Collective Unconscious, Gaza, Jews, Zizek-Lacan, Peterson, Narcissism (with Prof. Matthew Biberman)

So the other question I had where we, in our notes in advance were talking about Gijsac was the ban on Jung.

You talked about Young for a minute.

And that to me always gets to two things that we've kind of touched on.

One is, particularly now that we see a lot of conversation about the fall off of birth rates and with the fact that current young people are having a lot less sex and a lot less kids, that the desire in the Freudian tradition to root everything into the sex drive and Young's disagreement about that.

And then the desire to create some kind of notion that the unconscious of an individual extends in a very unscientific way, really, but I don't think young cared, you know, beyond their bag of bones so that we could begin to talk about a collective unconscious.

And there's no way you can talk about a collective.

But if you use the word social imaginary or something like that, then your piece in whatever peer-reviewed journal it is in the world of literature and humanities will get through.

But you can't use young. You can't go into the idea of a collective unconscious, but in so many ways we want to, what do you make of that?

Well, the pedigree of the idea of the unconscious doesn't start with Freud, of course.

Actually, Jeunet, who preceded Freud, Jonez accused Freud of plagiarism openly in writing. And I regret to say that he was right.

Freud's concept of the unconscious has to do with dissociation, 100%.

And so in this sense, Freud is just copy Jonez.

By the way, he copied Jone, verbatim. He like copied the concepts, the words.

In today's world, he would have been sued for copyright violations or infringements.

So this was the Freudian plagiarism act of the Jeune dissociated unconscious time.

Whereas Jung disagreed with Freud on all major issues.

It's very wrong to present Jung as a disciple of Freud. That ended after their first meeting. After Jung has met Freud for the first time, he said that he was so shocked by Freud that the father image of Freud has been ruined for him. Among other things Jung discovered in his first meeting with Freud that Freud was two-timing his wife with her sister, for example.

So there's not much of a father thing. So Jung divorced Freud mentally very early on.

Now Jung disagreed with Freud about narcissism. He disagreed with Freud about introversion. He disagreed and Freud about the formation of the self. He disagreed with everything. I have no idea why people group them together.

And one of the things they had a major disagreement about is the unconscious. Whereas Freud initially, by the way, initially suggested that the unconscious is an utterly individual thing because he plagiarized Jeunet. Jung, Ab initio, considered the unconscious as a bridge, a bridge connecting the individual to a culture, to society, to a period in history, and to the past, above all else.

Now, the social imaginary is acquired. It's non-universal, it's context dependent. And it's a narrative.

While Jung's collective unconscious is innate, so philosophically it's part of the theory of innate, so it's innate, it's hereditary, and it is universal.

So the differences between the social imaginary and the collective unconscious are immense. I wouldn't compare them. They are not the same, absolutely not the same, which makes it much easier to accept the concept of social imaginary.

The collective unconscious is deterministic, even one would say fatalistic, but definitely deterministic. It's hereditary in the strict genetic sense. Jung was talking about heredity, like genetics. And it's universal. Whether you're an African, an Asian, an American, whatever, you share the same collective unconscious.

Now this created severe problems because we have rejected determinism long ago, because we wrongly associated it with religion.

So the Enlightenment rejected the concept of determinism. When Newton came up with determinism in physics, Leibniz didn't spend a moment attacking him. And then we spent the next 300 years getting rid of Newton's determinism.

Determinism was a taboo in modern science, in modern thinking, enlightenment philosophies and so on, absolute taboo.

And here, Jung suggested a totally deterministic concept.

There was instead an idolization of the individual. The individual as a maker, the individual as an author, the individual as a focus or the center in Hegel's works as well.

So this led to a process of scientism, the idealization of science itself, and of the individuals who make science, the scientists.

And so there was an emphasis on empiricism, there was an emphasis on positivism, logical positivism, other positivism.

And above all, there was an emphasis on external criteria such as falsifiability.

So Jung's collective unconscious fails in this sense. It's not an empiricist concept. It is not subject to falsifiable, cannot be falsified. It's definitely not a positivist concept. It flies in the face of positivism.

And because it's unfalsifiable and undecidable, it was excluded from the discourse. The same way, no serious scientists would tackle the question, does God exist? It's an undecidable question, an unfalsifiable question.

Similarly, the question of mind-body dualism, and even the question of string theories in physics, these are undecidable. These are unfalsifiable things.

So they are relegated to the realm of mysticism or metaphysics, but they're not serious science and can never be considered serious science. And anything that is not serious science is not serious, period.

So art and religion and mysticism and even philosophy, they're not serious, because they're not serious science.

And disciplines such as psychology, such as economics, such as sociology, they're trying to become sciences, exact sciences, because otherwise they will never be taken seriously.

So you were swept along in this movement towards exact sciences, measurable, falsifiable, observable, quantifiable, etc.

That's why mathematics has become the lingua franca, the lingua franca of a discipline which should never ever be mathematical, and that is a discipline of psychology.

Why? Because it gives the appearance of exactitude.

And you can't reduce the collective unconscious to anything mathematical, although Lacan by the way did try to reduce his work to mathematics. I don't know if you are aware of that.

There was a massive initiative.

So psychology in general has transitioned from a logical positive space where people were basically concerned with the brain. They did autopsies of the brain. They studied the brain.

So we have Wundt. We have Chauchot. This was the first phase.

Then psychology transitioned to the mind, to the study of the mind. So we have Freud and we have Jung.

And then psychology transitioned to the study of populations or cohorts. Psychology became statistical and doomed the work of people like Freud and like Jung, but also people like Klein and Fairbairn and a million others, like treasures, all treasures, 150 years of psychology, have been, all these treasures have been incinerated in the furnace of mathematical exactitude and laboratory studies, which go nowhere, by the way, because there is a replication crisis.

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that Jung is a victim, is one victim among many.

And the problem is psychology, not Jung. Psychology has been corrupted and deformed beyond recognition and beyond measure. It's a pseudo-science. It's a mess. It's a circus act. It's not serious. Really not serious now, you know.

Now, ironically, exact science actually supports Jung.

When you look at various branches of science, we definitely find very powerful indications of what might be called the collective unconscious or the autonomous self or whatever you want to call.

For example, in ethology, you have processes such as imprinting or innate release mechanisms.

In linguistics, you have universal grammar, Chomsky, Pinker.

In social psychology, you have what is known as social pre-wiring.

They are amazing studies of twins as embryos, and they are much more social than selfish in the womb.

So wherever you look, biology, sociology, economics, ethology, I mean exact and less exact sciences, social sciences, humanities, the indications are overwhelming that Jung has actually been right.

And that the unconscious is probably pre-figured and pre-configured in some way.

Not necessarily with its contents. I think the major dispute with Jung is that he didn't just discuss templates. He discussed the contents of templates, the archetypes. The archetypes are the problem.

