—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative
When a student at the well-known Berlin art school Universität der Künste (UdK) used psychoanalytic terms to question her teacher’s assertion that we should listen to the “trees talking” more, she was attacked for her “colonial racist thinking,” using concepts of the white man, Sigmund Freud, to delegitimize “indigenous knowledge.”
A few weeks later, UdK students protested against Israel fighting back against the insurgents of October 7th, with banners that read “Stop the Genocide” or “It’s Not Complicated.” Dressed in all black, wearing black corona masks, and holding up red hands, supposedly meant to symbolize the blood that was on Germany’s hands, or bingo!, it’s “indigenous custom.” The president of the university tried to intervene, but the protestors shouted him down.[1]
Such protests marked the onset of a series of disturbances at Berlin universities following October 7th. These reached a culminating point when a Jewish Freie Universität student, Lahav Shapira—a known critic of the pro-Palestine protests and himself a descendant of one of the Israeli athletes murdered in the 1972 Munich massacre—was brutally attacked by an anti-Zionist Muslim student who recognized Shapira as he was exiting a bar.[2] At first this made headlines in Germany—not because a Jew had been hospitalized after an antisemitic attack, but because he is the brother of the well-known comedian Shahak Shapira.
I do not know if our tree-listening teacher was present at these protests. But if it is true that “the hatred of [psychoanalysis] is directly of a piece with antisemitism, by no means simply because Freud was himself a Jew, but rather because psychoanalysis consists precisely of that critical self-reflection that makes antisemites livid with rage,” as Adorno puts it,[3] and if we consider as well that Freud, the Jew, is likely seen in this context as a “white colonizer,” ergo on the side of the perpetrators, then the incident described at the outset at least has an antisemitic taint. For now, let us keep in mind that, in psychoanalytic terms, this teacher showed signs of a narcissistic tendency by indulging in the infantile fantasy of talking to trees.
Moreover “indigenous” seems to be a magical word that legitimizes even the most vicious hate. Recall that not long ago, the makers of the antisemitic mural at 2022’s documenta fifteen in Kassel pleaded that their mural was “indigenous art,” even though it looked suspiciously like the sort of street art that one can see in any big city around the world. The mural depicted something like a vast military-industrial complex with Stürmer-style depictions of Jews, Mossad agents as pigs, etc. When asked about it, the makers of the mural acted as if it was a specifically German quirkiness to not want antisemitic art displayed at a publicly funded event.[4]
Sadly, they were not entirely wrong in their assumption that not everyone objects to such forms of expression. While the antisemitic sleeper cells at UdK activated themselves relatively early after October 7th, more recently the comparatively mainstream audience at the Berlinale film festival—another publicly funded event—was able to vent its antisemitic urges. In the world of magical thinking, everything is possible, even wishing away the supposed imminent fascist coup d’état by the right-wing populist party AfD with ritualistic chants for democracy in front of the film festival doors, while clapping for the keffiyeh-wearing filmmaker Ben Russell and his crew, who were accusing Israel of committing genocide.[5]
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” Goebbels once famously said. And Hamas, as we know from Matthias Küntzel’s latest book, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (2023), is in this sense (among others) acting in the spirit of the Nazis. By repeating the lie of an Israeli genocide, Ben Russell and the crowd cheering him on were doing their part in Hamas’s PR-war against world Jewry. When it is Jews we are talking about, even the most baseless rumors make it to the mainstream. “Antisemitism is the rumor about the Jews,” Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, and the rumor mill has been running hot since October 7th, powered by the roars of the hundreds of millions Hamas supporters across cultures, united in the outrage about Jewish sovereignty.
