a grain of truth. While it is certainly untrue that psychiatry “does nothing but invent diseases,” calling it a “Jewish invention” isn’t entirely indefensible. Of the thirteen members in Sigmund Freud’s founding circle, only one was gentile. Their patients were virtually all Jewish as well.
There are plenty of theories for why this was so. Freud’s Austria was quite anti-Semitic, and close association with him, whether as a colleague or a patient, would have been stigmatizing for non-Jews.
But more pertinently: In my (Jewish) view, there can be no doubt that there was something familiar and accessible to Jews in the Talmudic nature of the psychoanalytic process. Instead of probing Torah narratives and commandments to know God’s will, psychoanalysts probe patients’ utterances to know their unconscious drives. I can see why the simple transfer of methodology from the interrogation of miracle-based texts to exegesis of exotic psychological tropes might appeal to the Jewish psyche …
As I can attest from my own 1940s and ’50s upbringing in Toronto, you didn’t have to be in Freud’s inner cycle to be affected by the Jewish predilection for psychoanalysis.
Some kids’ moms felt they missed their calling as a dancer or a writer. Mine, a high school graduate with native intelligence, but underdeveloped critical thinking skills harnessed to overdeveloped self-confidence, was an analyst manqué. I simply accepted that “what do you think you/she/he really meant by that?” was a normal response to even the most banal assertion at our dinner table. I assumed all families were like that, but they weren’t. It really was a Jewish thing.
My mother had a theory about political leadership and how it could be improved. If candidates for office were pre-screened by psychiatrists to weed out those with neuroses, she believed, the world would never again suffer the ravages inflicted by a Hitler or a Stalin again. And if those deemed fit for office submitted to psychiatric therapy before governing, that swords would turn into ploughshares. I see her sitting in our den in Toronto, one slender leg folded gracefully over the other (the rest of her being pudgy, she was extremely vain about her legs), complacently exhaling a fragrant stream of smoke from her Rothman’s cigarette as she intoned her signature proclamation, “Life can be beautiful!”
This was in the 1950s. I was an impressionable teenager, and I did not find her idea as ludicrous as I would in retrospect. Just as “red diaper” babies in the 1930s and ’40s were raised by their parents to believe the world was divided between evil capitalists and right-thinking Communists, I was for many years persuaded by my mother’s equally binary approach to life that history was a struggle between the psychologically crippled and the psychologically healthy (amongst whom she naturally counted herself).
To my mother, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (there are, of course, important differences between their professions, but it was all the same to her) were god-like figures, all-knowing and pure of intention, their craft a unitary corrective to what ailed modern man. It never occurred to her that the power to give the thumbs up or down on a politician’s readiness for office, then based entirely in the personal opinion of someone whose judgments were rooted in hypotheses and theories, might lead to corruption. Her naïveté is astonishing in retrospect, but I suppose one could say the same about Marxist utopians. …
Kernels of doubt occasionally lodged in my mind, though. One memorable incident that my mother witnessed and reported to me involved her friend’s husband, an almost parodically Jewish–German psychoanalyst. When his five-year old son told him, in mixed company, “I love you so much I could eat you up,” his father calmly and ponderously responded, “I know zat you fantasize about killing me, dear boy, but zis is nozzing to feel guilty about.”
Psychoanalysis is pretty well over today. It is crazily time- and money-consuming, and it rarely accomplishes anything for people suffering from true mental anguish. Coping strategies and medication have replaced extended, unstructured talking marathons, obsessions with toilet training trauma and alleged Oedipal fantasies. The focus is increasingly on short-term life crises or truly debilitating problems for which some form of chemical treatment is part of the solution.
But when I was a young adult, settling in for no-cutoff therapy with a “shrink” was commonplace, for Jews at any rate, for what I was led to believe were serious, but what I would now call trivial, reasons: normal clashes with parents and siblings, sorrow over a teenage break-up, less than perfect social success.
Being neurotic, or even being thought to be neurotic, was a kind of social capital amongst Jews of my generation…
I was reminded of what a “thing” neurosis was for me when I read recently that writer/actor Lena Dunham felt ashamed that she had never had an abortion. Her victim envy made me laugh, but it resonated. Neurosis was supposedly a psychological deficit, but amongst highly self-regarding middle-class Jews of a certain stripe—“snowflakes” avant la lettre—it came to be equated with superior intelligence and psychological complexity, just as social activists today, wracked by perceived omnipresent racial, gender and class microaggressions, feel a sense of special righteousness in calling them out. For a highly educated Jewish young woman in artsy circles to admit that she was psychologically normal and got along swell with her parents made her a bit pathetic, a bit of a simpleton.
