In 2020, about 20% of the U.S. adult population received psychotherapy or counseling services from a mental health professional.  Why do so many people turn to help from psychology?  A simple answer is that it is also estimated, through years of therapy outcome studies, that 75% of people who receive psychotherapy report feeling and functioning better because of the help.

The ultimate benefit of psychotherapy is saving lives, but that is difficult to calculate.  As with shootings, it is easier to count the people who die from gunfire than the number of people whose lives are preserved by armed protection from citizens, police, and military.  It is easier to count the people who committed suicide than to count the people who were at risk but chose life due to mental health services.  Where there is a comparable control group — for example, veterans who receive mental health services compared to veterans who do not — the evidence is strong that therapy prevents suicide.

The benefit of modern psychology is not limited to direct services.  Americans spend billions every year on self-help books, online courses, and about 20,000 mental health apps.  Furthermore, psychological nomenclature has kidnapped our way of thinking and talking.  People say, “I’m OCD, I’m ADHD, I’m bipolar,” almost as a form of amiable introduction.  And when we don’t like someone, or wish to identify bad behavior, we use psychological terms like narcissist, sociopath, psychopath, and pathological liar rather than good old-fashioned blame-and-shame verbiage.

Whence comes this fundamental expansion in our methods to solve personal problems?  Modern psychological knowledge takes many forms, but the development of psychological theory and psychotherapy to understand oneself, to change behavior, and to improve life was originally almost entirely a gift of the Jews.

Modern psychology arose in the explosion of scientific knowledge in Europe and America of the late 19th century.  Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany in1879.  Wundt’s student, James Cattell, received a Ph.D. in 1892 and became the first professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.  In 1890, William James published the massive The Principles of Psychology, in which he concluded “[T]here is no such thing as a science of psychology.”  Another Wundt protégé, G. Stanley Hall, founded the first psychology laboratory in America, at Johns Hopkins, as well as the American Psychological Association in 1892.

While these pioneers were studying the “what” of psychological phenomena, an isolated Austrian Jew, shut out from the elite circles of his medical profession by anti-Semitism, was fearlessly probing the unconscious mind to find the “why.”  With no professorship, no laboratory, no organization, in 1895 Sigmund Freud published “Studies on Hysterics,” about anxiety, phobias, compulsions — conditions we face today.  This incipient understanding of the singular impact of childhood experience, reoriented and refined by later psychologists, eventually led to the greatest gift of modern psychology, which is the uncompromising rejection of child abuse.

Depth psychology was not the only transformational corpus originated by Jewish healers and researchers.  Throughout the twentieth century, the knowledge base opened out to ego psychology, humanistic psychology, family and child psychology, social psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, positive psychology — all founded by Jews.

Thanks to multinational European anti-Jewish genocidal proclivities, upwards of 1.75 million legal Jewish immigrants came to America in the early twentieth century.  They were not received warmly, especially in elite education.  For example, Harvard reduced the role of test scores in admissions policies in the 1930s to restrict Jewish students to 15%.  This week, a Cessna flew over Harvard pulling a banner “Harvard Hates Jews.”  There should have been a second plane with the banner, “So what else is new?”  Paradoxically, exclusion from the Ivy League may have unleashed American Jewish intellectual dynamism in the early twentieth century in the new and offbeat science of psychology.

Some conservatives say psychology has been no gift at all.  That is understandable, given the moral catastrophe of institutional psychology attempting to replace religion and answer spiritual questions of human identity and significance, questions that cannot be answered scientifically.

