Was Nazism a mental illness? On right- and left-wing interpretations of the Holocaust

Someone comically suggests a parlor game in which the object is to identify the mental illness that would enable Hitler, in a time warp, to be cured and so prevent the Holocaust.

This hits the nail on the head of a problem with both the right wing of psychoanalysis and the conservative wing of thinking about the Holocaust.

There is a coherent left-wing position on the Holocaust, it has been developed by a number of scholars, Jewish and not, and stands diametrically opposed to the dominant right wing one.

Briefly, the right wing one is that represented by Holocaust historians like Lucy Davidowicz, and it is the dominant view among Jews and others; the left wing one is represented by scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Raul Hilberg, Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault (implicitly), Roberto Esposito, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Eric Santner, Moishe Postone, Alain Brossat, and a number of others. Scandalous as this may sound, it is heavily represented among scholars in the European traditions of philosophy and philosophical social theory of both Marxism and Heidegger, whose critique of modernity and its uses of technology and bureaucracy remains the strongest and most compelling basis of indictment of the Holocaust and other phenomena that share with it some elements in common. This tradition is focused on historical understanding rather than moralizing, and that is a key reason for its lesser popularity in more official and conservative circles. The conservative-liberal critique is basically that of the right and it is much simpler, as it amounts to a critique of something that is not new and requires no special social theory or historical analysis but is rooted at most from a scientific point of view in psychology, since the problem is, albeit in an extreme and horrible form, that of evil pure and simple.

There is also linked to this the conservative-liberal idea that, in accordance with classical liberal theory (in the English sense of 'liberal', or liberty) that does not seek the good society or to critique any particular form of social domination or organization as such, but only to limit any and all social power, and in accordance with this is skeptical towards all political idealism, as it views twentieth-century totalitarianism, including particularly in its Communist (Stalinist or state capitalist) form, as resulting from the idolatrously sinful extremism consequent upon placing too much faith and credit in ideas of the perfectly good society and how it can be instituted. This theme of liberal theory can very well coexist with more historical and socially theoretical analyses, since such totalitarian idealism is linked to social and institutional, discursive and practical, forms that themselves are also part of modernity as it developed first in the West under capitalism, colonialism, and the absolutist nation-state. 'Communism' was both a form of that and a flawed theoretical program for overcoming it, which failed in part not just because it was ambitious and ideological, collapsing the futural oriented of Jewish prophetic historical time into a project for the technological and bureaucratic management of a society that is in fact faced with all the problems specific to modernizing industrial capitalist societies in formerly agrarian-traditional societies. The skeptical view of power in liberal theory rests on the same negative theory of Being that I say more about below. It is based partly in the early modern physics that envisioned the world as a set of entities each endowed with a force whose desire for self-expression entails affecting the other entities in a way that is essentially a violence against them, with the consequence that the good society is the one in which all power is limited: individuals by the state, the state by constitutional limits upon it in favor of liberties of citizens and private associations, and each of the state’s constituent parts by its others.

That Nazism was a result of mental illness (or an inexplicable metaphorical ‘social cancer or infectious virus’) is an odd way of thinking, given the central role of such metaphors in Nazism’s own thinking about Jews and others, and its own project of ethnic national purification. As I have argued elsewhere, not only colonialism and the modern bureaucratic-technological industrial capitalist state with its factories and prisons, but the very project of psychiatry and the social exclusion of people deemed abnormal because of medical or biologically-based moral deviance and inferiority, or the presumed criminal disposition that is implied in every attribution of mental illness, is one of the causal precursors and elements of the Holocaust. The discourse of mental illness and the exclusion and incarceration of people deemed as such was part of what was done in the Nazi death camps, and part of the basis of what was said about and done to the Jews, who had recently been for the first time in history designated (not a religion or culture) but a race (and a ‘disease’) that, being biological (genetic) in causal origin and essence, meant that it could make sense to the new fascist anti-semites to not try to convert or cure them (Christianity itself was thought of on a ‘medical’ model, its salvation being the cure for the mental, or moral, illness of mortal sin), but remove them through expulsion or elimination by killing. Auschwitz is as much the product of psychiatry as it is of anti-semitism.

