COLLECTIVE DELUSIONS/SHARED PSYCHOSIS
Richard Koenigsberg

Dear Colleague,

I am going to send you a series of essays/commentaries--by myself and several colleagues--on the concept of shared psychosis or collective delusions. I've been developing and writing about these ideas for quite a while. Recent events in American society finally have brought these concepts into the foreground. 

The mass-culture participates in the delusion by enthusiastically speaking about "lying" and "the big lie"--and never examining the delusion or shared psychosis in which we are immersed. Yes, there are lies and endless lying, but something deeper, more pathological is going on.

I'll explore this psychopathology in a series of articles in the spirit of "Making Conscious the Unconscious in Social Reality"  and "Awakening from the Nightmare of History."

If you feel my missives come too frequently, you may delete them immediately and return to participating in (suffering within) the collective delusion in which you are now immersed.

Hope you will choose to assist in the process of awakening.

Best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg
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COLLECTIVE DELUSION: On the one hand, one may say that if certain forms of behavior occur with great frequency in society or history—however bizarre, weird or destructive they may be—these forms of behavior are normal simply because they occur frequently. Or one may view recurring episodes of warfare, genocide and mass-murder as profound forms of collective psychopathology.

Perhaps “madness” is a central characteristic of the domain of politics. 200,000,000+ million deaths in the 20th century as a result of warfare and genocide. Psychosis lies at the heart of historical process.

SOCIETAL DELUSIONS

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, 2000, cited in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”) defines a delusion as a

false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.

Delusions are beliefs “held with great conviction in spite of little empirical support.” A delusion is a “false belief based on incorrect inferences about external reality that is firmly sustained.” A person is deluded when he hold a particular belief with a “degree of firmness utterly unwarranted by the evidence at hand.”

Hitler and the Nazis embraced a delusion about the Jews and Jewish power, believing Jews were acting to destroy the German people and civilized world; asserting Jews were equivalent to bacteria or viruses; claiming that “international Jewry” stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin--who were acting to unite these leaders and their nations in a conspiracy to cause Germany to disintegrate.

Hitler and the Nazis created a collective delusion that came to define the "reality" in which Germans lived, 1933-1945. War was waged to destroy the delusion of the omnipotence of Germany. When Hitler died, the delusion disappeared ("gone like a cool breeze"--Chuck Berry).

The term “delusion” usually refers to a clinical syndrome associated with paranoid schizophrenia. What are we to say, then, about a delusion that comes to dominate an entire society?

I was at a Holocaust Conference where the Jeffrey Herf and I had just presented our papers. We were rapping in the back of the auditorium. He was happy that I agreed with his hypothesis that the Nazis' perception of Jews--the danger they represented to Germany--represented a collective delusion.

I said, "So you could say that the Nazis were psychotic." Suddenly, he walked away. The idea that the events he studies as "history"--may  be manifestations of (a shared) psychosis was difficult for even the greatest of historians to embrace.