Jeffrey Satinover

Jeffrey Burke Satinover (September 4, 1947) is an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and physicist. He is known for books on a number of controversial topics in physics and neuroscience, and on religion, but especially for his writing and public-policy efforts relating to homosexuality, same-sex marriage and the ex-gay movement.

Satinover was born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 4, 1947, to Joseph and Sena Satinover. He lived in and around Chicago until moving to California at the beginning of his high school years. Satinover won a National Merit Scholarship. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971. He obtained a Master of Education degree in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice from Harvard University, a medical degree at the University of Texas, and a Master of Science in Physics at Yale University. He received a diploma in analytical psychology from the C. G. Jung Institute of Zürich, becoming their youngest graduate. He trained there and became an accredited Jungian analyst. He received a PhD in physics in the laboratory of Didier Sornette at the University of Nice in France, in 2009.

Satinover served in the 1/169th combat-support helicopter battalion of the Connecticut Army National Guard as a flight surgeon and was also an Army Reserve Psychiatrist with the rank of major.

In 1974, Satinover was the youngest person ever to deliver the William James Lectures in Psychology and Religion at Harvard University.

He practiced clinical psychiatry between 1986 and 2003 and psychoanalysis between 1976 and 2003.

He was President of the C.G. Jung Foundation of New York.

He has taught Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

He was a fellow (resident) in psychiatry and child psychiatry at Yale, where he was twice awarded the department of psychiatry's Seymour Lustman Residency Research Prize (2nd place).

He married for the second time in 1982, having previously divorced and is the father of three daughters. According to two journalists, in September 1991, during the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Satinover suggested during dinner conversation with President Bush's nephew that Anita Hill, if suffering from erotomania (a "delusional disorder"), might be entirely convinced that Thomas had sexually harassed her, even if he had not, just as a witness for Thomas, John Doggett, (now a conservative commentator) claimed had happened with him. She would even pass a lie detector test, as Hill had, convinced of the truth of what she was saying. Soon Satinover and another psychiatrist, Park Dietz were explaining this possibility to Thomas' Senate sponsor, John Danforth, and White House press secretary, Larry Thomas, though as psychiatrists neither would testify about a patient they had not examined. (Psychiatrists brought in by the Democrats similarly refused to testify. Satinover was quoted as stating that once he saw the testimony of one of Hill's main critics, John Doggett, he concluded the idea was invalid.

A founder of Connecticut's Committee to Save Our Schools (CT:SOS), Satinover was active in the mid-1990s, supporting the resistance to "Outcomes-Based Education" and other related educational initiatives. Under his co-leadership, CT:SOS defeated a proposal in the Connecticut legislature to replace locally elected school boards with a single state-appointed board, a proposal supported by a broad-based coalition of government, educational unions and corporations, particularly Union Carbide. Connecticut did not adopt the CT:SOS program of alternative, traditionalist reforms co-authored by Satinover, "Academic-Based Education", but the Board of Education of San Diego, California, then the nation's sixth largest public school system, did so.

He has provided commentary for two documentary films, What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (2004) and What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole (2006).

In 2008, he completed a Ph.D. summa cum laude in Physics at the University of Nice, France.

Satinover was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Math and Science at King's College, New York City, a private Christian college affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ. He also teaches at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. He is a visiting scientist at the Department of Management, Technology and Economics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He is Managing Director of Quintium Analytics, LLC, a proprietary investment advisory company he founded in 2007. Satinover is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality.

He conducts research in complex and agent-based systems theory (econophysics, the minority game). His former areas of physics research were in fundamental quantum theory and in its application to quantum information processing and computation. Presently he is investigating certain aspects of game theory in complex systems.

Satinover is Jewish, but says he has an eclectic worldview.

Satinover's book, Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (1996), published by the evangelical Christian publisher Baker Books, debates the nature of homosexuality from psychological, religious and scientific perspectives, discussing homosexuality primarily in the context of being a condition that can or should be treated, contrary to the views of the mainstream psychiatric and psychological community. Satinover draws comparisons between homosexuality and various pathologies (e.g., alcoholism, pedophilia) and argues that homosexuality involves compulsive impulses. He states that homosexuality "is not a true illness, though it may be thought an illness in the spiritual sense of 'soul sickness,' innate to fallen human nature." He also argues that "gay activism distorts the truth and harms not only society, but homosexuals themselves". Most of the book discusses whether homosexuality is biological and genetic and if it can be changed. About one fifth of the book discusses human sexuality from Jewish and Christian perspectives. In the book's introduction, Satinover states that "[i]n the end the debate over homosexual behavior and its implications for public policy can only be decided conclusively on moral grounds, and moral grounds will ultimately mean religious grounds."

In 1997, Satinover was called by the State of Florida as an expert witness in Amer v. Johnson, which challenged Florida's law prohibiting adoption by gays and lesbians. "Surprisingly, Satinover said in his testimony that 'if two homosexuals wanted to adopt a child, I would have no objection to it if one of them was a man and one of them was a woman' [but]'the 'needs' of a child includes having [both] a mother and a father'". He said that "The state of Florida wanted me to argue that the reason the ban should be upheld was because homosexuals made bad parents and I refused to do that."After several years of additional court cases relating to the Florida's anti-gay adoption ban, In re: Gill resulted in the ban being declared unconstitutional in 2010.

Satinover has frequently testified regarding his views on same sex marriage. In a hearing before the Massachusetts Judicial Committee in April 2003, he testified that homosexuality is not immutable and that the environment plays an important role in sexual orientation. Organizations that oppose the expansion of LGBT rights and protections have frequently cited his research in their position papers.

Satinover's other writings include Cracking the Bible Code, about information purportedly encrypted as a Bible code into the first five books in the Hebrew Bible.He is the author of articles, chapters, and books on topics ranging from brain neurophysiology to the psychology of narcissism to the breakdown of modern society. His book The Quantum Brain explores current developments at the interface of physics, computation, artificial intelligence and neuroscience.

Satinover's current scientific research, with Didier Sornette of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, centers on studies of game theory and in particular the minority game, attending to the "illusion of control" in these games.

• Feathers of the Skylark: Compulsion, Sin and Our Need for a Messiah (Hamewith Books, 1996)
• The Empty Self: Gnostic & Jungian Foundations of Modern Identity (Grove Books, 1995), 28 pp.
  • also as The Empty Self: C.G. Jung and the Gnostic Transformation of Modern Identity (Grove Books, 1996)
• Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (Baker Books, 1996)
• The Truth Behind the Bible Code (Sidgwich Jackson, 1997)
• Cracking the Bible Code (1997, New York: W. Morrow, ISBN 0-688-15463-8)
• The Quantum Brain: The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man (Wiley, 2002)