The indulgence in childish fantasies of trees talking, the ritualistic chanting, the crude Manichaeism (“it’s not complicated”): all can be seen as signs of an infantile narcissism that has taken hold of not only the left but also the “batshit right.” Indeed, the contemporary anti-Israeli left’s infantilism reminds one of the title of Lenin’s book “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, in which he examines the German communists’ immature, or infantile, approach, which may be characterized as “all or nothing.” In his view, they were dreamers that did not want to align themselves with bourgeois political parties or trade unions, even when it would seem practical to do so. They wanted revolution or nothing. He characterized them as impulsive, dogmatic, and sectarian. While these traits merely led them to be ineffectual revolutionaries, today’s “left-wing” infantile disorder is something far more vicious.
According to the psychoanalyst Béla Grunberger, there is a connection between (infantile) narcissism and antisemitism. Grunberger characterizes narcissists as trying to avoid Oedipal conflicts, particularly conflicts involving instances of the father principle. Instead of confronting the challenges that reality presents, and that we all have to overcome, by facing what represents the father principle and maturing in the process of overcoming it—in an optimal constellation, taking on some traits, values, etc., while rejecting others—the narcissist decides to remain a child, sidestepping the Oedipal conflict rather than taking it on. The narcissist persists in his postnatal search for pure narcissism, the “paradise” of the mother’s womb, where all desires are endlessly met.[6]
They simply haven’t had anyone confront them with reality yet, or else they hide when circumstances confront them with it. Moreover, the father principle—the norms and values mediated to us by fatherly authority—is typically embedded in our conscience, when Oedipalization has been successful. In contrast to the ideal of a “normal, healthy” person, however, the narcissist, forever insufficiently Oedipalized, continues to feel the need for omnipotence throughout his life, and is thus narcissistically hurt when confronted with borders set by whatever is representative of the father principle. Thus in the case of the teacher at the UdK, he did not want annoying Jewish rationality to interfere with his indulgence in childish fantasies. He feels challenges to his omnipotence (making something real that isn’t), so he lashes out against everyone that reminds him of reality. For the antisemite, “conscience is a Jewish invention,” as Hitler once said.[7] And by fighting the Jews, they engage in a pseudo-Oedipal conflict.[8]
To see such a tight connection between Judaism and conscience, or fatherly authority, is to indulge in a tradition that dates back to the dawn of monotheism. In short, Freud claims in his book on Moses that one of the reasons Christianity came into existence was that some Jews could not handle the ambivalence that came from the guilt they felt from killing their prophets (including, according to Freud’s provocative thesis, Moses himself whom Freud claims was actually more than one leader condensed into one “big man”) whose civilizational demands for renunciation of their drives they didn’t want to bear. Making Jesus die for all their sins was a way to relieve themselves from these feelings of guilt. The remaining Jews’ however didn’t accept that salvation. So the Jews continued existence serves as a constant reminder of that trick, performed in order to soften their feelings of guilt. This might be where the topos of Jewish vengefulness originates. The antisemite’s feelings of guilt are projected onto the Jews, whose very being is then seen as an uncanny reminder of guilt.
Today, this kind of self-exculpating fantasy leads “pro-Palestinian” commentators to insist, in the context of the accidental killing of the World Central Kitchen workers, that not only was the accident intended to “make Palestinians suffer” but that, even more absurdly, Israel’s “entire existence is a collective punishment of the people of Palestine.”
An additional element of the infantile character structure that Grunberger discerns is that of anality. In the anal phase, children are often observed saying “no,” playing with dirt, and delighting in destroying things.[9] In this respect, the antisemite has a badly resolved anal phase, awkwardly synthesized with what might otherwise have been a more pure and simple case of narcissism. For playing with dirt and, at the same time, yearning for the narcissist’s ideal of a spotlessly pristine condition do not go hand in hand very well. So everything that reminds the antisemite of his anal components, like dirtiness, destructiveness, etc., is projected onto the Jews.[10]
In the case of our UdK students, this kind of anality can be seen in their outstretched red hands, like a little kid that proudly presents their food-stained fingers after one has left the room for a minute. That especially Jews with a connection to Israel will be reminded by the red hands of the picture of Aziz Salha, holding up his blood-stained hands out of the window of the Ramallah police station, where he was part of a violent mob that had killed and mutilated two IDF reservists who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, never crossed their minds, of course. While the students said that they held up their painted hands to show that Germany had blood on its hands for supporting Israel, it is still remarkably striking how similar these two events are with regard to their anality.
