An insightful way to think about the national character of the Zionists in charge of Israel is to view it as a national example of the narcissist personality disorder. Here are the key parallels
1. Many narcissists are products of trauma, with narcissism becoming a coping mechanism for always having to be in control, based on the intense fear that not being in control means they are existentially threatened. The Jewish people have lived through great trauma, both historically, then with overwhelming suffering under the Nazi era, and then again on Oct 7, which tho by military standards it was not a huge attack, it was the first in several generations. And even the younger people in Israel, many born of survivors of the HOlocaust, have epigenetic trauma in the DNA. This trauma plays, as Caitlin explains, both into their aggression, their need to be control, and their feeling of victimization.
2. Narcissists use lies and manipulations to cope and stay in control; likewise Israel has lied (about the original expulsion of the Palestinians, about their nuclear arsenal, and about destroying Gaza in self-defense. The lies are justified, in the mind of a narcissist individual and society, to protect them from existential danger. We might say, about Israel, if they did not have an enemy, they would have to invent one to justify their narcissistic behavior.
3. Narcissists are always looking both for admiration ("We are the most moral military in the world"" and sympathy (the whole world hates us, the UN hates us, the world is full of Jew haters...we ar eternal victims), and aggranizement, taking from others what they proclaim is either their birthright ("We were the majority here 2000 yrs ago") or for self-defense, such as the illegal seizure of most of the the 93% of land that in 1948 belonged to the native Palestinians, the Golan Heights, or most recently, large swaths of land in Syria. We might say this suggest the Nazi concept of Lebensraum but it is more than that, it is the rationalization of the narcissist criminal of taking "back" what rightfully belongs to him...or in the case of a nation, us.
4. When a narcissist, individual or nation, is caught or called out for wrong doing, they are incapable of admitting guilt and correcting course but instead immediately attack the person calling them out as an abuser (harkening back to the older traumas), or in the case of Israel, an anti-Semite or terrorists. AIPAC, the Zionist lobby for Israel in the US, is attacking anyone who supports Palestinian rights as "pro-Hamas" and "pro terrorism" thus shifting guilt from the war crimes the protesters are calling out to the protesters, calling for their arrests, deportations, etc...in other words punishment and expulsion, the very trauma that the Jewish people carry in their very DNA.
There are other parallels but I think these are enough to make the case for using the model of the narcissist to describe the character of modern Israel under control of the far right Zionists who are now acting towards the Palestinians as the Nazis acted towards the Jews 85 yrs ago, leading to the ancient wisdom that violence begets violence, that to break the cycle of violence, we must understand our trauma and resist the urge to relive as the abuser the crimes of those who abused us.
That book is not about narcissism and how it can help explain historical events. Why do you bring it up and claim, in the context of Israel, that it says it all?
All of Miller’s books are about narcissism. And trauma, and grandiosity, and depression. She analyzed Hitler’s childhood and the German character traits that made the Holocaust possible. Excuse my effusive praise for her, but on the topics of neurosis, dysfunction, and pathological behavior, I’ve never found her equal.
You did not reference "All of Miller's books" including the one that examined Hitler's childhood to find the forces that created Hitler, the historical figure. She does not, as I do, start with trauma to lead into narcissism and how it can both define an individual and a national movement; she starts with narcissism that leads to trauma. She rejects what we know, through neuroscience to be true, that trauma is transferred through DNA in the form of epigenetics. She traces the willingness of the Germans to follow Hitler (tho he lost the 1932 election in a landslide, getting only 13 million votes vs Hindenburg's 19 million) to their tradition of strict upbringing. That follows perhaps if you reject genetics. But my analysis is based on both direct trauma (not from strict child rearing) and epigenetics, by which trauma is intergenerational, which is a radical departure from her analysis of Nazi Germany, which does not explain the current situation in Israel/Palestine. I think there is much wisdom in Miller who influenced how I raised my children, but I don't think her approach to historical events, as in her book on HItler, explains the events I am trying to explore with a model that begins not with narcissism but with trauma and its intergenerational nature, which she clearly rejects. I appreciate your comment.
Miller certainly believes in the cycle of abuse and offers extensive evidence for the Compulsion to Repeat. She eloquently shows how the maltreatment of children traumatizes them and explains how this leads to pathological behavior when they're adults. Perhaps you should tighten your original comment laying out your ideas, but I'm a person who comes down firmly on the side of "nurture" in the nature versus nurture debate. Genetics of course have influence over humans, but the decades-long attempt in the U.S. to reject the importance of environment in how children turn out has been a failure.
