“The most mentally deranged people,” Tolstoy writes in The Devil, “are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.” In today’s culture, disturbed minds often feel sanest when they are paying for psychotherapy, buying pop-psychology books, and most often by becoming professional experts themselves. And what is more deranged than hating Jews?

In 2023, the organization StandWithUs filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against psychology professor Lara Sheehi, accused of creating “a pervasive, hostile, and discriminatory environment for Jewish and Israeli students” at George Washington University. She has, for example, stated publicly that Israelis and Zionists are “genocidal f[**]ks,” and claimed the belief in Israel’s right to exist to be a “psychosis.” Sheehi, however, is not merely one professor among many. She served as president of the Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA) and chair of its Teachers’ Academy—roles one would think require a commitment to professional ethics.

A year earlier, Routledge had published Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, her book arguing that psychoanalytic practice must commit itself to political violence. Lebanese-born Sheehi eventually left the United States again, this time for a teaching job in Qatar. (Qatar is the largest foreign funder of U.S. colleges and universities, with more than $5 billion in foreign gifts reported last year. Funding disclosures can be tracked through the National Association of Scholars’s foreign donor database.) Meanwhile, Routledge has not retracted the book, and the profession has offered little introspection.

An open letter to APA—signed by thousands of psychologists—speaks of anti-Jewish sentiments as well as rationalizations of violence against Jews and Holocaust distortion in multiple divisions and subsections within APA. A situation that “has severe consequences for the education and training of students in APA-accredited programs … and the credibility of the psychology profession as a whole.”

Israel has become a favored target of a new breed of mental-health influencers who blend therapy language with activist ideology.

Gabor Maté, bestselling author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, cannot seem to stop invoking Nazi analogies. “The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto.” It is not simply offensive; it is revealing. Increasingly, “mental health experts” use the veneer of professional expertise to advance ideological narratives, and Jews have become a predictable target within them.

Jennifer Mullan, author of the popular textbook Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice—described by the Jewish Therapist Collective as running a “campaign against the Jewish people”—states her premise openly: “Therapy is political AF – neutrality is a silent killer.”

Attempts to exclude Jews from psychology are not new.

Carl Jung—still admired in large parts of the field—claimed that “the Aryan unconscious has a greater potential than the Jewish unconscious,” praised Hitler and Mussolini, cooperated with the Nazis, and wrote other racist characterizations of Jews and blacks.

Today, Jungian anti-Semitism has drifted leftward. In 2024, a joint conference of the Association of Analytical Psychology (AIPA) and the Association for Research in Analytical Psychology (ARPA) was cancelled after members refused to meet Israeli colleagues at a venue in Italy. According to observers, the protest was violentissima—”very violent.” One scheduled attendee asked the obvious question: with such “extreme dogmatic ideology that unfairly targets Jews” now entrenched, what would become of their training programs? Would Jewish and Israeli candidates be limited, just as Jung once imposed explicit quotas on Jews in his Zurich psychology club?

The profession’s own surveys suggest the concern is widespread. A 2024 study by the Association of Jewish Psychologists (AJP) found that respondents “expressed significant concerns about rising antisemitism within the profession, feeling marginalized and silenced, and the possibility of diminution of Jews in the field.”

Concrete examples abound. In Chicago, an “anti-racist” therapist group created a Facebook list of Jewish and Zionist clinicians to be boycotted. The organizer—holding a doctorate from the Adler School of Professional Psychology—wrote: “Hi all! I’ve put together a list of therapists / practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to. Please feel free to contribute additional names as I’m certain there are more out there.” The initial list contained 26 therapists with ties to the Jewish community, plus others whose names merely sounded Jewish. “Likes” and smile emojis followed shortly, comments quickly multiplied: “I had planned on doing this soon on excel! Thanks for getting it started. I have a long roll of screenshots to add. I’ll get on this soon (smile emoji).” Another flagged a business owner as Jewish: “I don’t know how to add to this list, but this practice owner.” Even the administrator seemed surprised by how quickly the list grew.

The speed and enthusiasm recall how eagerly many Germans denounced Jewish neighbors after 1933—often more zealously than the Nazi leadership itself expected. And the medical professions played their part. Immediately after the Nazi takeover, German policy restricted “Jewish activity” in health care, barred Jewish doctors from public insurance reimbursement, and eventually prohibited them from treating non-Jewish patients.

Considering this history, it is concerning how today’s “experts” of mental health are drifting toward extremely dangerous language. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), for instance, employs rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi propaganda when it describes “Whiteness” as a “malignant, parasitic-like condition” that “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.” While it goes without saying that no skin color or ethnic background is a mental disorder, this kind of rhetoric is especially concerning since Jews are often defined as “white” in America, and certainly so within APA.

Meanwhile, counseling psychologists are encouraged to integrate political training into sessions with “white” clients who presumably seek treatment for health care, not political indoctrination of any kind. The APA has embraced “decolonial psychology,” and the American Counseling Association urges therapists to foreground “power, privilege, and oppression” in the counseling relationship. These frameworks risk turning therapy into ideological enforcement or a struggle session. And because Jews, as a successful minority, are often cast within these frameworks as part of an oppressor class, anti-Semitic conclusions follow naturally.

Psychology and Critical Race Theory work well together because they follow the same playbook: pre-emptively defending ideas by claiming that opposition reveals a deficiency—deep-rooted trauma, unconscious desire, or unconscious racism. Maté is a prominent example of this intellectual trick. In The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, he argues absurdities such as the case of a woman whose ovarian cancer, he claims, resulted from her being a “perfectionist.” And when fellow psychologist Stanton Peele criticized him, Maté responded, “Stanton, you have deep unresolved pain.”

Jewish religious practice is not exempt from pathologization either. Some clinicians have labeled Jewish observance an “obsessive-compulsive disorder” or “eating disorder.” When a profession begins diagnosing a minority’s religious life as pathology, something fundamental is breaking down. The same professional failure can be seen in the attempt to label anti-Semitism itself, not as a moral failure, but a mental illness, something that would evade personal responsibility.

Meanwhile, universities churn out psychologists in numbers that far exceed clear professional demand. One wonders where this expanding cohort will go: into genuine clinical settings, or into newly invented ideological training under the guise of health care because there aren’t enough insane people around to treat. Now, the discipline needs this debate, and hates it, and doesn’t know what to do with it—other than replacing scholarship with ideology and blaming the Jews.