But the templates exist, ready-made containers available, processes triggered, on birth. I mean, this is beyond dispute, I think, nowadays.

And in this sense, I think Fairbairn is much closer to modern scientific knowledge than Jung.

But both Fairburn and Jung agree that a baby is never born Tabula Rasa. It's never a blank slate. We are born with potentials and these potentials are encoded in wetware, in the brain, and just waiting to be triggered or fulfilled or whatever.

I think Jung, when Jung went into the territory of archetypes, he has abandoned probably science and moved into literature, the study of mythology, the study of religion.

And I think this is why scientists are very angry at him and tend to ignore him.

Right.

Well, that's very enlightening. I appreciate you going into that in the detail that you did.

In terms of your own work and your specialization in narcissism, I wanted to ask you to take a moment and walk us through why you decided to make that, I think it's fair to say at some point your life's work, and where your thoughts on it started, and to what degree there's been an evolution and your understanding of the concept and the degree to which there might be ways to mitigate it or, you know, I hesitate to say treat it, but that is perhaps the clearest way to ask the question.

Well, I don't want to emulate Freud. Every five years, Freud would write an autobiographical study, tracing his path and his evolution, self-aggrandizing.

I have a very dim view of Freud. I think it was a genius, unmitigated genius. But he had so many flaws, so many flaws that cast in doubt our idealization of him.

Anyhow, one of his flaws was this self-masturbatory self-preoccupation with his mental development. He thought he had to document every single step, thought, ID, conflict, and so on so forth. And it's very self-indulgent.

So I will not emulate it. Instead, I will tell you where I'm now.

I've reconceived of narcissism in four ways.

And before I proceed to describe these ways, as briefly as I can, I promise.

I think that narcissism is a very important concept in psychology, possibly the root of everything. The root of personality theory, the root of mental illness, the root.

So I don't think that narcissism is a single aspect or a single shard in the kaleidoscope. I think it is the kaleidoscope.

I think psychology is about narcissism. Only we call it different names, but I think it's all narcissism.

Now, of course, if you're a carpenter, if your hammer, everything is a nail.

But I share this view with many, many much more important luminaries and scholars. So I'm not alone in thinking this way.

And it is a fact that narcissism has become by far the hot button topic in the current study of psychology.

So I've reconceived of narcissism in four ways.

Number one, I suggest that narcissistic personality disorder is a post-traumatic condition, a post-traumatic condition, and therefore should be amenable to trauma therapies.

Our mistake, our current mistake is we are trying to apply to narcissism, treatment modalities which were never meant to deal with trauma.

And so they keep failing, of course.

I also suggest that the narcissist is a child, the mental and emotional age of the narcissist is, I don't know, anywhere between two and four years old, when separation, individuation has stalled and there was a problem with a formation, constellation and integration of the self.

So at that point there was what used to be called arrested development or stunted development or stunted thriving or whatever you want to call it.

And the narcissist simply froze in time. It's a child.

And so that's a second mistake we're making when we're trying to treat narcissists, where we apply to the narcissist adult psychologists, treatment modalities intended to cope and modify adults, when the narcissist is actually a child.

So the first contribution I've made is to suggest that we should combine child psychology with trauma therapies in order to cope with narcissism.

The second misconception, I suggested that the narcissist has a single exclusive mode of interacting with other people.

In other words, the narcissist is confined to a single type of interpersonal relations.

And that is known as the shared fantasy. Shared fantasy was first described by Sanders in 1989.

And I suggested that the shared fantasy is the only way a narcissist can interact and does interact with intimate partners, romantic partners, friends, colleagues, neighbors, you name it.

All interpersonal relationships are mediated via a fantasy defense, grand, large, all consuming, all pervasive, ubiquitous.

Actually, the narcissist is a fantasy known as the false self.

So I combined the shared fantasy with the principle that I came up with, the dual mothership.

I suggested that at the core of the narcissist's shared fantasy, there is an attempt to recreate an early childhood conflict, a failure in separation, individuation, a failure to separate from the maternal figure and become an individual.

And so the shared fantasy is used to recreate this conflict with a series of intimate partners, friends and so on and so forth.

And I call it a dual mothership because the narcissist regresses the partner, renders the partner infantile.

And so the partner becomes the narcissist's mother, but the narcissist becomes the partner infantile.

And so the partner becomes the narcissist's mother, but the narcissist becomes the partner's mother as well.

So it's like two mothers.

And I call it mothership, not because I don't know English, I wish to believe, but because I want to imply that there's a kind of mothership in space that is in control of the vehicles, you know, of the vehicles of the...

So a dual mothership.

The third reconception or reframing or rewriting of narcissism is when I suggested that narcissism is a failure at othering.

Now othering is a word that has bad reputation. It means, you know, the rejection of the other, the demonization of the other.

But in my work, othering simply means the ability to recognize the separateness and externality of other people.

And I suggest that because narcissism is a very early age failure, pathological narcissism, is a very early age failure in separation, the narcissist is incapable of perceiving other people's separateness.

And because the narcissist never becomes an individual, there's no formation of an ego.

Ironically, narcissists are egoless. They don't have an ego.

So because of that, there's an othering failure.

The narcissist is unable to relate to other people as external objects and as separate from himself because he has never gone through the experience of separation, individuation.

And so the end result is something known as hyper-reflexivity. It's a psychotic feature.

And in this sense, I compare narcissism to psychosis.

There's a confusion between internal and external objects, exactly like in psychosis. And in this, I'm a follower of Otto Kernberg, who has suggested basically the same. And finally, the fourth contribution is that I suggest that the only way to treat narcissism is to combine, as I said, trauma therapies with techniques borrowed from child psychology, but in a framework of re-traumatization, the narcissist needs to re-experience early childhood traumas, but not by verbalizing them or processing them, by actually reliving them, something known as revivitness. Again, that's not my original contribution. That was suggested in 1985 by Foie in Nozac. But what I've done, I've taken these concepts and so on so forth, and I've integrated them. So I have an integrated frame.

Unlike Freud, I like to acknowledge sources. So I acknowledge the sources, but I think I've given them a new lease on life. I also created most of the language in use today. So that's another thing.

Right.

Well, I think it's a very powerful model and i think i agree with you that narcissism uh rests at the core of the of the endeavor itself of psychology and psychoanalysis and one question that I want to ask it may seem like a stupid question but often those are the good the good questions is it makes so much sense you know the way you walk through it it's it makes so much sense.

You know, the way you walk through it, it makes so much sense of something that is not sensical in the sense that, you know, in the old days, I'm a Shakespearean scholar by trade, he would have said we're talking about madness here.

And what you've done is you've imposed a kind of sense on madness. Can that possibly be right? That is that I'm skeptical of its truth because I find the truth so logical.