Neurosis was supposedly a psychological deficit, but amongst highly self-regarding middle-class Jews of a certain stripe—“snowflakes” avant la lettre—it came to be equated with superior intelligence and psychological complexity, just as social activists today, wracked by perceived omnipresent racial, gender and class microaggressions, feel a sense of special righteousness in calling them out. For a highly educated Jewish young woman in artsy circles to admit that she was psychologically normal and got along swell with her parents made her a bit pathetic, a bit of a simpleton. …
Looking back, I can see that blind faith in psychiatry as the Answer was a kind of mania in the 1950s and beyond for Jews who had lost touch with the faith of their fathers, but were too bourgeois and socially conformist to find appeal in far-left political radicalism. Smart, striving secular Jews, who couldn’t for one reason or another complete the upstream leap to material good fortune, tended to gravitate to political ideology. And there were enough of them to make up a massively disproportionate share of the Communist movement in the West. So whacko white supremacists such as Roof aren’t completely off base in their identification of Jews with Communism either. In both cases, the appeal was a universal belief system in which Jews might melt—unChosen, unChosen at last!—into the general polity, whether the defining authority was the universal Unconscious or an international classless society presided over by Big Brother. The two faith systems also had in common the belief that human unhappiness was the consequence of non-rational laws and taboos. And God knows Judaism is more chockablock with those than any other religion I can think of…
My mother was American, Detroit-born and bred, and was far more tolerant, even approving, of the bullish style in politics than most decorum-seeking Canadians. Lately, I find myself wondering what she would have made of America’s 2016 presidential campaign. I note wryly to myself that her tidy theory would have been dangerously strained at the seams. Obama, for whom she would certainly have voted, is the very picture of psychological health and maturity, and Hillary, for all her ethical baggage and lack of charisma, publicly the same. How would my mother have felt about the egregiously uncontainable Donald Trump, I wondered, a walking, talking, tweeting template for narcissism, impulsivity, adhd, and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (tantrums that persist beyond an appropriate age)…
When my mother thought the cure for anti-Semitism was psychological hygiene, her hopes were buoyed by the post-Holocaust orgy of self-recrimination that swept through Western nations. Her generation—and mine, too—really believed anti-Semitism was a dying animal.
I doubt one Jew in a hundred thousand thinks about making war on white people. To the extent that in the West mental health professionals and their advocates push the destruction of bonds, traditions and healthy inhibitions (and today I doubt many do this as Freudianism is largely dead), they are making a war on sane people. On the other hand, many people’s lives have been enhanced by mental health professionals and their medications. Overall, I don’t know if mental health professionals do more good than harm.
An extrovert's extrovert, Dennis Prager became happy at last when he took up a career of lecturing at the ripe old age of 21. From the burning core of the Ashkenazi culture of critique, he would take his giant brain and disect the world, gaining prestige, money, and friends, just so long as he played within the rules (such as saying it is Judaism that causes Jewish success, not genes).
Steve Sailer noted:
…[E]gomania provides confidence and confidence is essential to charisma…
Indeed, much of what we are taught as the high intellectual history of the human race is based more on the magnetism and impenetrable self-assurance of thinkers than on minor issues like whether they were right or not. Freud is a perfect example, a charlatan who befuddled two generations via his implacable self-esteem. Marx was similar, and Ayn Rand was cut from the same cloth…
Sailer said: "…[I]ntellectual heavyweights of Western civilization are known not for being right but for being charismatic…"
Dennis took the stage at the end of the 1960s, a decade when Jewish radicals took charge of non-Jewish followers.
Sailer wrote:
…the importance of extra-rational charisma in the appeal of egomaniacal, messianic intellectuals like Marx and Freud to younger Jewish students. Over the last 150 years, secular Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly reproduced the traditional brilliant rabbi-student relationship in launching powerful cults. Among the more recent examples have been Ayn Rand (see Murray N. Rothbard's hilarious 1972 article "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult"), Susan Sontag (see Terry Castle's hilarious 2005 article "Desperately Seeking Susan"), and Leo Strauss (see the unintentionally hilarious 2003 article "What Leo Strauss Was Up To" by two true believers, William Kristol and Steven Lenzer).
