Antisemitism, a Fate Neurosis

Introduction

From time to time, our civilization repeats the same manifestations of hatred in which it seems fixated. As in a sacrificial ritual, the aggressors and observers change, but they retain the same discourse and point to the same victims: the Jews.

At the individual level, when we revolve fruitlessly within a “fate neurosis” (Schicksalsneurose; S. Freud, 1953–1974), repetition adds still more suffering. In this case, psychotherapy involves several elements: stopping the desperate cycle of projecting onto others, taking responsibility for one’s own experiences, self-observation of defense mechanisms, and compassion for the suffering one feels. Once our wounds have been tended, we can find appropriate solutions that do not perpetuate the symptom and that allow recovery.

Identifying collective defense mechanisms points us toward real forms of suffering for which, once they are observed, we can feel compassion. Taking responsibility for them is meant to reveal a path toward healing.

Identification with the Aggressor

Identification with the aggressor (A. Freud, 1937) places us in a position of strength and allows us to leave the victim position. For the aggressor, sacrifice must be limited to others, and for that reason the aggressor is interested in finding a convenient victim, preferably one who has occupied that position before. If the aggressors change while the victim remains the same, the victim appears to be the guilty party.

Many decent partners become aggressive when they learn that their girlfriends have been victims of aggression. At the collective level, Christ’s sacrifice and then the many persecutions of Jews throughout history lead some people today to discharge their aggression onto this community. Aggression can take apparently harmless forms, such as learned pronouncements on social media, and extend all the way to declarations of exclusion and alliance with terrorist organizations.

The aggressor’s aggression is motivated by the pleasure of having escaped the burden of pain and is reinforced by communities that preserve their cohesion by offering their members “blood and circuses,” pointing out “victims” whom they may devour without repercussions.

In Euro-Atlantic civilization, Jesus is not merely a mourned victim, but one whose body and blood are ritually consumed at every Communion. The founding ritual, which gives participants access to illo tempore (Eliade, 1978–1985), is the crucifixion of a Jew, Jesus. The cross worn around the neck differs from the one borne on the back and marks the difference between the protected person and the victim. When the “talisman” loses its symbolic protective power, the move is made to real sacrifice. Ordinary Jews take the place of the symbolic victim, Jesus, and are savagely “crucified.” Those who deny Jesus’ Jewish identity confirm it by demanding new crucifixions.

Identification with the aggressor is fairly easy to understand because it appears in the form of bullying. The aggressor identifies a victim and a group of accomplices, then establishes a scenario of power. The aggressor imposes segregation within the group through fear: “whoever is not with me is my victim.” Once subjected in this way, the accomplices deceive themselves into believing that they are carrying out an act of justice and become “rhinoceroses” themselves (Ionesco, 1960), believing they will be protected by the pack: “Lupus non mordet lupum.”

Victims are chosen according to distinctive markers that prevent them from being confused with the aggressors: for men, the victims may be women; for adults, children; for White people, Black people; for anyone, Jews.

This is a dangerous power game because the practice of aggression generates ever more aggression. The aggressor subjects himself to intense stress that, over the long term, leads to anxiety, an inability to calm down, and an inability to trust.

The False Savior

Contemporary morality preaches pity for the victim, which forces the aggressor to present himself as a savior. A genuine savior allies with the victim and gives the victim the power to leave that position. The false savior allies with a false victim so that together they can fight a false aggressor who is, in fact, the real victim. In this case, the “hero” is nothing more than a perverse aggressor who wants to be praised for the bullying he carries out “democratically” because he has allies who give him numerical superiority over the victim.

Throughout history, antisemitism has legitimized itself as an act of justice. There always seemed to be a victim who had to be saved: children stolen by Jews, workers exploited by Jewish bourgeois capitalists, bourgeois people attacked by Jewish communists, terrorists abused by Jews.

Pity is an important factor in aggression. Pity is an emotion expressed with disgust that establishes a hierarchical distance between the superior, pitying Ego and the pitied Other. Empathy is thereby avoided, and aggression can be practiced under the banner of the savior. Pity permits violent forms of redress and introduces moral confusion. This confusion is not only destructive to others but also self-destructive because, sooner or later, aggressors appear among one’s allies and cannot be identified in time.

Unlike pity, compassion brings people together through empathy, understanding, and acceptance of differences. Compassion for others develops self-compassion.