Obviously affirming Judaism absent a political-historical project of social transformation of any kind that starts with and aims at bettering the now near-universal social order we live in is wholly inadequate politically if not morally and ethically.

Conservative Holocaust scholars consider the essence and cause of the Holocaust to be the combination of prejudiced misconceptions and mis-recognition of others and hatred that together constitute anti-semitism. Thus its ultimately explanation is psychological, and the sufficient cure is combatting anti-semitism everywhere, and prejudice and hatred more generally.

The result is to yield a form of conservative governance as policing and war against evil, understood as hatred of the Other.

Hence, also psychoanalysis as the leading tool in combatting this evil through psychology, which is the preventive cure for it that corresponds to the policing, sanctions, and punishments that are the retroactive cure.

This is the direction taken exactly by the school of psychoanalysis that follows Melanie Klein, one of the two principal schools in the English-speaking world, the other being the neo-Freudianism of Anna Freud, which led to cognitive therapy via, in part, the influence of Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, whose popular book Man's Search for Meaning argues for the Stoical idea that anyone courageous enough to will themselves as loving God and remaining faithful to this love can and will survive their destruction faced with any form thereof whatsoever, provided only they remain strong in their soul. The current fashion in psychotherapy and psychiatry of American business-oriented Buddhism is also a form of this.

The Kleinian school is represented by two principal directions, both started by refugees from Hitler who thought psychoanalysis could prevent the kind of evil that resulted in the Holocaust. The basic proposition is that Hitler was a hater because he did not mature beyond a primitive psychical aggression and hatred, which according to Kleinians represents the earliest phase of infantile psychical history, marked by a love/hate ambivalence and inclinations to harm and hate the Other. The two sub-schools are represented by Heinz Kohut's self-psychology, itself a kind of blend of the Kleinian object relations psychoanalytic theory with neo-Freudian ego psychology, and Lawrence Kohlberg's more strictly psychoanalytic and drive-theoretical analysis, which retains the Kleinian focus on drives and impulses and a strong orientation towards the critique of aggression and violence in the imagination and unconscious.

The root problem of Kleinian psychology lies in its Gnostic/Christian assumption of the original character of evil. Evil for Klein is the aggressive drive, a simplified form of Freud’s death drive, and which for her is essentially a will to violence, a desire to destroy or harm the Other (and not really Being itself, as in Freud, or destruction purely rather than hate as a will to violate or harm an Other). Klein here is also unlike Donald Winnicott, in other ways a follower of hers whose psychology is somewhat kinder to those whose unconscious is strongly marked by conflicts of infantile origin, for Winnicott thought of aggression, in a manner closer to Spinoza, as rooted in a desire not to oppose a frustrating external force but for an expressive movement of an expansive self. Klein assumes in a way unlike Freud, whose dualism as expressed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is perhaps at root a monism, that what Judaism called ‘evil inclinations’ are somehow original and must be essentially defeated and tamed. This leads Klein to a critique of ambivalence (the division of the Other into good and bad forms to be admired or hated, to be resolved in the acquisition of ambiguity, which perceives good and bad qualities in the other as inseparably tangled or discernible or uncertainly recognized) that itself presupposes a dualistic and moralistic rejection of moralizing dualism, since what and who is most deeply and troublingly ‘mentally ill’ is the personality who is evil in imagining and opposing evil. The logic this involves, the classical one of negation of the negation, leads in social theory to one of policing or war, and may not posit the new but only seek to establish what necessarily is as other than what is not. And this makes it conservative. It is no surprise that Klein’s most important followers were combatting the devil, for her theory is based on the idea of this, and aimed at producing a liberal subject who tolerates ambiguity and so makes more nuanced judgments about people and situations and is less likely to become a hater armed with prejudices that are arranged to fit what he learns about people to what he has already posited or presupposed. The psychological problem with this as an approach to the evils of our time is that they may be the result less of hatred than indifference. States and business organize societies so that people do what is expected of them in order to get done with effectiveness and efficiency what the organization and its hierarchy have determined they aim to do, and behaviors that deviate from or resist or oppose these projects are quite normally and readily sanctioned by punitive or preventive measures, but what if the whole enterprise is oriented towards a violent project of social management or domination such that at the individual level the question is not one of compliant normality versus selfish disobedience, which is what the system is organized to understand people as being and doing, but of a normality, conformity, and obedience that is itself the problem and a courage to resist, rebel, or oppose what is demanded that is by nature difficult and rare? To get there, we need criticism to focus on institutions and social practices and discourses that can be criticized, and not on the correct or incorrect behaviors of individuals. Inadequate here is morality in the usual sense that makes it a species of correctness, at least in positive governmental regimes that prioritize ‘pagan’ values of order and law as such, authority and getting things done, rather than grounding it in principles more transcendent and deeper than those as Jewish tradition and thinking that follows from it does. Such notions of justice (as in legal positivism, which holds that the good is good because the ultimate authority wills it, and not that it is willed because good on a more ‘anarchic’ and non-nihilistic basis) are certainly linked to different ways of thinking of world, being, and time, which have been discussed elsewhere, including in the Heideggerian and phenomenological traditions and in the philosophy of Judaism.