What's your response to that? It's a very good question. It's not stupid at all, but it does rely on an erroneous foundation, on a hidden assumption that is utterly wrong. And that is a very common mistake among laymen. No offense. I'm a layman in Shakespeare. Very common mistake among laymen to believe that madness equals chaos and sanity equals order or structure. It's a mistake committed by the likes of Jordan Peterson, I mean, who is ostensibly a psychologist. So, and that is of course completely untrue. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, including a scholar I have met, you Duff Reed when I was very young and had a huge influence on my work and on me, as numerous scholars have demonstrated conclusively, madness is an alternative structure, alternative order, alternative logic, parologic. So it's not that madness is chaos. Madness is not your order. Madness is not your structure.

And this is of course at the core of the work of people like Michel Foucault or like Thomas Zaz or the anti-psychiatry movement.

Because madness is not chaos. Actually, there is an excellent argument to make that many forms of madness have to do with rigid structures, an order that has ossified and that is constricting life because it's too algorithmic and too reducible to mathematics, if you wish.

So many psychotics, many psychotics develop impeccable logics, internal logics, kind of private languages, if you wish, to borrow from Wittgenstein, but they develop impeccable logics, and they impose these logics on observations, they're very scientific about it, and so on so forth.

So narcissism is one such thing.

Kernberg suggested that narcissism is a defense against borderline emotional dysregulation, and therefore both narcissism and borderline are on the border of psychosis. That's why he called it borderline. It's on the border between neurosis and psychosis. I agree. I agree. Whereas the psychotic confuses internal objects with external ones, he believes, the psychotic believes that his internal objects, for example, internal voices, internal images are actually external. Theexternal.

The narcissist confuses external objects with internal ones.

The narcissist would look at you and say, you're just a figment of my imagination, or you're just an internal object in my mind.

He wouldn't say it because it's unconscious, but that's the way he would relate to you.

That's why he would never accept your personal autonomy, your agency, your efficacy. He would reject this. He would fight it furiously because you are internal.

If you display personal autonomy, you are a rebellious internal object, which threatens the precarious balance of the personality.

But balance does exist. It's a mistake to think that psychosis, for example, is an unstable system. These are stable systems which incorporate internal instabilities and so on, but they are stable, they're rigid.

If you open the DSM, by the way, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

In the descriptions of many mental illnesses, narcissistic personality disorder included, they use the word rigid, a rigid personality.

That is often when there is this perceived rebellion against the rigidity of the worldview that's the moment when the aggressivity, the aggression, the rage and the bad behavior of the narcissist comes to the floor.

So many people think, to seek you out in terms of the quasi-therapeutic videos that you make that people use to understand the behavior that they're dealing with when they encounter toxic narcissists.

So shifting gears to an example that as we move into part two of our discussion of a type of behavior that people find mystifying right now in our current political worldview, which so many of the world is now focused on Israel and the war in Gaza.

I gave you an example from a Carolyn Glick lecture, and you see it all over of this desire to want to understand the queers for Palestine where this meme is often treated sort of the way that we're talking about madness in sort of the layman's wrong way, that this just doesn't compute.

I mean, these people are just, they're either very stupid, very crazy, stupidly crazy.

They don't understand that if they were in Gaza, they would be thrown off the first building.

And that's as far as the analysis on this phenomenon goes.

Can you help us understand it further?

No, I don't know if I can help you understand it further because I suspect here I don't have any relative advantage compared to you. But I can offer my point of view.

First of all, I believe in the footsteps of Bradley Campbell, the famous sociologist, I believe that we have transitioned from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood.

The organizing principle of modern life is victim.

Now victimhood, like everything else in human life, has a malignant version.

And unfortunately, this malignant version has taken over.

It's competitive, it's defiant, it's entitled victim, and it's an identity. I call it reckless or psychopathic victim. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, psychopathic victim, but many recent studies, four of which were conducted in Israel, by the way, many the Gabai studies, many recent studies show that victimhood movements are infiltrated by narcissists, with narcissists and psychopaths, especially in leadership positions.

Narcissists and psychopaths leverage victimhood in order to obtain narcissistic supply, to impose obligations on others by declaring impromptu rights, and to become entitled, and to leverage and manipulate people. There's manipulative victim. And so forth. This is established. This is in the corpus of recent psychological studies on multiple continents. We're talking British Columbia. We're talking Israel. We're talking China. We're talking.

So this is pretty virtual signaling has become a narcissistic psychopathic thing.

Now, so this is problem number one.

That victim would, when we try to cope with gray areas, nuances, and so on so forth, the organizing principle that springs to mind and makes sense of the world, the hermeneutic, if you wish, or exegetic principle, is victim.

Obviously, you're always the victim. You wouldn't want to be the abuser.

But that necessitates finding abusers. Abususes are in short supply.

If everyone and his dog is a victim, who is abusing? Who is victimizing?

That's a problem.

So we're beginning to label each other as victims. That is known as the Karpman Drama Triangle.

In the Karpman Drama Triangle victims often become abusers and abusers often become victims.

So now we have a situation that victims label each other as their abuser so you could be in a role of a victim in one group and an abuser in the other.

So the Jews, and I'm a Jew, just to remove any doubts, in case I'll be accused of anti-Semitism or something.

Jews are perceived as the universal rapacious, oppressors, and elites.

And I'm not talking about the 20th century or the 21st century.

Jews have been perceived like this in the tundras of Russia. Jews have been perceived like this in China where there are maybe 100 Jews.

Jews are cast in the role of the universal, rapacious, oppressor, and always a member of an elite.

Now the elite could be an occult elite, a hidden elite, but definitely there's an elite there.

So, because Jews are the universal abusers, the universal virus, if you wish, then everyone is the victim of the Jews. Russians, Palestinians, Americans, because you can find tens of millions of Americans would say that the Jews are victimizing America. The power of AIPAC and the Israeli lobby and so on so forth.

Wherever you go, everyone is the victim of the Jews.

And it's the same, you know, if you discuss a virus. A virus would infect a Chinese man, a Russian woman, an American girl, and a Kenyan boy, equally.

That's what the Jews do. Wherever they go, they oppress, they suppress, they steal.

And this is, of course, I don't need to tell you, you're an expert on anti-Semitism, but this is a core of anti-Semitism, Jew hatred, as you wrote to me.

Absolutely, yeah. It's simple, it's Jew hatred.

But behind this, there is what Gijs would have called an ideology.

The ideology is the universalism of the Jew as a victimizer. As the Jew as an abuser, the Jews cannot help it.

It's an unconscious automatic process.

It's not that the Jews are malevolent necessarily, because you can find a lot of literature that doesn't say they're malevolent or malicious or premeditated.

It's not intentional sometimes. It's just who they are. Toxic, poisonous. Nothing can be done. It's like a snake or virus or, you know, a force of nature.

