A Nazi psychologist reinterpreted synaesthesia as a degenerate perceptual trait

Evidence

In 1934 Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In 1938 E.R.Jaensch, a psychologist and also a Nazi, published the book Der Gegentypus. This book reported the discovery of a consistent human type—the Gegentypus or Anti-Type. The Anti-Type was also called the S-Type because Jaensch found that he was synaesthetic: one who enjoys concomitant sensation, a subjective experience from another sense than the one being stimulated, as in color hearing. Synaesthesia, which we are likely to regard as a poet’s gift, seemed to Jaensch to be a kind of perceptual slovenliness, the qualities of one sense carelessly mixed with those of another. In other perceptual tasks Jaensch found the Anti-Type to be characterized by ambiguous and indefinite judgments and to be lacking in perseverance. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 426

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to anyone interested in the history of psychometrics or in how scientific categories get weaponized — the redefinition of synaesthesia as ‘perceptual slovenliness’ is a striking inversion.
• XREF: Connects to Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man on scientific racism and to the broader history of Nazi psychology.
• CANDY: A Nazi psychologist thought synaesthesia (a poet’s gift) was a degenerate sloppiness — a genuinely startling inversion for cocktail conversation.
• SEED: Article angle: how völkisch ideology recast ordinary perceptual/cognitive variation (synaesthesia, ambiguity-tolerance) as racial degeneracy — the ‘scientific’ infrastructure of Nazi personality typing.
• STORYSTEM: The S-Type/J-Type typology — a perceptual trait (synaesthesia) as a marker of hereditary impurity — is a compelling engine for a speculative or alternate-history story: a society that reads synaesthetes as an underclass.
• BMF: The J-Type whose virtues are bequeathed by ancestors living ‘from time immemorial in the North German space’ resonates obliquely with the Okonkwo/Ikemefuna blood-and-clan logic in Things Fall Apart — inherited character as ethnic inheritance rather than personal action.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 426