The basic problem with psychiatry is its concept of mental illness, which excludes the class of the mentally (and thus morally) ‘sick’ as distinct from the class of the ‘normal’. It is exclusionary because normalizing. Certainly all the vital theories of Jewish identity on the left are anti-normalizing theories, unlike the romantic nationalism which underlies most of Zionism and so insists on the normal and normalizing character of Jewish identity as rooted in land and tradition (or blood and soil, to use the German terms made infamous by the last century’s most extreme ethnic nationalists), with many people now taking it for granted that the Jews are a ‘biological’ people with belonging to the covenant transmitted not by familial social influence but genetics, though this understanding of what it is to be Jewish was also only introduced by the racial anti-semitism that developed in the wake of Darwin and that was so much part of Nazism, even constituting what makes it a historically unique form of anti-semitism. Jewish conservatives have certainly given Hitler quite a set of posthumous victories. The idea of mental illness excludes those with ‘problems of living’ that are part of their personality or personal mental and moral disposition just as Nazi anti-semitism excluded the Jews.

Ultimately, that must be because what it aimed to and did exclude, as best it could, was ‘the Jew in us’. The Jew in us in his moral seriousness, with its demands upon us and their ‘castrating’ threat to our innocent and ‘natural’ ‘being’, ‘putting us in the wrong’ as Fassbinder has an anti-semite say in his play about German anti-semitism, “Garbage, the City, and Death” (which the Jewish community of Frankfort-am-Main continues to block local stage production of); and the Jew in us who represents our self-division, perhaps, and the inevitable internal alienation, exile, homelessness, uncanny Angst-inducing horror of our own and our society’s potential for evil, our sensitivity to the possibility of injustice and the restless demand for a justice and happiness that can trouble our conscience…. Of course, being a Jew is more than that, since it not only means an existential condition, that perhaps has been finally overcome so that now either the Jews are free of this problem of the “European” soul or those who are sensitive to it are concerned with some other problem, be it one of lesser or greater moral importance; happily for many of us, it also has priestly as well as prophetic dimensions and can indicate a way of life devoted to a holiness whose exemplary character in full attention to its isolable particularity, not needing the avant-garde social and political project that has both Jewish and Hellenic and modern European origins and so is perhaps now a name of nothing other than merely ‘the left’, perhaps even partly a vaguely defined orientation around artistic objects and purposes…. Jews have never asked others to live by their own very rigorous moral codes, at least in the more traditional forms of the religion, or even the same rigorous moral concern, though that could be generalized, but it is certainly not false or pointless to draw certain conclusions in the way of positive ethical and political values that can be derived in part from the historical experience of this people. In fact, Judaism gave rise arguably to not just two but at least three religions, the third being a modern secular one that is perhaps imperfectly but undeniable captured in the modern concept of ‘the left’, especially when the specific theories of Marxist historicism and other modern theories of societal and historical oppression and liberation, or whatever other more exact metaphors these might be superseded by. I make no claim whatever that Jews should turn to this alone any more than the old alternative of Christianity so urged upon them so intently and so long by its exponents and followers. The left is not everything, even for such as myself who believe in it very thoroughly and deeply; my argument is not for a totality but the necessity of a certain possibility.

