Dear Colleague,

In his upcoming presentation as part of the Neuropsychoanalytic Association's "Dialogues on Aggression" Series, Richard Koenigsberg discuss how we externalize fantasies about the body into the world, creating nations or "bodies politic"--that are treated as if actual bodies. Richard will show how Nazi officials at the Wannsee conference planned the policy of extermination based on the fantasy of Jews as pathogenic organisms whose continued presence within the nation would lead to the death of Germany.

In The Body is the Hero (2012), Dr. Ronald Glasser explains that the theory of immunology depends on the ability of one cell to recognize a cell unlike itself. Recognition precedes destruction. Once a cell is identified as foreign or not self, “the attack on this cell begins.” “Our battles against microbes,” Glasser says, ”have never been one of percentages. Every microbe entering our body has to be destroyed, not 98% of them or 99%, but 100%. Not one single enemy can be left alive. If just one survivor continued to replicate, this would eventually mean death, and so all have to be eliminated.”

This passage might have been written about pathogenic Jewish cells by Heinrich Himmler. This kind of thinking about Jews—conceived as bacteria requiring that every single one of them be destroyed lest they survive and multiply—was the basis of the Final Solution.

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS--AND INFORMATION ON HOW TO REGISTER.
Students may click here.

Online via Zoom | 12 Noon (EDT) | Friday, Apr 23, 2021 (see directly below for start time in selected time zones). A one-hour lecture, with one additional hour for discussion and dialogue. 

Scroll down for Abstract of Richard's Presentation and Bio.

Best regards,
Mary Helen

Dialogues on Aggression
This online series, hosted by the Neuropsychoanalysis Association, convenes experts from a number of disciplines – evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychodynamic psychiatry, developmental psychology, sociology and criminology, for a fascinating exploration of this timely topic.  CPD credits: 2. (Please click here for further information regarding CPD credits.) Want to join the Society? Or not sure you are a member? Click here.

Richard Koenigsberg, Ph.D.

Genocide as Immunology 

Start time in selected time zones

ABSTRACT: Koenigsberg presents a method for studying the language of political leaders to reveal the unconscious fantasies that generate destructive forms of societal behavior like war and genocide. He focuses on Hitler, who conceived Germany as a body politic consisting of the German people as cells of this body. Jews were pathogenic organisms—source of a “disease within the body of the people.” Hitler claimed that Germany possessed an immune system that automatically destroyed alien or not-self cells. The Final Solution was as a struggle to destroy Jewish pathogens, thus to save the life of the German nation.

Koenigsberg examines the case of Donald Trump, who similarly asserted that the presence of a certain class of people within the body politic would lead to national destruction. Trump identified “Mexican rapists” as the primal danger, requiring construction of a “wall” to prevent these alien cells from entering the body politic. 

One would imagine that psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts would enter the arena to explore the causes and meanings of collective forms of violence and mass-destruction. There is profound resistance toward exploring pathological behavior that is “normative.” In his presentation, Koenigsberg will show us how to overcome this resistance in order toand to "make conscious the unconscious in social reality."

Bio
Richard Koenigsberg, Ph.D., is a psychologist and historian, leading authority on Hitler, Nazism and the First World War. Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Society was hailed as an “instant classic” and the “best critical analysis in English of Hitler’s thought”. His psychoanalytic study, Symbiosis and Separation, was praised by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Francis Tustin and Thomas Ogden. His influential, Nations have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War reveals a sacrificial dynamic at the heart of warfare. Widely reviewed, commentary and reflections appear here. He is Founder and Director of LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE, a scholarly publishing and marketing firm. The renowned Ideologies of War, Genocide and Terror Website features publications by the most prominent scholars on these topics.

His papers have appeared in The American Imago, The Psychoanalytic Review, and Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. His online publications are here. He has lectured widely throughout the United States and Canada, often Keynote Speaker at conferences. He presented a Workshop at the Church Center of the United Nations at the invitation of Ambassador Anthony DeLuca. Presently, his ideas reach the world through The Library of Social Science Newsletter. A long-time reader—head of a Scholarly Press—wrote to Koenigsberg saying he is “one of the most important thinkers in the world today” and invited him to publish in book form. For now, Koenigsberg is focusing on digital publication, reaching more readers in a single day—than the typical journal article or scholarly book reaches in its lifetime.