How Big a Threat is Psychiatry?

If you've never seen the BBC Documentary "The Century of the Self,"  (also at YouTube) it is a prerequisite for this discussion. It reveals how psychiatry convinced governments across the world, including our own and others we think of as humane, that most of humanity were savage beasts in need of control: this produced monstrous secret government programs even in the United States. The effect of Freud on the elite who studied him was a horrified fear of those they governed -- and, then, sought to rule and dominate for their own self-preservation. 

Later psychoanalysis created extraordinary instability by asserting that human meaning was to be found through self-actualization rather than in communities with common purpose. One example in the documentary is a convent of nuns that was completely destroyed by it. They began with devout and sworn members of a lifelong religious community. The effect was that 300 nuns -- more than half the convent -- petitioned to be released from their vows. The convent closed its doors to new recruits. The remainder of the convent divided into those who "became radical lesbian nuns," and who drove out  most of the rest. (This is at 2 hours, 20 minutes, 13 seconds in the YoutTube video.) A community with a deep, meaningful commitment to a moral vision of the good life was completely destroyed by psychoanalysis committed to self-actualization.

The modal answer to the question therefore should be "At least among the biggest threats facing humanity"; we are interested in whether or not it is closer to the biggest one, or a somewhat less pressing (but still major) threat.

So today we see a new psychoanalytic theory that most of America is malignantly ill. 

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

There is, of course, a permanent cure. It is the one that the phrase "never again" intends to memorialize. This psychiatrist is here engage in a rhetorical move, one that is meant to yoke the left-hated Israel to the left-hated flag-waving Americans, who were also characterized as 'having whiteness.' It is also meant to diminish the concerns of both groups to mere psychological disorders, not pointed at real threats faced by anyone. 

Yet of course there really was a Holocaust; and there really could be another. Antisemitism is rising even in America, and on both the political right and left. A rabbi I know is warning American Jews that they may no longer be safe in America; and indeed there are places where they well may not be. 

And there is really a genocide going on right now in China, where the Uighur people are being both actively exterminated and subject to legal restrictions on their reproduction. This is no paranoid delusion, but an actual fact. China is, of course, the power that stands to gain the most should America fail to be 'great again.' 

This is not one guy, either.  It is not just him plus that lady at Yale who fantasizes about emptying revolvers into people. It is an idea that is gaining prominence in American society, especially among psychiatrists. 

So: watch the documentary if you have not. It is fairly long, but time very well spent. Then consider this question, and what might be done about it.