What Miller rejected is now science, that trauma is inherited thru DNA. "Miller believed that in psychoanalysis, the therapist was taking a step too far back when it came to pointing out the true cause of mental problems in adulthood. She believed that the parent must be made aware of his or her inadequacies. The writer’s personal and family experience of Nazism seems to have galvanised her theories about a bullying authoritarian force ruling the life of an individual. “She has analysed the psyches of Hitler and his henchmen, and despotism constantly recurs as a metaphor in her work. (…) she even writes of her mother thus: “Not once did she apologise to me or express any kind of regret. She was always ‘in the right’. It was this attitude that made my childhood feel like a totalitarian regime. ” artlark.org By projecting her own need to blame her own parents, she had to reject what is accepted science today, that trauma is intergenerational: Epigenetics, which she rejected in order to find the focus of blame on the parents, is "the study of mitotically and/or meiotically heritable changes in gene function that cannot be explained by changes in DNA sequence." Wikipedia
In other words, we have to take a step back further than the parents, whose narcissism may well be the coping mechanism of a person suffering epigenetic trauma. That rejection, which I think was motivated by her personal need to blame her parents for her own suffering, is the fatal flaw in her analysis of both individual cases and her study of the Nazi era, which in no way would explain the events in Israel today, The Nazi era is, in a sense, being repeated, but her explanation for it, does not hold up, for Israeli child rearing is almost the opposite of the German model: "“free-range parenting” is the national default position. Kids are independent from young ages, arranging and ferrying themselves to playdates. A six- or seven-year-old walks to the corner store with friends for ice cream. Ten-year-olds regularly cross Tel Aviv on scooters or on the bus with friends. Parenting in Israel offers more freedom to both kids and parents. " mosaicmagazine.com
I would suggest that what you say, without dealing with the merits, is only applicable to Ashkenazi Jews, and not to the other branches of Judaism. I think it is important to make that distinction clear.
I make it clear from the beginning sentence: "An insightful way to think about the national character of the Zionists in charge of Israel ....." Not all Jews are right wing Zionists, and not all Israelis are in charge.
Actually this psychological analysis is not in fact a product of 'relatively recent history' - the true origins of it are rooted in the very ideology of Judaism (Jewism) itself, going back several thousand years of course. Nietzsche had it absolutely correct when he used the word 'resentment' to describe the motivation. No other social group in the entirety of human history has ever behaved like that, so we have to put it down the ideology. I would thus further argue that in order to defeat the propaganda and gaslighting we need to educate people about this psychology. The most effective method these Judaists have used of course to silence that very thing is to say that even just talking about this psychology is 'anti-semitic', and then labelling this word 'anti-semitic' as somehow 'morally wrong'. It's not morally wrong to point out narcissistic personality disorders or the cause of such disorders. That's what needs to change. Otherwise this coercive control will just continue.
I clearly trace the trauma of Jewish people back before recent times in this sentence: "The Jewish people have lived through great trauma, both historically, then with overwhelming suffering under the Nazi era, and then again on Oct 7.....I would not agree that the narcissistic character is of " Jewism" but rather of the nationalistic ideology of Zionism, which builds on an older history of trauma.
However, you are ignoring the myth of exalted victimhood. Which is a part of their origin myth (Moses/Exodus etc.). At that time their atrocity propaganda was directed against the Egyptians. Since then it's been directed at pretty much everyone at some point. In other words, you are assuming that their propaganda about victimhood is true. Which is isn't. Not in any exceptional or unique way, anyhow.
At the same time, they are told they are the 'master race'. That engenders racism towards every other social group (all gentiles, in other words). It's not surprising if everyone else finds that offensive, and starts acting in self-defence. This is then presented as 'unprovoked attacks' (anti-semitism etc.). But if the perpetrators are prevented from self-realising that, by this 'innocent victimhood myth', then they will continue to think that, in a paranoid way, everyone else hates them for no reason. So they never learn the lesson and grow up. Ironically, maybe people would've had more sympathy for Nazis if they too had massively pushed an exalted victim narrative themselves, seeing as normal humans empathise with perceived victims and are more likely to believe what they say (however absurd or farcical the atrocity propaganda is). It's easy for people to hate Nazis because of their perceived racism and superiority complex. But add an innocent victim narrative, and gaslighting, and it becomes a bit more difficult.
The 'trauma' I would argue is self-inflicted in the form of child abuse starting at 8 days old, followed by indoctrination and fear-based and punishment-based obedience training. Of course they can't admit they are traumatising themselves, nor can they rightly blame it on their 'Fuhrer' - Yahweh - so they have to project it onto everyone else (Gentiles).
So ultimately, your psychological analysis depends on believing the exalted victim mythology. Remove that, and the sympathy that goes along with it, and you need a completely different psychological explanation for the evil stuff they do.
And if a psychologist diagnoses a serious personality disorder in someone which makes that person a serious danger to others, I think we can all agree the psychologist is the good guy in this story. Before anyone accuses me of being the bad guy, that is.