Sacrifice (Identification with the Victim)

The idea of sacrifice reverses the value of the victor’s success and turns the victim into a hero. Contrary to appearances, sacrifice, practiced since the dawn of human civilization, does not oppose the instinct for self-preservation but serves as a payment for personal and communal survival.

The idea of sacrifice is the magical solution of the child who does not understand how the world works. In place of knowledge, the child invents rituals meant to provide protection. This explains many strange childhood practices, such as counting, repeating, refusing, and so on, which function as a pact made unilaterally with the divine. This is a stage that often passes, but sometimes persists in the fears, superstitions, and compulsions of adults.

At the social level, the lack of control over the world is even more difficult to bear. This is why all cultures have sacrificial rituals that function as a “protection fee.”

Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to obtain favorable winds for the journey to Troy (Aeschylus, 1984). The Thracians sacrificed their strongest young men in order to communicate with the gods (Eliade, 1972). Master Manole sacrificed Ana so that the monastery could be built (Eliade, 2007). Jesus practices sacrifice but nullifies it through resurrection. This marks a transition from real sacrifice to symbolic sacrifice: a lamb can be slaughtered, a fast can be observed.

For ritual to move from the real to the symbolic, a culture needs clear values and members capable of sublimation. The sacrifice of Jewish communities shows a failure of symbolization.

Far too often in history, in the years 1066, 1096, 1348, 1391, 1492, 1496, 1506, 1648, 1881, 1903, 1905, 1918, 1938, and 1941, Jews were expelled, humiliated, and attacked simply because they were Jews. The contemporary world does not separate itself from this history. Today, anti-Zionist attitudes are normalized, even though Zionism is a political movement that supports the right of Jews to have a sovereign state in their historic land, as other peoples have sovereign states. Anti-Zionism also has a dictum similar to Hitler’s “Final Solution”: “From the River to the Sea.” This saying calls for the disappearance of the State of Israel. What other state is subjected to a comparable demand? No one now approves of fascists who prevented “good Christians” from buying products from Jewish businesses, yet campaigns to boycott companies that have contracts with Israel are considered “cool.”

The practice of sacrifice attempts to soothe social anxiety, an anxiety that points to the absence of anchoring values capable of bringing moral clarity and stabilizing members’ self-esteem. Sacrifice does not help. On the contrary, it adds “fuel to the fire” of primitive emotions.

Regression to Adolescence

Euro-Atlantic culture emerged at the intersection of Greco-Roman civilization and Jewish civilization.

Just as an adolescent opposes the parents in an effort to resolve childhood wounds, our civilization is also in open revolt. The “Jewish parent,” the only one still alive, bears the rebellion so that the “Greco-Roman parent” can be positively idealized. Like any adolescent, our civilization oscillates between aggressive manifestations of “killing the father” (S. Freud, 1953–1974) and manifestations of self-directed aggression. One of the aims of adolescence is to heal childhood, and for that reason every revolt is an indication of suffering.

If we look at what the antisemitic narratives of Euro-Atlantic civilization have had in common across time, we see the pain of exclusion. Judaism, as an ethnoreligion that combines religious beliefs with a distinct ethnic identity, does not claim the “paternity” of Christianity or of today’s post-Christian civilization, namely humanism based on “Human Rights.” Yet Euro-Atlantic civilization has already inherited the Jewish ideas on which it was built, and the “father’s” failure to recognize it produces a narcissistic wound and a sense of imposture.

The resentment produced by the “father’s” failure of recognition leads the son, in turn, to deny the father’s contribution so that he may claim the inheritance for himself: “Jesus was not Jewish”; the Bible is not composed of the Old Testament, the Tanakh: Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim, and the New Testament, written by Jewish apostles.

The discomfort of nonrecognition produces profound fears because, without the protection of the “Name-of-the-Father” (Lacan, 2006), the son’s survival is at risk. The Bible also offers a parable in this regard: a response of recognition from the Father would have stopped the crucifixion of the Son.

If we understand the symbolic context of recognition, we can see the reality in which Israel and Euro-Atlantic civilization have created a shared construction within which they can recognize and support one another without so much passion, infantilization, or projection.