Narcissism can also be detected in the form of the aforementioned Manichaeism (“it’s not complicated”), which furthermore goes to support the protester’s fantasy of impeccable moral hygiene. “Stop the Genocide” is especially vicious when considering that it was a Jewish scholar that came up with the definition of genocide in the immediate wake of the Holocaust. With what we know now about the mind of the antisemite, this can be interpreted in the context of October 7th as the postcolonialists’ doubling down on their Palestine solidarity, not despite the brutality of the terrorists but because of it. The “dirtiness,” the moral stain, the obvious genocidal urges of their protégés (the Palestinian “resistance”) cannot be accepted, and so it has to be projected outward, onto the victims (the Jews).
This becomes especially clear when Israel is slandered as if it were the most evil and brutal force operating in the world, while all of Gaza apparently consists only of innocent little girls, and as if it were IDF soldiers, and not Hamas fighters, that in unison, with substantial help from of the Palestinian population at large, raped and mutilated their victims in the most abhorrent ways imaginable.
The important thing here is that the Jews are being fought as an embodiment of the father principle. This mechanism repeats itself in various forms over the ages—from the religious anti-Judaism of the Middle Ages, to its secularized versions as Nazi “racial” antisemitism, and today’s “postcolonial” anti-Zionism, where it manifests itself through our postmodern, de-Oedipalizing, and heavily narcissistic consumer culture.[11] It is deeply ingrained not only in Christian but also in Muslim society.[12]
Of course, all this does not mean that every pro-Palestine activist can themselves be diagnosed at a distance as a pathological narcissist. It is a group phenomenon. This is perfectly illustrated by the essay “I Want to Kill Cops until I’m Dead,” which Hendrik Hansen cites in his Telos 204 article. In the manifesto that Hansen quotes from, there is talk of killing not only the cops in the real world but also “the cop in our head.” We have to kill “that little voice which tells you that what you are doing is right or wrong. . . . This ‘conscience’ is the cop inside your head.” To do so, we have to riot; for in the riot “we collectively struggle against each others’ ‘consciences'” and “we are no longer atomized existential entities concerned as to whether burning a car is morally right or wrong.”[13]
This is a very lucid example, indeed, of how group narcissism works. Likewise, just as plainly, while “fighting the cop in our head” is merely riot romanticism in the end, postcolonial activists, instead of fighting the cop in our head, want to “decolonize the mind.” In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, this means that “our imagination is colonized” and that if we free our minds, we will then be able to imagine a world where “Palestine is free and Israel doesn’t exist anymore.”[14]
These are the stirring words of Sandew Hira, author of Decolonizing the Mind and a man who reported shedding tears of joy when he saw the paragliders ascend over Israel on October 7th.[15] It thus becomes clear where the leftist urge for a clean tabula rasa ends up when Israel is involved. Maybe he too learned the indigenous knowledge of listening to trees! Thanks to his vivid, decolonized imagination, he might have heard them whisper: “There is a Jew hiding behind me—come and kill him,” as the 1988 Hamas charter quotes talking trees in the Hadiths.
That there is a connection between narcissism and antisemitism could also be the answer to the question Gabriel Noah Brahm raised, in one of the Telos Israel Initiative webinars, concerning how it is possible that people who are overly sensitive to microaggressions are the very same people that hail, ignore, or relativize the macroaggression of Hamas. Narcissists are experts at playing the victim card. So maybe it is not surprising, after all, that people who have managed so brilliantly at simultaneously weaponizing and professionalizing the pose of victimhood—thus magically turning the smallest of nuisances, like being criticized, into improprieties that must be policed as forms of illegitimate hostility in miniature—are now hailing the most spectacularly successful professional victims in the world, from Hamas to the Houthis, and even Osama bin Laden.