Now, Israel is a private case because it's been established by Jews.

Naturally, the thematic ethos of Israel is abuse. Anything Jews do is intended to abuse, constructed on abuse, and the end result is abuse.

So Israel is definitely an abusive entity. It is an imperialist settler colonial outpost. They are the aggressors.

But it's only a private case. Because if Israel were to vanish tomorrow, another target would have been found that is associated closely with Jews.

Now, one thing to be clear, you cannot reject Zionism if you are not an anti-Semite.

Why is that?

Because, you know, the Venn diagram? The Venn diagram, we have two circles, and there's a common area.

In the Venn diagram of Jews and Zionists, the common area is about 80%.

The vast majority of Jews are Zionists.

That's a fact. Inescapable fact.

If you're rejecting Zionists, you're rejecting Jews. End of story.

Except maybestory. Except maybe for a 20% minority.

Because Jews are the universal virus, the universal aggressor, and I can use other metaphors and similes from Nazi literature.

Because they're like that, they are never the victims. You can never be an abuser and a victim simultaneously. These are mutually exclusive propositions.

If you are the universal abuser, you could never, ever be a victim. Whatever happens to you, you had it coming. You precipitated it. In other words, whatever happens to you is just.

Let me ask you a question on this, because it's a compelling case that you're modeling here for us.

I haven't finished by the way, there are three other mechanisms, but okay, we can make a break.

Yeah, and if you can dovetail this in, and you may very well be able to, that the paradigm that you're using is shared by the basic accepted theory of anti-Semitism, namely that it's a projection of certain aspects of the anti-Semite that is found in them, like they're the capitalist.

And it's projected out because they can't deal with it internally. And it finds its locus in the Jew and it becomes this fantasy of salvation, perhaps global salvation, that we can fix everything if we just get rid of the Jews, because the Jews are now the collective exteriorized malignancy that is the problem.

So we solve the problem by eliminating the Jews.

I haven't said any of this, although this is of course fascinating.

And there is a place for this in psychology.

When we deal with social psychology and so on, we of course, in victimhood studies, for example, victimology, we of course recognize the power of primitive defense mechanisms such as projection, such as splitting. And I'll come to it when I answer your last question.

What I have said is because victimhood became such a dominant organizing principle, the only way to explain the world, the only way to make sense of the world, the only way to imbue your life and the world with meaning, the necessity to become a victim means that you have to find an abuser. You have to go looking for an abuser.

Otherwise, you're not a victim. You're in trouble if you don't have an abuser. You're not a victim. And if you're not a victim, you're not entitled. Your life doesn't make sense, you're not special, etc.

So this new emergence of victimhood, competitive victimhood, malignant victimhood, this new emergence made people look for victims.

So some people find narcissists. They say narcissists are the abuser. Psychopaths are the abuser.

But everyone agrees that Jews are the abusers. It's an easy pick.

If you decide tomorrow, you wake up in the morning, you drink your coffee, of course, and then you say, okay, today is the day that I become a victim. And I'm going to use my victimhood to expand my life to myself, my failures, my defeats, my shortcomings, my flaws, they all have to do with the fact that I've been victimized as a child, I've been victimized as an adult, I've been victimized in the workplace.

Victimhood suits me perfectly. It makes sense of my life, it calms me down, it's anxiolytic, reduces anxiety. It's wonderful.

There's only one problem. No one has ever victimized me. I can't find an abuser. It's horrible.

Oh, wait a minute. There's the Jews. The Jews victimized me. Directly, indirectly.

So the Jews are the default option if you fail to find another identifiable abuser. They're always there. They're like background noise. They are a perfect universal agent of abuse.

And so that's what I'm saying. In an age of victimhood, the Jews are likely to be selected as abusers and victimizers time and again. Regardless of reality, it's counterfactual, it's mythological even, but that's the way it is.

And it combines with three other very pernicious psychological processes.

As if this were not enough, and it is enough, it goes hand in hand with three other processes.

One is known as the Stockholm syndrome.

The Stockholm syndrome is a fantasy defense. Reality is too unbearable, too intolerable.

For example, your life is threatened. You can't countenance this, you can't digest it.

So the Stockholm syndrome has to do with helplessness, dependency, and so on and so forth. And it leads to the idealization of the aggressor.

I'm not going to the history of Stockholm syndrome. There's also a huge debate whether it's real or not. Huge debate.

But I think it's a useful metaphor in the worst case, and maybe it does exist in the best case.

But it explains a lot. It explains why we identify with aggressors, why we identify with violent people, why we identify with terrorists, why we identify with criminals, because it feels safer.

If you're on the side of the terrorists and you're helpless and you're dependent, and you're afraid for your life, and you don't want to go to war, and so on so forth, it would feel good to be on the side of the terrorists.

It's an emanation from weakness. There's an underlying assumption of weakness.

This was the reason for the appeasement policy in the 1930s with Adolf Hitler.

You know, the democracies didn't feel that they were strong enough to cope with him.

So they adopted his point of view. They became his hostages in a Stockholm syndrome type.

I think these kids, I think these kids, these scholars, so-called scholars, these academics, anyone who supports Hamas is because they're afraid of Hamas and they're loathe.

They don't want to admit that they're afraid. They don't want to acknowledge their helplessness, their dependency, their terror, their weakness, their vulnerability, their fragility. They don't want to acknowledge any of these things.

So they idolize and idealize Hamas. It's better to be on Hamas's side because Hamas is winning the war, not the physical war. Not a physical war. The war for hearts and minds.

Because Hamas, if you disagree with Hamas, they throw you off a building. They have no inhibitions, no morals, no rules. There's no game, except their game. If you don't identify with Hamas, you will be heckled in the best case. You may be beaten to death, as happened in Gaza yesterday, to a dissident, in the worst case.

People automatically identify with dictators, with tyrants, with terrorists, with criminals, with violent people because it's safer to be on their side. It feels safer.

And this is known as the Stockholm syndrome.

And then there's trauma bonding.

Trauma bonding is a power imbalance that involves fear, terror, dominance, intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold behavior, and leads to self-harm.

Organizations like Hamas, dictators like Putin, they are traumatizing the West. There is a process of trauma, unacknowledged trauma.

It's terrifying to know that terrorists can travel all the way to your country, destroy half of Manhattan and kill 3,000 people.

If they so desire and if you are not the friend of these terrorists, so better to be the friend of the terrorists and better to bond with these terrorists and better to idealize them and better to create for them a literature and ideology that kind of elevates them and on the high moral ground.

It's a fear reaction. It's atavistic. It's primordial. And it involves trauma bonding and the Stockholm syndrome.

