Ernst Simmel

[2] In 1913 alongside Karl Kollwitz and Ignaz Zadek he helped found the Society of Socialist Physicians (VSÄ), and became one of the pioneers of Social Medicine.

[11] Simmel maintained that “on the developmental path of mankind, games of chance are a reservoir for the anal-sadistic impulses held in a state of repression”, and that gambling served to satisfy the “bisexual ideal which the Narcissus finds in himself”.

[12] Among other topics covered in the ten or so papers he published between 1918 and 1937 were screen memories; sadism in sex murderers; psychosomatic defences against psychosis; and hypochondriasis.

[16] Through such studies, Simmel played a significant part in ensuring that psychoanalytic theory was extended from individual diseases to include cultural issues and social situations.

In Simmel's own paper — "Anti-Semitism and mass psychopathology" — he interprets antisemitism on the basis of Freud's critical exploration of myth in his book Moses and Monotheism (1939).

A reversion to infantile modes of denying external reality (reaching back to stages of development dominated by the death drive), in Simmel's model anti-semitism appeared as a mass psychosis that nevertheless enabled the individual to compensate for psychological deficits, in such a way as to remain socially integrated and relatively intact psychologically: "The flight into mass psychosis is not only a flight from reality but also from individual insanity".