Today, James Cattell and G. Stanley Hall would be horrified to see the central preoccupations of the American Psychological Society (APA) they founded feature the dehumanization and disposability of the unborn, a peculiar idolatry of sexuality minorities, and APA presidents chosen mainly for identity politics.  Nevertheless, the science of psychology and methodologies of psychotherapeutic recovery are universal and independent of politics and religion.  Research has shown that psychology can be particularly helpful to people of faith.  Before modern psychology, it was common for people, especially women, to sink into hopeless states of mental collapse and despair, and many were discarded or imprisoned.  Modern psychiatry gets credit for alleviating the most severe forms of mental illness, but psychology has prevented countless tragedies and enabled happier lives.  The dark cloud that has descended over the world is not the fault of modern psychology.  Perhaps when this darkness lifts for a New Humanity, the greatest non-Jew psychology genius, Carl Jung, will finally have his day!

In the 20th century, Jewish psychological thinkers, honored below, tried to understand why Jews are perpetually hated.  Isn’t that self-evident?  Time after time, as societies slip into degeneracy and civilizational failure, they prop themselves up on the crutches of anti-Semitism.  We see that today, as streets fill with useless juveniles, their empty heads wrapped in tablecloths apparently stolen from Italian restaurants, enjoying raucous festivals of Jew-hating.  Morally bankrupt people defend themselves against facing the failures of their own godless creeds through jealousy of the most successful community organizers in world history.  The weak-minded, which today includes many Jews who despise their own identity, snarl at the Jewish homeland.  They resent the incomparable resilience of the Jewish people, which has sustained their identity through millennia without endless wars of aggression, while perpetually renewing an ancient birthright.  A more interesting question is, how did the Jews become exceptional in the first place?

Theistic gossip has it that the Jews are chosen by God to be the first knowers of important things: monotheism, written law, morality, science, and now psychology.  But monotheism, at least, was given to several ancient peoples.  The genius composer Philip Glass (Jew) along with his associates Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel, and Jerome Robbins (Jew, Jew, and Jew) created the opera Akhenaton, exploring a pharaoh’s failed attempt to introduce monotheism in 1200 B.C.  Monotheism was also introduced in Zoroastrianism around 1500 B.C.  Zoroastrians have been called the Jews of India.  They are extant but barely hanging on and invisible on the world stage.  So why isn’t a genius Egyptian or Zoroastrian composing operas about the lost civilization of ancient Jews?  Why is it always the other way around?  Here’s a psychological explanation.  Judaism is essentially a four-thousand-year-old private conversation with God about how He wants us to live.  The Jewish tradition of educated dialogue with the Lord (only recently opened to Jewish women) is restricted by birthright or high-hurdle conversion.  The only objective skill that must be demonstrated for membership is the ability to read.

That has proven to be a great formula for civilizational stability, adaptability, and a disproportionately high occurrence of genius, including the last century’s creative burst in scientific theories and humane methodologies called psychology.

The following 50 names are a tiny sample of Jewish leaders of modern psychology:

Aaron Beck; Abraham Maslow; Albert Ellis; Alexander Loewen; Alfred Adler; Anna Freud; Bruno Bettelheim; Bruno Klopfer; Daniel Levinson; Egon Brunswik; Elizabeth Loftus; Elsa Frenkel-Brunswik; Ernest Becker; Erich Fromm; Erik Erikson; Ernst Kris; Francine Shapiro; Franz Alexander; Frederick Hertzberg; Fritz & Laura Perls; Heinz Hartmann; Heinz Kohut; Hyman Spotnitz; Jerome Bruner; Jerome Singer;  Karl Abraham; Kurt Lewin; Kurt Koffka; Laurence Kohlberg; Leon Festinger; Martin Seligman; Melanie Klein; Nathan Ackerman; Nathan Kline; Otto Fenichel; Otto Kernberg; Otto Rank; Rene Spitz; Rudolph Loewenstein; Sandra Bem; Sandor Ferenczi; Sigmund Freud; Solomon Asch; Stanley Milgram; Steven Pinker; Tamara Dembo; Thomas Szasz; Urie Bronfenbrenner; Walter Mischel; Yossef Ben-Porath

This is dedicated to the memory of the author’s dissertation adviser, psychologist Donald K. Freedheim, Ph.D., who passed in May of 2023.

Image: DeltaWorks via Pixabay, Pixabay License.