The Protective Good

The need for protection is one of our fundamental needs. We adults protect children, but no matter how mature we are, we cannot tolerate feeling at the mercy of chance. To prevent a state of insecurity, societies create institutions and beliefs, but these cannot shelter us from our own desires and fears.

A state of insecurity is experienced as a state of feeling bad, while a state of security is experienced as a state of feeling good. Good thus becomes a central value that, in Euro-Atlantic culture, also has an associated “god.” Jesus embodies the ideal of Good as a shield against Evil. This dichotomy creates a framework for evaluating all of life. Because absolute Good is an ideal, what remains for human beings is Evil.

When something bad happens, the “god of good” has failed. Because the failure cannot be attributed to the god, it is assigned to his representatives, the Jews, who can then be seen as the “source of evil” in society.

In the search for absolute Good, the experience of everyday evil is inevitable. Only abandoning idealization helps us move beyond the dichotomy and accept that we can be wrong and that we are imperfect. By becoming mature and responsible, we will be less aggressive toward ourselves and others.

Idealization

Idealization means adoration of an omniscient and omnipotent protective agency: God. The displacement already identified appears here as well: Jesus is omnipotent, therefore all Jews are omnipotent. This explains the suspicion that Jews know everything that happens and, through unlimited power, coordinate events.

In all the world’s mythologies and religions, gods are blamed for disastrous events and even for the weather. In our own time, Jews are blamed when a soccer team loses, when Moroccan citizens invade a Spanish city, when the governments of states fail, and even when terrorist groups attack Israel. They are also said to control the weather and to be responsible for heat waves, storms, and floods.

Idealization is a defense mechanism that helps the child feel protected in an unknown and potentially dangerous world. The child idealizes the parents, while the adult projects a Father-God into an abstract Heaven. Idealization provides a feeling of protection at the price of accepting helplessness and blaming the idealized object for inconveniences.

The frequency of idealizing blame reveals an inability to sublimate. Our civilization needs a varied cultural space that leaves no one out. Everyone within a culture needs to consume and create something valuable and to be seen and appreciated as an individual.

Idealization can soothe us, but it makes empathy impossible.

The child who feels protected by the mother cannot believe that she could be the target of aggression. The mother is perceived as restrictive and therefore as the one who aggresses by imposing the law of reality against the “pleasure principle” (S. Freud, 1953–1974). For that reason, the child cannot identify with the mother but will find similarities with anyone she “scolds.” The child identifies with the mother’s opponents and cannot empathize with her before deidealization occurs.

Adults who idealize have not completed the process of internalizing the protective parent. They live in a reality distorted by anticipation, which prevents them from calibrating themselves to reality.

Holocaust denial is also grounded in this idealization. The omnipotence attributed to Jews makes the Holocaust seem unbelievable. At the same time, any opponent of the Jews, however ferocious, appears worthy of pity.

Idealization blocks empathy, but it is also a way for us to live at the level of the pleasure principle. We often refuse reality simply for the sake of pleasures, many of which harm us: we eat poorly, do not exercise, and do not get enough rest. As slaves to our own desires, we become unable to fulfill our real potential and may even become ill. Idealization mystifies reality and predisposes us to anxiety by leading us to imagine all kinds of dangers.

Deidealization is the remedy that helps us “wean” ourselves from the pleasure principle and become empowered in our own lives.

Hatred Born of the Inability to Love

A fundamental human need is to love and to be loved. Love also takes on social nuances related to acceptance, inclusion, appreciation, and recognition.

Just as the mother is the one who satisfies all the child’s needs, for adults the gods take that place. In Euro-Atlantic civilization, Jesus is an ideal of Love. Christlike love is maternal love, implying unconditionality, self-giving, and sacrifice. But values come with their negative reverse. When love becomes a standard, we can expect hatred to be practiced intensely.

Jesus offers a response to hatred: “turn the other cheek.” It is a model opposed to the natural instinct for self-preservation and therefore cannot be adopted.

Hatred, however, is not exhausted through expression. On the contrary, expression feeds it, allowing it to spread until it becomes impossible to control. The Bible offers this parable: from turning the other cheek, one arrives at crucifixion.

The crucifixion of Jesus does not transform hatred into love. Instead, it opens the way to the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, and the Holocaust.

The cross is a symbol of suffering in the name of love. Love and hatred thus assert themselves as values that, at their extremes, are incompatible with survival. Otherwise, the crucial balance between love and hatred becomes, from time to time, crucifying.

