The Psychopathology of Judaism

Psychanalyse de judaïsme
Hervé Ryssen
Levallois: Éds. Baskerville, 2006

“The Psychoanalysis of Judaism” is Hervé Ryssen’s second book on the Jews.

For Ryssen, who rejects neither the ethnoracial nor the religious designation of Jews, it is their mentality that most distinguishes them from other peoples.

To understand this mentality, his first book, Les Espérances planétariennes (2005), looked at the “planetary ideology” dominating the work of contemporary Jewish intellectuals.

Ryssen’s second work approaches the Jews in a related but somewhat different way — in order to uncover the characterological or psychological foundations of their mentality. (His is not actually a “psychoanalysis” in the Freudian sense).

And like his first work, Psychanalyse de judaïsme is argued through extensive quotations from the various writers who are its subject — quotations which are often pages long and comprise more than half the book. This makes its 400 pages a rather tedious read, especially given that the argument lies buried amidst the endless quotations. (Those enamored of French clarity and eloquence will find this particularly challenging).

I’ve gained, though, a greater patience with his “method.”

For it’s clearer to me now, especially after Greg Johnson’s translation of Ryssen’s Mechanopolis interview, that his “method” is dictated in large part by the political restrictions imposed on his type of “discourse.”

Nearly everywhere in the EU, it is a crime to “incite racial hatred.”

To avoid the inquisitor, Ryssen must proceed carefully.

By extensively quoting and documenting what the Jews say about themselves and their intentions, while implying rather than explicitly stating what he thinks, he is able to publish his incendiary books.

The downside is that this makes them a chore to read and blunts his arguments.

* * *

In his characterological analysis of the Jewish intellectual, Ryssen re-visits the planetary ideology he examined in his first work.

Given the centrality of this ideology to their mentality, Ryssen claims Judaism is as much a political project as it is a religion — a project inspired by the messianic expectations that make up Judaism’s religious core — as Jews endeavor to break down borders, unify the earth, and establish the universal peace announced by their vengeful prophets.

Religious Jews understand this aspiration for a unified, peaceful world order in terms of their millennial longing for the messiah and the restoration of David’s ancient kingdom. Non-religious Jews, Ryssen’s focus, see it in secular terms — as a multiracial planetary Utopia based on Jewish values (assumed to be those of a unified humanity).

Their compulsion to realize this planetary ideology has made the Jews a people preeminently defined by their priests, prophets, and publicists.

Every Jewish intellectual or artistic production aims, as such, to instill planetary expectations in others.

In this spirit, they urge gentiles to deny their race, religion, heritage — in effect, every particularistic identity that divides them from the rest of humanity.

From the Europeans’ most intimate personal relations to the cultural fundament of their civilization — everything particular to them becomes a monstrosity, obstructing the advent of the Jews’ perfectly planned world.

Blood loyalty, tradition, established institutions and practices — in their resistance to globalism’s leveling impetus — are deemed “racist,” designated thus for crucifixion.

The only thing European they have any real appreciation of is the beauty of Europe’s women.

Similarly, their ideology assumes that all men are brothers under the skin — and that the ideal human state is a nomadic one, unattached to anything or any place.

They favor for this reason mass Third World immigration, publicizing it as a “chance” for Europe — to undermine the old ways, mix different populations, and create the coffee-colored world of their Utopian expectations.

Above all, they stand as champions of America’s international order, with its capitalist obsessions, its inherent pluralism and openness, and its profound affinity with the Jewish spirit.

Indeed, anti-Americanism is a kind of anti-Semitism to them.

Yet no matter how inspiring Jewish messianic strivings are to their intellectuals, they remain an illusion that distorts their view of the world, sets them apart from other peoples, and nurtures certain psychological disorders in them.

As such, the Jews’ planetary ideology is both reflective and formative of who they are, shaping their national character, as their ideologues endeavor to re-shape the world in their own image.

* * *

How does Ryssen characterize the cosmopolitans as a people?

First, he sees them as a people full of overweening pride. Having a world-historical mission to unite humanity, they consider themselves not just “chosen,” but superior, imbued with humanity’s highest, most lofty spirit.

This makes them the pivot of all things.

Unable to conceive of the world without themselves and their extraordinary spirit, they are convinced of their self-designated moral superiority, even if others fail to recognize it. They think, in this vein, that nothing compares to Jewish suffering: The tragedy of World War Two’s 50 million dead is hardly commensurate in their eyes to that of the fabled “Six Million.”

Despite the great persecutions they have suffered from all the various peoples amongst whom they have dwelled, these persecutions never seem to have anything to do with who they are or with the way they relate to others. They are always innocent.

When they do fail, their failure is that of “man” in general.