The story of Collin May that was posted on TelosScope is another good example of how victimhood is nowadays used as an instrument of a chauvinistic agenda, and also why the whole concept of having a “multitude” of oppressed people does not work, since this supposed multitude obviously has conflicting interests.
In such an atmosphere, cultivated over decades, antisemitism is a godsend for the perpetrators of so many impostures—a golden opportunity to project onto a single cause all the nuisances and narcissistic insults naturally attendant upon everyday life. In the wake of October 7th, the easily offended of the world happily took that offer.
Finally, all this is not to say that narcissism necessarily leads to antisemitism, nor that narcissism is per se a bad thing. We all have to deal with narcissistic insults, which we have to somehow manage as gracefully as we can. Contrary to the anti-narcissistic zeitgeist (e.g., everybody seems to have a narcissistic ex-partner these days), narcissism is a plus for religious activity, self-love, critical thinking, and creative endeavors.[16] If only artists would do actual art instead of political “art,” which is mostly nothing more than placative virtue signaling and badly cloaked activism.
It might be too optimistic to conclude that if the teacher at UdK would teach Freud instead of Tree, then perhaps they would not be so inclined to take part in antisemitic protests. But the pedagogy currently on offer surely does not help.
“[I]f rigorous psychoanalysis found its institutional place, its influence upon the intellectual climate in Germany would be a salutary one, even if that meant nothing more than taking it for granted that one should not lash outward but should reflect about oneself and one’s relation to whatever obdurate consciousness habitually rages against,”[17] says Adorno. And he is right. While these psychoanalytic speculations are just a small piece of the puzzle, now at least we can choose, if we wish—rather than settling for just explaining away the phenomenon—to properly apprehend and appropriately respond to the postcolonial activists for what they are: vicious adult children who, instead of facing the world and its challenges, choose to tap into our culture’s oldest and most monstrous mechanism of hate.
1. “Israel-Hass und Antisemitismus treten an der UdK Berlin offen hervor,” FAZ.NET, November 27, 2023.
2. “‘Er war voller Hass’: Muslimischer Student der FU Berlin verprügelt Shahak Shapiras Bruder,” Der Tagesspiegel Online, February 4, 2024.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005), p. 101. For the sake of consistency, the spelling of the words “anti-Semitism” and “anti-Semites” in the original has been conformed to match current usage.
4. Theresa Franke, “Verdeckung einer Arbeit von Taring Padi auf der documenta fifteen,” documenta fifteen, June 20, 2022.
5. “Viel Politik bei der Berlinale,” ZDFHeute, February 25, 2024.
6. Béla Grunberger, Pierre Dessuant, and Max Looser, Narzißmus, Christentum, Antisemitismus: eine psychoanalytische Untersuchung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2000).
7. Ibid., p. 361.
8. Ibid., p. 355.
9. Ibid., p. 365.
10. Ibid.
11. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (Norton: New York, 1979).
12. See Matthias Küntzel, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge, 2023).
13. Hendrik Hansen, “Left-Wing and Right-Wing Identity Politics: A Comparison of the Post-Structuralist Turn in Left-Wing Extremism with the Ethnopluralism and Nominalism of the New Right,” Telos 204 (2023): 34–35.
14. IHRCtv, “Decolonise Your Mind: The Future of Israel,” YouTube video, November 10, 2023.
15. IHRCtv, “Author Evening with Sandew Hira: Decolonizing The Mind—A Guide to Decolonial Theory and Practice,” YouTube video, October 12, 2023.
16. Grunberger, Dessuant, and Looser, Narzißmus, Christentum, Antisemitismus, p. 43.
17. Adorno, Critical Models, p. 101.
Julius Bielek is an undergraduate student in philosophy and history at the University of Potsdam. He is the head of the Telos student group in Berlin, which formed in the context of the Telos Israel Initiative.