Today we witness many manifestations of hatred, both at protests and on social media. The very definition of antisemitism involves hatred. Practiced hatred is a symptom of a lack of love. We can therefore understand all resentful cries as the public declaration of people who did not feel sufficiently loved.

A lack of love cannot be healed by practicing hatred, but by restoring self-esteem.

The Other, the Brother

External reference points are important in the developmental process. Thus, in the structuring of the Ego, a psychic agency is constructed to serve as a point of reference: the Other (Lacan, 2006).

The Other is everything we are NOT. It is a negative model necessary for the formation of the Ego, but also for reducing the pressure of the superego. Any undesirable attribute of the Ego can be projected onto the Other in order to fool the superego.

This is the mechanism used by the child who blames a sibling for something the child did.

The Other is a psychic agency, but it needs to take on a real form. The appropriate image is someone close enough to permit comparison but distinct enough to mark difference. The most fitting image for the Other is the brother, just as the parent is the fitting image for the superego. At the social level, this brother may be the neighbor, the coexisting ethnic group... generically speaking: the Jew.

In relation to this Brother, we structure our personality: we engage in different activities, hold opposing beliefs and aspirations, experience envy and resentment, and fight for the same resources. These struggles can culminate in fratricide, as in the biblical parable of Cain and Abel, but because the Other is a psychic agency that supports the Ego, the desire to destroy is suicidal.

To overcome the Cain complex, Jesus, who has no brothers, proposes an impracticable path: sacrificing oneself for the sins of others. But sacrifice cannot absorb hatred. Instead, it turns Jesus into a generic Jewish brother, an Abel for a collective Cain.

As in the biblical parable, the struggle begins with the Other’s privilege of being “chosen” by the parent.

Abel is favored by God, and this is the source of Cain’s rage. The Bible also identifies a collectively privileged group, the “chosen people.” In society, injustices and privileges are punished through discharges of hatred, and these can be channeled toward the “chosen people,” who serve as a lightning rod.

The struggle with the Other is the externalization of an internal struggle, which is why peace is not achieved through privileges or victories. The solution comes from accepting the Other as a formative part of the Ego and embracing one’s own “shadow” (Jung, 1953–1979).

Freedom and Responsibility

Humanist civilization shifts faith away from divinity and toward human responsibility. Laws are no longer inexorable; they are voluntarily established for peaceful coexistence. Personal peace is no longer secured by appeasing the gods but by respecting Human Rights. Individual freedom anchored in responsibility becomes a value greater than life itself, as people give their lives in wars to defend freedom.

Responsible freedom marks the transition from “God willed it so” to “As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.” We do not arrive at this naturally, but through an education that requires knowledge of causal models, anticipation of consequences, ownership of decisions, and limiting control to what lies within our power. Yet Euro-Atlantic education demands responsibility while preparing people for dependency.

In school we try to change children rather than understand them; we use manipulation, conditioning, punishment, and reward; we encourage prepackaged answers. We suppress children’s initiative, free thought, and decision-making. We satisfy desires and cancel consequences. This education is a recipe for how responsibility CANNOT be developed.

The break between the ideology of our civilization and education creates moral confusion. We confuse what depends on us with what does not, and what is right with what is not. We confuse freedom, which entails responsibility, with license, which means an absence of restraints and empathy. We confuse responsibility, which means accepting the consequences of one’s own actions, with guilt, which brings a diffuse penance and creates resentful bonds. Guilt is a form of retroactive control that allows us to avoid uncertainty. Guilt is also a hot potato tossed to someone else who can be blamed.

Jesus proposes a model for breaking the vicious cycle of guilt and blame. He voluntarily takes on the sins of the world in order to save humanity. Starting from this model, the generic Jew can be blamed at any time. Just as children blame their own mistakes on parents and teachers, society too can point to guilty parties for whatever is going wrong.

Replacing responsibility with guilt is a dangerous game that predisposes people to dependency. Blaming is the cry for help of an adult who cannot be free, who feels dependent and suffers. If we want to live in an environment that is less toxic and less prone to dependency, the key lies in taking ownership of oneself and developing responsibility.