An insightful way to think about the national character of the Zionists in charge of Israel is to view it as a national example of the narcissist personality disorder. Here are the key parallels
1. Many narcissists are products of trauma, with narcissism becoming a coping mechanism for always having to be in control, based on the intense fear that not being in control means they are existentially threatened. The Jewish people have lived through great trauma, both historically, then with overwhelming suffering under the Nazi era, and then again on Oct 7, which tho by military standards it was not a huge attack, it was the first in several generations. And even the younger people in Israel, many born of survivors of the HOlocaust, have epigenetic trauma in the DNA. This trauma plays, as Caitlin explains, both into their aggression, their need to be control, and their feeling of victimization.
2. Narcissists use lies and manipulations to cope and stay in control; likewise Israel has lied (about the original expulsion of the Palestinians, about their nuclear arsenal, and about destroying Gaza in self-defense. The lies are justified, in the mind of a narcissist individual and society, to protect them from existential danger. We might say, about Israel, if they did not have an enemy, they would have to invent one to justify their narcissistic behavior.
3. Narcissists are always looking both for admiration ("We are the most moral military in the world"" and sympathy (the whole world hates us, the UN hates us, the world is full of Jew haters...we ar eternal victims), and aggranizement, taking from others what they proclaim is either their birthright ("We were the majority here 2000 yrs ago") or for self-defense, such as the illegal seizure of most of the the 93% of land that in 1948 belonged to the native Palestinians, the Golan Heights, or most recently, large swaths of land in Syria. We might say this suggest the Nazi concept of Lebensraum but it is more than that, it is the rationalization of the narcissist criminal of taking "back" what rightfully belongs to him...or in the case of a nation, us.
4. When a narcissist, individual or nation, is caught or called out for wrong doing, they are incapable of admitting guilt and correcting course but instead immediately attack the person calling them out as an abuser (harkening back to the older traumas), or in the case of Israel, an anti-Semite or terrorists. AIPAC, the Zionist lobby for Israel in the US, is attacking anyone who supports Palestinian rights as "pro-Hamas" and "pro terrorism" thus shifting guilt from the war crimes the protesters are calling out to the protesters, calling for their arrests, deportations, etc...in other words punishment and expulsion, the very trauma that the Jewish people carry in their very DNA.
There are other parallels but I think these are enough to make the case for using the model of the narcissist to describe the character of modern Israel under control of the far right Zionists who are now acting towards the Palestinians as the Nazis acted towards the Jews 85 yrs ago, leading to the ancient wisdom that violence begets violence, that to break the cycle of violence, we must understand our trauma and resist the urge to relive as the abuser the crimes of those who abused us.
2. Sin
Alice Miller said it all and very eloquently in books like "The Drama of the Gifted Child."
That book is not about narcissism and how it can help explain historical events. Why do you bring it up and claim, in the context of Israel, that it says it all?
Did she use it as a model by which to understand national character?
All of Miller’s books are about narcissism. And trauma, and grandiosity, and depression. She analyzed Hitler’s childhood and the German character traits that made the Holocaust possible. Excuse my effusive praise for her, but on the topics of neurosis, dysfunction, and pathological behavior, I’ve never found her equal.
You did not reference "All of Miller's books" including the one that examined Hitler's childhood to find the forces that created Hitler, the historical figure. She does not, as I do, start with trauma to lead into narcissism and how it can both define an individual and a national movement; she starts with narcissism that leads to trauma. She rejects what we know, through neuroscience to be true, that trauma is transferred through DNA in the form of epigenetics. She traces the willingness of the Germans to follow Hitler (tho he lost the 1932 election in a landslide, getting only 13 million votes vs Hindenburg's 19 million) to their tradition of strict upbringing. That follows perhaps if you reject genetics. But my analysis is based on both direct trauma (not from strict child rearing) and epigenetics, by which trauma is intergenerational, which is a radical departure from her analysis of Nazi Germany, which does not explain the current situation in Israel/Palestine. I think there is much wisdom in Miller who influenced how I raised my children, but I don't think her approach to historical events, as in her book on HItler, explains the events I am trying to explore with a model that begins not with narcissism but with trauma and its intergenerational nature, which she clearly rejects. I appreciate your comment.
Miller certainly believes in the cycle of abuse and offers extensive evidence for the Compulsion to Repeat. She eloquently shows how the maltreatment of children traumatizes them and explains how this leads to pathological behavior when they're adults. Perhaps you should tighten your original comment laying out your ideas, but I'm a person who comes down firmly on the side of "nurture" in the nature versus nurture debate. Genetics of course have influence over humans, but the decades-long attempt in the U.S. to reject the importance of environment in how children turn out has been a failure.