And finally when you do that, when you choose the disinhibited, violent, dangerous side, because you're afraid to be on the other side, you're afraid to suffer the consequences of confronting Hamas. You're afraid to suffer the consequences of confronting Hamas. You're afraid to suffer the consequence. So you'd rather be with Hamas. This is self-gaslighting. You are falsifying reality. You're lying to yourself. It's counterfactual. And so this is self-gaslighting. Your reality testing, your ability to tell reality from fantasy gets impaired. There's damage to your ability to discern reality exactly as it is. And so these are the processes that collude to push people, especially fragile, vulnerable, broken, damage, fearful, weak people, push them to take the side of the likes of Putin or Hamas or because, you know, who would you want to have as your friend in case of a brawl or a fight would you like to have Biden or would you like to have Putin? Putin probably right and you can criticize Israel to your heart's content you can act against against Israel, you can burn the Israeli flag, you can spit on the Israeli embassy, you can shoot a bow and arrow at the Israeli guard. You can do anything and Israel will not do anything to you. Israel is not in the habit of killing dissidents or protesters or... Israel will not do anything to do. It's a civilized country with rules and laws and, you know, it plays by the rules, plays the game. But if you dare to confront China, if you dare to confront Putin, if you dare to confront Hamas, volubly enough, you're taking risk, definitely. It is riskless to attack Israel and risky to attack Hamas.

Do you think that these mechanisms that you've brought to the fore to explain the behavior that we're short-handed as the Queers for Palestine meme. Do you think that this is something that has been enabled to work, maybe in a kind of supercharged way, by the technology of the day, by the fact that, as I heard you say in another interview that you did recently, that the majority of young people today are spending their time playing video games.

No. Well, technology has always been there. I mean, the printing playing video games. Yeah. Well, technology has always been there. I mean, the printing press allowed people to print pamphlets and to distribute pamphlets as never before. Technology has always been at the service of the side-guise and social mores and norms and behaviors. So I don't blame technology at all. I think technology reflects. I think technology is never a leader. It's a follower. When narcissism started to rise in the 1980s, the emergence of social media was only a question of time. But narcissism started to rise in studies, studies by Twenge, Campbell, others. Narcism started to rise dramatically, exponentially, in the 1980s, early 1980s, long before social media.

I've wanted to call the Gaza conflict the Fortnite War in the way in which people talked about Vietnam as the television war. It was the time when Americans had war come into into the their uh dinner time with walter kronkite and now it's like if you've if i have a son who's who loves fortnight and when you when you watch somebody play these first person shooter games you know know, you get really, really specific. I mean, you can shoot just that one person and you don't shoot that person. And when you shoot that person that you shouldn't shoot, then you get a deduction. And it's all done exactly right and that there is this sort of expectation that, you know, the IDF should be able to pursue a war in a fortnight manner. That is, without any, taking out anyone but the bad guys, because you can do it in a video game.

Well, I don't see the same criteria applied to Russia. When was the last time you've seen massive anti-Russia demonstrations with Ukraine flags, draping, nimble figures of the young. I don't see, I don't see this being applied to Myanmar or Sudan or Russia or any of the, all your breadth, 78 conflicts raging across the globe as we speak. All of them involving civilian casualties. Some of them involving civilian casualties on a scale that dwarfs Gaza.

So I don't think that's the issue.

If I may, I think there's another problem here.

Please.

Whenever Jews are perceived as empowered, there is a huge well of resentment and hatred and rejection and aggression. Jews are not supposed to be empowered.

You know, the protocols of the elders of Zion were published in the 19th century. It was a falsification by the Okhrana, by the Russian secretaries.

But it was entitled the protocols of the elders of the Hebrew people. It wasn't titled the protocols of the Jews, the elders of the Jews. It was titled the protocols of Elders of Zion. Zion as a political entity.

And it was a prototypical world government. What was described in this pamphlet later made into a book was a prototypical world government.

So it was about political power, geopolitical power. It was about power.

The hatred in the protocols, the resentment, the vile accusations, they all centered around the fact that Jews have power and are exercising it in the secret meetings and cemeteries and so on but they're exercising power that's inconceivable, unacceptable.

Consider for example the riots in the beginning of the 19th century in Bavaria, you know the slogan during these riots in 1819 and 1820. The slogan was Hep Hep.

Now, later, it was suggested that HEP was Hero Solima Espendita. We both know probably that it's apocryphal. It's not true.

But it doesn't matter. The very idea that HEP could mean this is enough.

What is He Rosolima Esperidate? It's a Latin verse that talks about the demise of the power of the Jews in the polity of Judea, in the polity of Israel at the time, with the Roman conquest.

So Hep Hepp, as it was interpreted later, was directed at the fact of a political power, the fact that Jews had a political power, andthey were celebrating and reveling at the collapse and disintegration of Jewish political power.

That was the beginning of the 19th century. That's 200 years ago.

Similarly, the conspiracy theory about the Rothschild, the Rothschild family. It was not about money. Rothschild made a fortune.

It was not about money. It was about the power that the Rothschild had over, for example, monarchy. It was all about power.

All these conspiracy theories and the mother of all conspiracy theories was the blood libel. And the conspiracy theory started with Jews.

But all these conspiracy theories were about the fact that the Jews should never have power. Power should be proscribed, not prescribed, but proscribed.

And when if Jews, when and if Jews have power, they abuse it. When and if Jews have power, it should be taken away from them.

Jews should be disempowered, should be weak, should be dependent, should be at the mercy of decision making by others, should be exterminated of course, from time to time, to varying degrees.

So there is a resentment of the empowerment of the Jews and the state of Israel is only the latest reiteration, iteration, I'm sorry, latest reincarnation of this resentment against Jewish power.

There's another thing Moshe Moses has, Moses has one of the first kind of Zionist thinkers. He suggested that Jews are the equivalent of ghosts. They're a nation without the homeland. And so they're like ghosts.

And he said that the Gentiles are reacting to Jews because they're like ghosts. And there's this visceral reaction to ghosts. The same reaction you have with cockroaches. You know, you recoil. It's a visceral reaction.

Jews do represent what we call in psychology a prolonged grief disorder. Jewish grief is built into, hardwired, baked into, basic foundational Jewish texts.

For example, the Haggadah, the Pesah Hagadah, it's full of grief, full of mourning, and it's a prolonged grief disorder because it's been lasting more than 2,000 years.

So we do have some pathologies associated with the mode of existence of the Jews and the decisions which were forced upon them, for example, which kind of professions they could occupy, there have been some pathologies associated with the Jewish existence.

Some of these pathologies brought on by the Jews. Some of these pathologies imposed on them.

The Jewish rejection of others, the Jewish insistence on leaving apart, you know, kosher laws and so on so forth. This was perceived as rejection by the Gentiles, so it created bad blood.

On the other hand, when the Jews tried to emancipate, to get emancipated in the 19th century, it generated another syndrome, described by Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud called it the narcissism of small differences. When there is a group, a minority, who tries to emulate the majority, this creates in the majority resentment and hatred.