Magnification of Scale

Jewish culture values education that is pursued with care and enthusiasm. Knowledge is an opportunity and a privilege, and the joy of inquiry is encouraged. This leads to numerous discoveries, constructions, and creations.

A small number of Jews, approximately 16 million or 0.2% of the world’s population, make a significant contribution, including 22% of Nobel laureates and numerous inventions and enterprises. The large number of achievements leads people to overestimate the number of ethnic Jews.

Israel is a country with a strong economy and an important geopolitical role for Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. This importance makes Israel appear to have a much larger territory than it actually does.

Israel has an area ten times smaller than Romania, seventy-five times smaller than Iran, and 1,500 times smaller than the combined area of Muslim countries.

When our sense of scale is distorted, there is a temptation to empathize with those considered small and innocent. Magnification leads to improbable assumptions of power.

Soros, a 96-year-old Jewish man, is the omnipotent hero of many conspiracy theories.

This hyperbolizing view reveals a need for an “adult in the room,” someone who knows how things work and who can bear responsibility for what happens. It is a form of infantilization that keeps people in a state of self-induced helplessness, bringing neither protection nor innocence. Euro-Atlantic civilization needs to get out from under its “mother’s skirts,” empower itself, take responsibility for itself, and become an adult.

Balancing Through Compensation

When people cannot understand the underlying mechanisms of their world and cannot make decisions for themselves, they regress, imagining all sorts of things happening “in the parents’ bedroom.” This is how conspiracy theories arise when democratic communication is short-circuited in the social sphere.

In conspiracy theories, “the Jews” almost always appear according to a compensatory principle: “If they invent so many things that make life better, they must also be doing many things to make it worse.” Out of an inability to feel gratitude, “no good deed goes unpunished.”

Mediocrity penalizes excellence regardless of ethnicity: Brâncuși was not appreciated in Romania while he was alive. High-achieving children are attacked by those without achievements. At the level of our civilization, Jews are regarded as “the top students in the class.”

Democracy is an ideology of the majority, and to avoid mediocrity it must incorporate the values of meritocracy. Without appreciation for merit, contributors are harassed out of envy. Friedrich Nietzsche writes about the inability to feel gratitude for Jewish culture’s contribution to contemporary civilization in Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche, 2001).

Admiration and gratitude are preferable to envy and resentment.

Fear Is Neither Pretty nor Very Healthy

Fear is the most mobilizing emotion. In our world, we have a cult of fear, not only in religion, where we value “God-fearing” people, but also in secular life.

Schools are often institutions built around fear of evaluation and become theaters of bullying. Adults are frightened socially with political and economic crises, bombarded with alarming news, mobilized to defend rights said to be in danger, and urged to vote for “the lesser evil.” Anxiety, panic attacks, and depression are manifestations that no longer surprise anyone.

At the social level, fear is a way of “herding the sheep into the flock.” Social cohesion is easier to obtain through fear than through the establishment of constructive goals.

Manipulators know that people will follow them if they first frighten and then soothe them. When we panic, it is easy to confuse the aggressor with the savior and even with the victim. When we are afraid, we are not interested in truth; we cling to anything that promises relief. Those who frighten us can enlist us behind fictitious causes with real victims. Disturbed by fear, “we make the devil our brother until we cross the bridge.” We seal an alliance with aggressors and distance ourselves from victims with whom we cannot allow ourselves to empathize. We strengthen the aggressors’ power in the belief that we can avoid becoming victims.

Conspiracy theories arise from the need to soothe fear. Many of them are woven around “the Jews” as a “scapegoat” used so often throughout history that it is easy to recognize.

Fear cannot be healed by strengthening the power of aggressors. What helps, instead, is the courage to face the truth.

To these psychological levers expressed through antisemitism we may add “ressentiment” (Nietzsche, 2017) and the analogy of the “scapegoat” (Sacks, 2015).

Conclusion

Contemporary antisemitism is an attack on Euro-Atlantic civilization because it supports the practice of hatred, sacrifice, “witch” hunting, and injustice.

At the individual level, manifestations of hatred are cries for help from adults who feel unseen and unrecognized. They are too frightened to be free, too disoriented to search for their purpose, too sick from stress, fear, and the inability to build anything. Taking to the streets in support of the causes of other civilizations is a masochistic form of self-destruction. Hatred of the Other is self-hatred and indicates a need for therapy to restore self-esteem.

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