Said another Gentile observer:
So you had all these wild-eyed, charismatic, brilliant people, suddenly without the compression of traditional life. What to do with all that fire and brilliance? Answer: Marx, Freud, civil rights, etc…
All of which does make me ever-so-slightly sympathetic to the idea that these brilliant Jews give out advice that's almost designed to cripple the people it's given to. All the while claiming it's for everyone's good, and charging a pretty penny for doing so. I could never accuse them of being anything but well-meaning. But I had to learn to see through the posing, the fiery eyes, and the preaching….
Many of the Jewish radical kids went on to do very well for themselves.
Psychologist Byron M. Roth reviewed Richard Lynn's 2011 book The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement:
In general, Jews do not differ in any appreciable way from Gentiles in the things they value, with one exception: They have a greater desire to achieve economic and social success, that is to say, they are high in “achievement motivation.” Professor Lynn suggests that, like many personality variables, this may have a partly genetic basis “brought about through having been selected by eugenic customs, persecution, and discrimination.”
Steve Sailer responds to Barbara Kay’s essay:
That agrees with my impression that Freudianism was largely for more conservative liberal Jews who wanted a Jewish-invented “scientific” ideology just like Marx had provided, but who didn’t like Marxism (often for the very good reason that they were quite bourgeois and figured they’d get expropriated).
In the early 20th Century, there were a whole lot of high IQ Jews, but there was a shortage of great Jewish thinkers to idolize due to the Jewish community being so self-limiting until so late. There was Marx, but maybe you didn’t think Marxism would do you and your upper middle class family much good. So that kind of left Freud by default.
Freudianism’s immense prestige no doubt set back the psychological sciences by a few decades. But Freud didn’t collectivize agriculture or invade Poland, so, when grading him on the curve of his era, he seems not so bad. Freud was basically L. Ron Hubbard with a higher IQ fan club, but by the standards of 20th Century cult leaders, he didn’t cause all that much harm.
Freudianism then got imposed on the rest of the upwardly mobile parts of Western culture by the same kind of cultural power that has turned Emma Lazarus’s poem into the Zeroth Amendment.
The funny thing looking back was how much courage it took to publicly laugh at Freud’s absurd pretensions to be scientific. Apparently, you had to have the immense self-confidence of a Vladimir Nabokov to scoff at Freud.
*
This is a perspective of a woman who grew up in a Mafia family, where everyone around her was running a racket of one kind or another
* “Take the greatest Jewish minds ever — Marx, Freud, Einstein… what have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality, and the atom bomb.”
* What fate awaits the peoples of the lands where Freud’s ideas took root? How influential has Freud been in causing them to forsake their ancestors and abandon their life-protecting cultures and traditions?
They are on course for destruction, for extinction.
* Steve Sailer: “Israel seems to be doing fine.”
* It was superseded by cognitive-behavioral therapy, which made a lot more sense (thinking crazy things makes you act crazy–you compare yourself to Donald Trump so you always think you’re awful for not being rich).
The stuff never caught on quite as well in literary circles because it’s not as much fun to make books and movies about. Guy feels awful until he discovers he’s torn up because he hated his father and works it out with help of his therapist? You’ve got your protagonist, antagonist, and secondary protagonist right there, and lots of great scenes where he pours out his pain and makes breakthroughs. Gut feels awful and his therapist convinces him to challenge his self-defeating thoughts and gives him homework? Boring as heck and reminds him of school.
* It’s exciting and fascinating and makes for great stories. You have conflict, revelations, relationships, motivations–all the stuff of great fiction. It had a huge influence on mid-twentieth-century middlebrow stuff, before postmodernism and the need to have transgender people of color at the center of every work.
It’s not true, but that’s obviously of less importance to writers and directors.
* It was more the guys who came after him–Norman O. Brown and all of them–who gave rise to the permissive 60s culture. Freud actually thought repression was necessary for civilization.
Einstein’s real advantage was that he was a physical scientist. Your theories are always subject to disproval, and always have to be tested by facts. (He was ultimately wrong about randomness in quantum mechanics.) That’s just the way science works. So he had to keep his ego in check.
