Dear Colleague,

Robert Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1988) documents that Nazism was a medical ideology: killing to cure. One of Hitler's most important intellectual influences was Robert Koch, who discovered the bacterium causing tuberculous in 1882—leading  to the idea that each disease was caused by a specific pathogen. Curing a disease meant identifying and destroying the pathogen responsible for a particular disease.

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS AND INFORMATION ON HOW TO REGISTER TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS SPECIAL EVENT. Students may click here.

In Mein Kampf, posed the question: “Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms?” Hitler was referring to the "law" of the immune system, how organisms identify and destroy cells identified as foreign or "not self."

In this groundbreaking lecture, Dr. Richard Koenigsberg will show how genocide enacted an immunological fantasy. The German nation, according to Hitler's grotesque theory, was merely acting like any other organism: automatically destroying Jewish cells identified as foreign or not-self. Genocide enacted an immunological fantasy on the stage of reality.

Please click through the link above for details on reserving your place at this exciting event. 

The lecture will be one hour in length, with a full one hour devoted to questions and discussion. 

Please register ASAP to hold your place.

Best regards,

Mary Helen

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.

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.