And so it's a no-win situation. When the Jews kept themselves apart, sequestered in ghettos and I don't know where, they were hated because they kept themselves apart, sequestered in ghettos and I don't know where they were hated because they kept themselves apart because it implied that there were the chosen people because the Gentiles perceived it as rejection and contempt but when the Jews tried to mingle with the Gentiles and become like Gentiles, you know, Germans with the Moses Creed, again the Gentiles rejected the Jews and hated them for exactly because they were trying to emulate the Gentiles.

There was a no-win situation here, no-win strategy.

And I think the no-win strategy had to do with the fact that the Jews refused to disappear.

And the very fact that they insisted on existence was perceived as a form of defiance.

I mean, you exist, therefore you are defiant. You should not exist. Why do you exist? You should not exist on religious grounds because you kill Jesus. You know, you're the one who kill Jesus. You should not exist on political grounds. You should not exist. And your existence is defiance. And defiance means that you have some power. Defiance automatically, the association is power.

So empowered Jews should not roam the land. They should be exterminated.

And when they are concentrated in their own country, called the State of Israel, and they are super empowered there, because they have an army and an air force that triggers and provokes the Gentiles into convulsive, apoplectic reactions.

But these reactions are 2,000 years old. And they're triggered, they're handed down the generations. They're part of the collective unconscious situation.

Right.

Yeah, we come back around.

So as we round, perhaps the last, I'm talking you from Louisville, Kentucky, so as we round the last turn here coming down to home stretch. Let me ask you another question, which is, given everything that you've said about how you see Queers for Palestine being read today and how we've looped it into your understanding of anti-Semitism and how it's playing out right now in our current political situation.

My own thinking about it is that I introduced the concept of postmodern anti-Semitism where I talked about it as being cut off from these sort of earlier mechanisms of if we just kill the Jews, you know, we'll realize the society that we need. It has to come at their expense. We have to weed the garden. And if we weed the garden, we'll get the great garden that we want.

And that we no longer believe that.

But that although that dream died, anti-Semitism lived on as what I call the free-floating signifier, whether you agree with that or not, I have been thinking that, in my own thought, that that phase has come to an end and that it's fair to think about anti-Semitism in a new phase, a post-107 phase, of a kind of radicalized desire to proceed with these sort of fantasies of extinction, perhaps again to realize some sort of better tomorrow.

What is your own thought about how you read where we are right now in relation to these concepts?

My conceptual framework is victim.

So I think I've elaborated on this. I wouldn't like to do it a second time.

As to what you have said, this was much deeper because fantasies of purification fantasies of purification underlie, for example, psychology.

When you go to psychotherapy, it's a process of purification. When Freud discuss the reactivation of hidden repressed material in the unconscious, together with the effect, with the emotions attendant upon these memories, a process known as abreaction. He was talking about purification.

So purification is a very potent, very powerful, or pervasive, ubiquitous symbol, not only in the study of alterity or otherness, not only in the study of hatred, and not only in the study of anti-Semitism as a private case of, but I think it underlies theology and psychology and many, many other things.

Again, the Jews are a perfect symbol because there's 2,000 years of indoctrination that the Jews are some kind of an impurity.

They are the repository. One could even say that the Jews are the unconscious. They are the unconscious because they are the repository of everything that's hidden, everything that's forbidden, everything that's repressed, everything that's forgotten. They're very old. They are preternaturally old. And they're ghost-like, as I said.

And so, this process of purification by getting rid of the Jews is an irresistible proposition.

Because it's a simple recipe, you know, it's one act, you don't have to think too hard, it appeals to our age, the age of the meme, the age of the sound bite, the age of limited attention span. You don't need to go deep. You don't need to study, to analyze, to educate yourself. You don't need any of this.

If you want to feel pure, if you want to reduce your anxiety, if you want to explain your victimhood and so on, there's a single address, and that's a Jew.

I think the Jew is the sacrificial lamb.

In Judaism, we had the cow, the Hafer cow, and so. So there's this animal, could be a lamb, could be a cow, depending on. There's this animal that becomes the repository of our bad deeds, the repository of our sins, the repository of our shortcomings and flaws and doubts and then we kill this animal. We drive it off a cliff.

And humanity has been trying to drive the Jews off a cliff and thereby cleanse itself.

This is really ethnic cleansing, but reverse ethnic cleansing.

Humanity was trying to cleanse itself by driving this symbolic animal off the cliff.

And the animal refuses. The animal refuses to be driven off the cliff. It possesses power, resilience, strength, self-conviction, and so on so forth.

And this is infuriating because you are one step away from being pure and being cleansed and being elevated and being enlightened and being perfect and being, you know, one step away.

All it takes is for the Jews to cease to exist. Is that such a big thing to ask?

And yet the Jews refuse and their refusal and their defiance backed by ever increasing power, at least in the imagination of the Gentiles. This is utterly discombobulating. It's utterly infuriating. It drives people, as I said, to convulsive apoplectic, to utterly crazy behavior. Like this woman that you send me her opinion piece. Yeah. I mean,

she writes... Jodie Dean.

What was name?

Jody Dean. Yes, I had the misfortune of spending 10 minutes on her piece. So she writes, for example, Hamas was democratically elected. Well, the same way Hitler was democratically elected. She prostitutes an intellect in order to gain popularity or the alternative. She is an unmitigated idiot. In both cases, she has my content. But I understand her behavior.

The Jewish question, you know, it's very evocative this phrase, the Jewish question, as if the Jews are a question mark. The Jews are a constant question mark, and the Gentiles fail to find the answer. It's very humiliating, demeaning, degrading that you fail to find the answer. And the Jödenfrage, the Jewish question is such that it triggers behaviors which are regressive, infantile, primitive defenses, impaired reality testing, these aspects of infantile regression that are usually reserved to when you react to a threat. When you react to threat, uncertainty, extreme insecurity, you will regress, you become an infant again.

And it enforce defenses such as splitting. The Jew is all bad, we are all good. This is known as splitting defense in psychology. When you say one group is all bad, I'm all good. So this is splitting. Projection. Your hate, your guilt, your shame, you dump them on the Jews. They are the perfect trauma dumpster. There's a process known as trauma dumping. And then you rationalize everything you're saying but in the process you come out you're verging on insanity this sentence Hamas was democratically elected is not only counterfactual it's grounds for committing her to a mental asylum because only someone with a severe impairment in reality testing could write this sentence. So what to tell you? These people are driven crazy by the existence of the Jews. The Jews are a trigger. We call it in trauma studies, trigger. The Jews trigger people. They trigger the trauma defenses. Their guilt, their shame, their hatred, their behaviors become chaotic, disorganized, disregulated emotions. We, Jews drive people to become borderline there's a massive borderline personality disorder by the way we have a name for it in the DSM it's called mass psychogenic illness anti-semitism is a mass psychogenic illness I wanted to ask you before.