The major problem with this psychologizing is a function of the conservative psychological reduction of what is also sociological and so has a history that is that of societies and not just persons. The problem specifically is that the Holocaust was also made possible by modern industrial capitalism and bureaucracy, and was a consequence less of disobedient and childishly willful sinfulness than an excess of obedience and trust in the authorities that Christian and particularly Protestant culture had a tendency to identify too close with the authority of God, conceived essentially as authority, which is not exactly the Jewish conception. The conservative school has a state-oriented policing approach to the evils of the Holocaust, while the left-wing school of thought about it is oriented by a critique of modernity and sees it as partly a form and development of modern colonialist, bureaucratic, technological, capitalist, and authoritarian forms of political domination.

The left links the Holocaust to colonialism and the forms of oppression that were peculiarly developed in modern Western societies along with capitalism and colonialism and the modern absolutist state. To speak merely of anti-semitism is to simplify this and attribute the worst evils of modern societies to something too specific and partial that ultimately reduces to an attitude of persons, which therefore can be policed and managed by authorities of capitalist enterprise and the state. This yields a full legitimation of the status quo in Israel/Palestine, since it does not see the uniquely deadly modern forms of the oppression of the Jews of Europe that were however not absolutely unique to them as a people, as forms of something larger that contemporary societies will surely be participating in if they do not partake of a critique of those larger tendencies nor see what they are doing and are part of as part of them. The left does see this, and its critique of the Holocaust, a critique also in the Kantian sense that determines its conditions of possibility. Reducing it to evil, whether understood as rooted in hatreds that are part of the primitive psyche, which amounts to attributing them to original sin or an evil inclination, is a mystification that does not explain the thing to be explained, because in the end it just says that evil qua actions and experiences is caused by evil qua the will to destruction or hatred. In the end, this is as uninformative as positing the devil as cause of misfortune.

Right and left differ in psychoanalysis and in Judaism as well as the theory of modernity, including in respect of the critique of modern societies that seeks to understand their problems and potentialities, including the Holocaust.

Appeals to this form of pseudo-explanation are legion and can be seen for example in the statements of people like Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of New York's Stephen Wise Free Synagogue that anti-semitism is a 'disease' that basIcally has no explanation, since (as I believe this claim implies) it is wholly irrational, and having no justifying reason it can have to explanatory cause. Such explanations are self-serving and they lead to the overemphasis on policing on the one hand of organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center that claim to be about opposing every instance of anti-semitism, and the other function and purpose of this same organization and much of the Jewish right, which is to legitimate Israel and attack all of its critics by associating them with anti-semitism, on the supposition that what the Holocaust is ultimately about is denying Jews the right to be fully Jewish, and the need for Jews to just be just that, and so to affirm Jewish identity and the Jewish state, in lieu of pursuing what remains the project of the left, Jewish and otherwise, which is, as part of an historical avant-garde that understands itself as such, to develop a critical understanding of the modern and contemporary world with the aim of bringing into being a better, freer, and more just social world, and one in which there are not and assuredly will not be other Holocausts, even ones that might target other people, or perhaps target even Jews not as Jews but as something else, whether as overly intellectual rootless cosmopolitan internationalists and insufficiently rooted in the blood and soil of 'our' culture and tradition (but who can have their own, and must, and maybe need and want only or mostly just that, as if that would or should be enough? We must have the courage to say the contrary of the Passover song, Dayyenu (It would have been enough: we have, and may insist on, some very good things, and they are not enough, and cannot be; we want more than that, we want to perfect the world, not just protect and cultivate as Voltaire put it, our own garden.