What Miller rejected is now science, that trauma is inherited thru DNA. "Miller believed that in psychoanalysis, the therapist was taking a step too far back when it came to pointing out the true cause of mental problems in adulthood. She believed that the parent must be made aware of his or her inadequacies. The writer’s personal and family experience of Nazism seems to have galvanised her theories about a bullying authoritarian force ruling the life of an individual. “She has analysed the psyches of Hitler and his henchmen, and despotism constantly recurs as a metaphor in her work. (…) she even writes of her mother thus: “Not once did she apologise to me or express any kind of regret. She was always ‘in the right’. It was this attitude that made my childhood feel like a totalitarian regime. ” artlark.org By projecting her own need to blame her own parents, she had to reject what is accepted science today, that trauma is intergenerational: Epigenetics, which she rejected in order to find the focus of blame on the parents, is "the study of mitotically and/or meiotically heritable changes in gene function that cannot be explained by changes in DNA sequence." Wikipedia
In other words, we have to take a step back further than the parents, whose narcissism may well be the coping mechanism of a person suffering epigenetic trauma. That rejection, which I think was motivated by her personal need to blame her parents for her own suffering, is the fatal flaw in her analysis of both individual cases and her study of the Nazi era, which in no way would explain the events in Israel today, The Nazi era is, in a sense, being repeated, but her explanation for it, does not hold up, for Israeli child rearing is almost the opposite of the German model: "“free-range parenting” is the national default position. Kids are independent from young ages, arranging and ferrying themselves to playdates. A six- or seven-year-old walks to the corner store with friends for ice cream. Ten-year-olds regularly cross Tel Aviv on scooters or on the bus with friends. Parenting in Israel offers more freedom to both kids and parents. " mosaicmagazine.com
I would suggest that what you say, without dealing with the merits, is only applicable to Ashkenazi Jews, and not to the other branches of Judaism. I think it is important to make that distinction clear.
I make it clear from the beginning sentence: "An insightful way to think about the national character of the Zionists in charge of Israel ....." Not all Jews are right wing Zionists, and not all Israelis are in charge.
Actually this psychological analysis is not in fact a product of 'relatively recent history' - the true origins of it are rooted in the very ideology of Judaism (Jewism) itself, going back several thousand years of course. Nietzsche had it absolutely correct when he used the word 'resentment' to describe the motivation. No other social group in the entirety of human history has ever behaved like that, so we have to put it down the ideology. I would thus further argue that in order to defeat the propaganda and gaslighting we need to educate people about this psychology. The most effective method these Judaists have used of course to silence that very thing is to say that even just talking about this psychology is 'anti-semitic', and then labelling this word 'anti-semitic' as somehow 'morally wrong'. It's not morally wrong to point out narcissistic personality disorders or the cause of such disorders. That's what needs to change. Otherwise this coercive control will just continue.
I clearly trace the trauma of Jewish people back before recent times in this sentence: "The Jewish people have lived through great trauma, both historically, then with overwhelming suffering under the Nazi era, and then again on Oct 7.....I would not agree that the narcissistic character is of " Jewism" but rather of the nationalistic ideology of Zionism, which builds on an older history of trauma.
However, you are ignoring the myth of exalted victimhood. Which is a part of their origin myth (Moses/Exodus etc.). At that time their atrocity propaganda was directed against the Egyptians. Since then it's been directed at pretty much everyone at some point. In other words, you are assuming that their propaganda about victimhood is true. Which is isn't. Not in any exceptional or unique way, anyhow.
At the same time, they are told they are the 'master race'. That engenders racism towards every other social group (all gentiles, in other words). It's not surprising if everyone else finds that offensive, and starts acting in self-defence. This is then presented as 'unprovoked attacks' (anti-semitism etc.). But if the perpetrators are prevented from self-realising that, by this 'innocent victimhood myth', then they will continue to think that, in a paranoid way, everyone else hates them for no reason. So they never learn the lesson and grow up. Ironically, maybe people would've had more sympathy for Nazis if they too had massively pushed an exalted victim narrative themselves, seeing as normal humans empathise with perceived victims and are more likely to believe what they say (however absurd or farcical the atrocity propaganda is). It's easy for people to hate Nazis because of their perceived racism and superiority complex. But add an innocent victim narrative, and gaslighting, and it becomes a bit more difficult.
The 'trauma' I would argue is self-inflicted in the form of child abuse starting at 8 days old, followed by indoctrination and fear-based and punishment-based obedience training. Of course they can't admit they are traumatising themselves, nor can they rightly blame it on their 'Fuhrer' - Yahweh - so they have to project it onto everyone else (Gentiles).
So ultimately, your psychological analysis depends on believing the exalted victim mythology. Remove that, and the sympathy that goes along with it, and you need a completely different psychological explanation for the evil stuff they do.
And if a psychologist diagnoses a serious personality disorder in someone which makes that person a serious danger to others, I think we can all agree the psychologist is the good guy in this story. Before anyone accuses me of being the bad guy, that is.