The Bad, The Mad and the Functional:
One Anti-Semitism or Many?
Psychoanalytic practice taught us to perceive archaic defense mechanisms and transference enactments not only as pathological, but also as developmentally functional and communicative. The propensity for regression, scapegoating, projective-identification, and generalization cannot be “banned” from language and from public sphere. I propose viewing some forms of Anti-Semitism (especially those that are not politically organized or propagated by a political party), as we are now accustomed to look at the dream: as an archaic vehicle, a stage on which the unconscious mind is revealing itself to the self or to the group. It takes more then a few like-minded Anti-Semites to produce an anti-Semitic “climate of opinion” or to turn the discrimination of Jewish citizens into a “cultural code”. In fact, Anti- Semitic prejudice does have a monitoring function for the body politic of a society. It holds up a mirror to society and forces it to confront its…