If they suffer “oedipal” feelings or other neurotic sexual neuroses, then it’s something universal, not Jewish; if their culture is misogynist, then all cultures are; if they are money-grubbing, then economics, as Marx held, is everywhere and in every time enthroned.

They can do no wrong — that’s the goy’s specialty.

Having once been what sociologists call “service nomads,” acting as civilizational or religious “go-betweens,” their planetary ideology is linked to their cosmopolitan heritage, just as this heritage enhances the plasticity of their character, enabling them to adapt to new surroundings, while retaining their Jewish identity. In this way, they easily “assimilate” the culture of their host, though they never actually assimilate in the sense of developing an organic attachment to it that demotes the centrality of their Jewish identity.

Rooted solely in themselves, as their great thinker Franz Rosenzweig noted, they lack attachment to exterior things — to a land or a locality, a transcendent reference or a defining folklore.

They are noted for being “mobile, clever, articulate, flexible, and good at being a stranger.” Their thought and behavior are often audacious — stimulating, complex, effervescent, full of chutzpah, but rarely great in its achievements, lacking as they do the well-nourished depth of rooted sentiments and an intrinsic, life-affirming standard of value.

More negatively, the Jewish sense of mission causes their more unstable members to become megalomaniacal in their ethnocentrism.

This makes them prone to grandiose reasoning, exaggerating, dramatizing, even lying without the slightest hesitation.

If this is not enough, they are inclined to pontificate on everything, even those things of which they know nothing, telling us what’s best for us and what we ought to think or do.

They are wont, as the French say, to “drown the fish” (noyer le poisson), overwhelming every situation with contradictory discourses, justifying, as they dissimulate.

They are similarly disposed to inversion (making the noble common and vice versa), to materialism, and to low-mindedness — as they drag everything and everyone down to their veiled, usurious level.

As planetary cultists, they pursue lives of constant agitation, with their existence being a carousel, which revolves around the disturbances, disorders, and irritations they bring to their host, as they plot, scheme, and subvert.

The bad faith they sow inevitably yields hostile reactions, poisoning their relations with gentiles, whose potential violence is an endless source of anxiety to them.

Whenever they bring down persecution on themselves (which they can’t seem to help), they rarely understand why — though they are quick to seek revenge.

They are, relatedly, ridden with fears of separation, expulsion, disaster — seeing monsters everywhere.

Stuck between the grandiose idea they have of themselves and the hostility they inevitably provoke in the real world, Jews have become extremely neurotic about their identity (often going to therapy for years to reconcile themselves with who they are).

Anxiety, paranoia, ambiguity, and a good deal of hatred comes with being “chosen.”

* * *

What does Ryssen make of this complex of specifically Jewish characteristics?

He sees it in terms of the psychological disorder known in French as histrionisme.

In English, this is called (I think) “histrionic personality disorder” or what, up to a few decades ago, was known as “hysteria.”

The hysteria studied by its pioneering student, Jean-Martin Charcot, or discussed in Freud’s early case studies — such as that of emotionally distraught women swooning or losing control of themselves in the period’s Victorian and Viennese salons — is rarely encountered today.

The contemporary definition describes hysteria as a condition marked by excessive emotionality — evident, for example, in those who seek to please others or draw attention to themselves, or in those who try to “seduce” in an “excessive and invading” way. (Hence, its “histrionic” nature).

Hyperemotional, hysterics tend, as a consequence, to the fragile, impulsive, highly subjective, but also to the seductive, egocentric, and exhibitionist — prone as they are to self-engrandizing delusion.  This goes with their extremely “plastic” personalities that bend and form in the presence of others.  Their social activities are accordingly inauthentic and they are usually incapable of imagining the perspectives of others, let alone respecting them.

* * *

Ryssen argues that the “histrionic personality disorder,” though not applicable to all, matches that of many cosmopolitan intellectuals.

He then suggests (sincerely or not, I don’t know) that given the disorder’s severity Jews should start looking in the mirror, to confront who they really are, not what their illusions imagine them to be.

To “cure” themselves and their elites of this debilitating disorder, they must fight, therefore, against the fantasies that keep them in their mental ghetto.

He claims that numerous Jews over the last century have, in fact, preferred to abandon their neuroses and root themselves among European peoples, even if this has taken several generations to complete.

Real assimilation is possible, Ryssen claims, — if Jews are willing to reject their judéité.

* * *

By this reasoning, those who aren’t actually Jews, but who have assimilated their intellectual reflexes, become such, in spirit.

If Judaism, then, is above all “a particular psychic disposition,” as Ryssen contends, it helps to explain why so many white Americans live today under the influence of their planetary expectations and why even some of their most ardent critics bear elements of their distinct “histrionic personality disorder.”

The conclusion I take from this is that the struggle against the cosmopolitans’ anti-white jihad will be as much a struggle against a certain mentality, associated with “Judaization,” as it will be a struggle against Jewish power.