I had two more questions here. Let's see if we can knock them off. One was for your, for you to talk a little bit more about your characterization of the war in Gaza, where you talked a little bit about seignoir and expanded upon the psychology you see there and the psychology that you see in the field by Netanyahu but also sort of generally in how the Israelis are pursuing this war. And the terms that you introduced was that this was a sort of struggle between a narcissistic mindset in the Israelis and a psychopathic mindset in Hamas. And my joke about that was, but you forgot to say that they're married and they don't see any way out of the relationship. So they're stuck. Is this still a characterization that you find useful? Yes.

Well, if it's a marriage, it's a Catholic marriage between a Muslim and a Jew. Because they can't divorce. There's no idea to break up. In most marriages nowadays, you can simply divorce. There's irreconcilable differences. Yes, I still think it's instructive. Of course, it's metaphorical and no one can diagnose, not safely, you can diagnose, but not safely. The collective is narcissistic or psychopathic because there are always outliers and exceptions, individual exceptions and so on. But the general conduct of Israel and the IDF, which is very common in post-traumatic situation, Israel has been traumatized time and again, at least seven times that I can recall, and sometimes severe trauma, such as in 1973, and as on October 7th. These severe traumas.

It's very common among people with what we call CPTSD, complex trauma, complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Very common for such people to behave in a narcissistic way.

Narcissism is a defense mechanism that is triggered by complex trauma.

So it's not surprising that Israel is becoming more and more and more narcissistic. It's a reaction to complex trauma.

On the other hand, the Palestinians, I made a distinction between Palestinians and Hamas.

Hamas, more precisely, is an utterly psychopathic organization. I mean, all the criteria for psychopathy, defined by Robert Hare apply and more. It's an utterly psychopathic organization.

The Palestinians are distinct from Hamas, but they largely support Hamas. Hamas is well over 50% in Gaza and well over 70% in the West Bank in terms of support.

So Hamas is becoming equated with the Palestinians more and more. The Palestinians celebrate October 7th. The vast majority of them, 93% to be precise, think that it was a good thing that has happened for a variety of reasons, post facto, but that's a situation.

So yeah, I think we are dealing with a battle like Godzilla against the AVP or whatever. So I think we are dealing a battle between narcissists and psychopaths.

As to the solution, because you've asked me about the solution.

And again, I'm not assuming here some divine power of, you know, power of divination or some outstanding intellect that's going to solve the Israeli, but as I see it, the only solution is protracted somapaternal conflict or ethnic cleansing and genocide. There is no third solution.

And the reason there is no third solution is because both groups of people, both collectives, nations or not nations, doesn't matter, both collectives, have maintained and have maintained, always maximalist position, with a few exceptional years in Israel's history.

But both of them have maintained maximalist positions when it comes to a very well-defined territory. And I don't see this result.

The two-state solution is a chimera that cannot survive. And the Palestinians insist overwhelmingly on the right of return, which is a re-annexation or recapturing of the allegedly lost lands in Israel.

The Israel is now in the past 20, 25 years, the Israelis have held a maximalist position, annexing the Golan Heights, settlements in the West Bank, and now openly talking about resettling Gaza.

The greater Israel position.

I don't know. There's no, I can't see a middle ground. Never mind what a wizard you are, Enrique Kissinger, to the power of 10. You could still, I don't think you could come up with a solution to this.

And then the only things left are ethnic cleansing, also known as transfer, a solution that has been proposed numerous times, by the way, in the country. Or unfortunately, genocide, which I think no one will contemplate, I'm sure not even the Palestinians.

So it's a very sad situation and of course the only other solution or maybe the only solution actually is a one state solution, but that would sacrifice the Jewish nature of the state.

Israel, as we all know, has to choose between being Jewish and being democratic. And if he chooses democracy, it will no longer be Jewish.

And then there will be one state, perhaps a confederacy, like Canada or even Switzerland, a confederacy of two entities.

Yugoslavia survived for many years with six or five actually, republics and one autonomous or two autonomous areas. The United States is essentially a confederacy, increasingly more a confederacy than a federal entity.

So we have precedents of confederacies that are working in Switzerland is not a bad example. Even Lebanon, believe it or not, Lebanon is an example of a confederacy that is working very well.

There was a civil war in Lebanon which lasted more than 15 years. And then the parties sat down and established a confederacy. And it's working well. Lebanon has been at peace until now.

So maybe a confederacy.

But as long as the two parties insist total ownership of the land, to the exclusion of the other, I see no solution.

The two-state solution is an example of fantasy overtaking reality or optimism overtaking experience.

Right. So we touched on the last question that I had, but I'll come back to it before inviting you to comment in a final way about any stray thoughts or points you wish to make.

And that was getting back to the Jodi Dean piece and the way in which you make sense of the resurgence, resurgence of this kind of binary thinking, you know, all bad, all good.

At the same time that we see this apparent rejection of binary thinking, a good example of it is in current American sort of obsessions with gender fluidity, for example, where we're teaching our children, you know, the last thing you want to do is thinking in a hard binary of male-female, but when it comes to making sense of this political situation, all good, all bad, how have we ended up here?

Well, I think splitting, the splitting defense, the clinical term for this is splitting defense. I think the splitting defense characterizes all political discourse, definitely in the United States.

I mean, you ask any Republican that will tell you the Democrats are all bad. There's no redeeming feature.

And vice versa, if I may add.

So I think splitting is taking over as the dominant mode of political discourse and not only in the United States.

For example, look at the French election, recent election, where the far right has been utterly demonized.

Not that I'm a far right supporter, absolutely not, but they were demonized.

Splitting involves a sense of virtue, self-aggrandizement, because you are perfect, you are pure, you're clean, you're right.

I mean, when you're split, you're always in the right. And that's very anxiety reducing.

Splitting emerges in political discourse in times of high anxiety, in times of uncertainty.

So you had splitting in the 1930s, but you didn't have splitting in, let's say, the 1950s.

So when there's times of high anxiety and uncertainty, people split. And politics is made up of human beings, most of them, politicians excluded, but made up of human beings.

This is the natural reaction of human beings. They regress, they become infantile, and they activate defense mechanisms, such as projection also.

In projection, you attribute to the other the parts in yourself that you reject, the parts in yourself that you're uncomfortable with, that you're ashamed on your weakness, for example, or your avarice or your propensity to hate, or you attribute it to the other, because you can't cope with the fact of who you are, with your identity.

So we are witnessing a deterioration, a devolution in political discourse across the board, and in all countries, no exception, because reality has become intolerable, unbearable, and seriously, seriously frightening and threatening.

So we're all whistling in the dark, we're all bathed in the wood.

