Eric Ormsby praises Jonathan Philips, the author of “Holy Warriors A Modern History of the Crusades,” for the “cool, almost documentary power [of] his narrative,” which inspires Ormsby to romanticize the Crusaders: “In fact, their faith was as pure as their savagery.” But were they so pure? Ormsby makes no reference to Phillips’ perfunctory descriptions of “pogroms” and massacres during the first Crusade, while Phillips studiously avoids mentioning “anti-Semitism or the role played by Church-sponsored hatred of the Jews in fueling the fervor of the Crusades. As noted by Paul Johnson in “A History of the Jews,” “the anti-Semitic ideology and folklore which helped to detonate the first crusader riots proved to be simply the plinth on which a vast superstructure of hostile rumour was built” (p. 208). Similarly, Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, in his 1901 “Anti-Semitism throughout the Ages” (published in English in 1953 but cited by Sigmund Freud in his 1938 “Comment on anti-Semitism,” after he fled from Nazi Austria to London), noted the following: “with the Crusades began a time of the most terrible persecution of the Jews. Hosts of Crusaders, many of the the scum of French, English, Lothringian and Flemish countries, started, as Graetz says, their work of murdering and plundering with the Jews for want of Mohammedans. Thousands of the former were massacred” (p. 132); “when the Crusaders under Godfrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem they indulged in terrible carnage and massacre. All the Jews were driven into the Synagogue, which was set on fire, and the victims perished in the flames” (p. 134). Such persecutions were repeated in the subsequent Crusades as well. Regretfully, Ormsby believes that the persecution of the Cathars was nothing but a “holy war” waged “against coreligionists”; thankfully Phillips makes a small concession when he describes Usama bin Laden as spouting “Judeo-Christian” hatred.

Henry (Zvi) Lothane, MD, DLFAPA
Clinical Professor Department of Psychiatry
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
1435 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10128(212) 534 5555
Schreber@lothane.com
www.lothane.com

Click Here To Read: Letter by Leo Rangell in response to Louis Menand’s New Yorker article.

As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has worked with a wide range of patients since 1963, I believe it is important to refute Prof. Shorter’s brutal attack on contemporary psychiatry. His views are idiosyncratic, to say the least, reflecting as they do his individual appraisal of the diagnostic manual and current treatments.

Paradoxically, Prof. Shorter denounces the very areas of great progress that have made psychiatry a potent force in providing effective treatments for those previously unable to be reached in psychotherapy. The growing number of effective drugs for severe depression, mania and schizophrenia date from a dark period in the 1950s and ’60s when psychopharmacology hardly existed. The attack on drug makers that have produced effective medication is inexcusable, as is the paranoid assertion that the new diagnoses proposed for DSM-V are designed to create new categories of illness that will accommodate the drug companies’ desire for a larger marketing audience.

The possibility of providing combined psychotherapy and psychopharmacological treatments has enhanced our effectiveness and widened the scope of patients who can use these treatments. I certainly don’t join with those who regret the DSM-V moving further away from psychoanalytically based diagnostic categories. The inclusion of theoretical aspects of our thinking that focus on the unconscious causality of human mental functioning has never been an essential aspect of proper psychiatric diagnosis, regardless of how important they are in the actual treatment situation. The impact of basing psychiatric diagnosis on identifiable behaviors and symptoms should be applauded rather than denounced by those who take no responsibility for providing psychiatric care to those in need of it.

Henry J. Friedman, M.D.
Harvard Medical School
Cambridge, Mass.

This article originally appeared as: Neimark, Geoff (November 2009). Patients and Text Messaging: A Boundary Issue: American  Journal of Psychiatry 166:1298-1299 and appears here with all requisite rights and permissions.

Click Here To Read:  For Children of the Recession, the Economy Hits Home, Letter to the Editor by Mark Smaller in the New York Times on November 18, 2009. 

Mark D. Smaller