And the intellectuals, especially public intellectuals, which should have served as the bulwark, it should have served as a firewall against primitive defense, they were swept by the tide.

When I read this woman's opinion piece, that is splitting. She sees no nuances. There are no gray zones. There's one party that is 100% right and one party that is 100% evil.

But she has betrayed her calling. Our role as intellectuals is exactly this.

To counter primitive defenses such as splitting and projectionto enlighten and to point away and to expose if necessary and to fight back and to take risks as intellectuals to do that, to introduce nuance and grays on and subtleties and a form of thinking that takes into account everything and doesn't become counterfactual by excluding some information.

This is the role of intellectuals, and I regret to say that I don't know of a single major, and even minor, public intellectual, who is doing this.

They're all polarized, taking sides, splitting and projecting themselves, and educating future generations along these lines, poisoning them. It's toxic.

And I'm not talking, I'm not limiting myself to progressive liberals or conservatives. The fault is on both sides.

Conservatives like Jung. Progressive liberals, they like Lacan.

But what they're doing with Jung and with Lacan, there's nothing to do with Jung or Lacan. It's an abuse. It's abusive.

Let me ask you one last question, and then I'll invite you to make any kind of closing remarks you wish to make.

In our discussion, it occurs to me that one term that we haven't taken out of the toolbox, and its absence in the conversation is why I'm bringing it up now to get your thoughts on it is perversion.

And of course we're at the end of the interview, and this is where perversion always comes up. It comes up at the stage.

Wait a minute, it's not gone yet. We can't hold it anymore.

Yeah, you know, it's not just neurosis and psychosis. There's perversion, and then, you know, it's too late.

But to what extent does concepts of perversion afford some utility for you as a thinker in your work?

No, I'm adamantly opposed to this concept.

Okay, why?

Because it's culture bound. It's been contaminated throughout the ages, I mean, last 150 years, last 100 years, it's been contaminated, repeatedly, time and again, by culture, society, politics, mores, preferences, agendas, and so forth, to the point that it can no longer be extricated, or it's no longer extricable, no longer can be separated from these overt layers of contamination.

You know, when Freud came up with the concept of free association, that's one of a few things that he really came up with.

By the way, talk therapy was not Freud, of course. It was Breuer.

So when he came up with the idea of free associations, he came up with a brilliant concept in my view because he exposed to us the fact that even single words carry numerous archaeological layers of meaning, semantic meanings, and possibly if it's written, semiotic meanings, but meanings.

There's no word that is neutral, objective, a word that is lexical, dictionary definition. That's not true. These are fantasies.

When you say perversion, immediately it triggers in my mind, layers upon layers upon layers, which I regard as contaminants and pollutants, don't help me.

So I prefer not to use. This is a highly triggering one, which I prefer to not use.

Gotcha.

Well, I invite you now at this point before I thank you for the wonderful conversation to introduce any thoughts that you would just beat yourself up if you didn't get the chance to get that.

I beat myself up in any case. I'm Jewish. I'm Jewish. That's what we do. Self-flagellate. We can't help it. This is the perversion.

I think we are at a crossroads, two types of crossroads.

First, in our understanding of the mind and whether the mind exists at all, or whether it's some form of obstruction or a desperate attempt to put together disparate elements.

There is a huge debate about consciousness and mind and the connection to the brain. Issues of duality are dualism are emerging again and so on so forth.

And I think we are on the precipice of a revolution in language. I think the only way forward is if we have a linguistic breakthrough.

I did something similar in physics, by the way.

I mean, together with a group of physicists, I'm a physicist by training, for too much.

Together with a group of physicists all over the world, we made use of my PhD dissertation in physics, dating back to 1983, but we revived it. We took it out of the moth balls.

And the idea in my PhD dissertation was to try to rewrite physics, to derive all of physics, but using a single word, time.

Now in physics, we have many words. We have motion, we have momentum, we have force, we have many words. We have motion. We have momentum. We have force. We have object. There are many. You know, many words. Mass. We have many words.

I said, let's try a language that has a single word. Only time. And let's see if we use this language and we limit ourselves to the use of the word time, can we then derive the totality of physics?

And by today I can say the answer is yes. So I'm giving this as an example.

I think we should do something similar in psychology. There has been a proliferation of terms and concepts.

Ockham's razor has been broken to pieces. There's no parsimony.

And there are many, many words and terms and phrases that are ill-defined.

The terminology is not only non-consensual, there's no consensus on terminology, but sometimes they don't bother to define even. They just invent a word and they're gone.

As if the word is...

So I think we are headed towards a linguistic revolution in psychology.

The second point, the last I promise, is the interface between the individual and collectives.

I'm not saying society and purpose because society is a new idea. If you went back to the Middle Ages, there was no concept of society. It's a very new idea.

So I'm not saying society. I'm saying collective.

The interface between individual and collective, is the collective a mere assemblage of individuals? Can it be reduced to the individuals? Is it an epiphenomenon? Is it an emergent phenomenon? Are the same principles that we apply to individuals? Are they transferable or transmissible to collectives without any change?

By the way, we have a similar problem in physics. Similar problem in physics, where we have laws that describe elementary particles, but when we try to apply them to macroscopic bodies, they break down.

So there's a lot of affinity between psychology and physics on some levels.

So individual collective.

We are trying to understand collective dynamics by applying theories in physics which have dealt exclusively with the individual.

It's time to stop this practice because it's very likely to be wrong.

I don't have proof that it's wrong, but I think it's wrong.

It's time to come up with theories, psychological theories, not sociological theories, and not psychological theories that deal with collectives and ignore the individual.

Not collectives as assemblage of individuals, but collectives are separate entities and ignore the individual. Treating collectives as epiphenomenal, as emergent phenomena.

The same way, when I describe the physics of your water glass, I wouldn't specify what the atoms in your water glass are doing. The atoms comprising your glass of water are irrelevant when I try to describe the behavior of your glass.

So we need a new psychology, but not an extrapolation of individual psychology and not an amalgamation of individual psychology.

There's something that has nothing to do with individual psychology. And no one has done this yet.

Once this is done, I think we're going to decipher and decode many, many things that either to befuddle us and they're enigmatic.

For example, the amazing phenomenon of anti-Semitism, which I think all psychological theories fail miserably at explaining. Mm-hmm.

Well, I appreciate the chance to talk to you, Sam, and I appreciate being an audience for you to share some of your thoughts, especially the ones that you talked about here at the end, which are big ideas. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other thoughts or have we come to the come to the

only thought i have is that no viewer is going to survive

this right right yeah no i i i i mean like i said i you know i i certainly i'm going to to to to hack it up. I mean, again, I don't get, I mean, while I'm thinking about it, I should stop the recording anyway since we're done, right? How do I stop the recording? Just hit here. Yeah, the recording will be converted when the meeting ends. Okay, so I've stopped mine. So, yes, no...