Jeffrey Burke Satinover (September 4, 1947) is an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and physicist. He is well-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. Copies of his best-selling 1996 Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth were distributed to all bishops attending the 1998 Lambeth Anglican Communion Conference and his work is widely-used and cited, and equally-widely criticized, as one of the main modern sources supporting the view that homosexuality is a changeable, non-innate condition, though not a matter of choice. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Science and Mathematics at The King's College, New York City and a Visiting Scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich. He also teaches at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. He was the youngest person ever to have delivered the William James Lectures at Harvard. He has written widely on subjects such as narcissism, religious history, cryptology, psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, complex systems theory, physics and finance.
Satinover was born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, September 4, 1947 to Joseph and Sena Satinover. He lived in Chicago and the surround until moving to California at the beginning of his high-school years. He demonstrated an early interest in physics.
Satinover won a National Merit Scholarship to M.I.T, where he obtained a B.S. in 1971 at the age of 25. He subsequently obtained his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an Ed.M. in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice from Harvard University, and his M.D. at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and later an M.S. in physics at Yale University. He completed psychoanalytic training at the C. G. Jung Institute of Zürich, their youngest-ever graduate. In 2008 he completed a Ph.D. in physics (summa cum laude) at the University of Nice, France.
Satinover is a former state flight surgeon. He served in the 1/169th combat-support helicopter battalion of the Connecticut Army National Guard, and was also an Army Reserve Psychiatrist (rank of major). He practiced clinical psychiatry between 1986 and 2003, and psychoanalysis between 1976 and 2003, having trained early in his career as a Jungian analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich.
In 1974 Satinover was the William James Lecturer in Psychology and Religion at Harvard University. He is a past-President of the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York. He is a former 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). After twenty-five years in the medical and psychotherapeutic arena, he returned to school.
He is currently conducting research in complex and agent-based systems theory (econophysics, minority game). His prior areas of physics research are 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.
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 (April, 2001, Wiley). The book is written for a general but well-educated readership.
He has appeared in the media and before various American state and federal institutions as a policy advisor with respect to the nature of homosexuality, and also before the British Parliament; he has treated homosexuals seeking a change in sexual attraction, for which he has been criticised. He also played a role in the film What the Bleep Do We Know?!.
Writing and ideas
Satinover’s previous writings also include "Cracking the Bible Code" (William Morrow & Co., 1996), a critical discussion of modern scientific analyses of the ancient tradition of hidden encryptions in the five books of Moses. It is more importantly the story of one of the most significant and invisible figures of the Holocaust, Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, whose rescue of tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis, through two years of face-to-face negotiations with Himmler’s and Eichmann’s chief overseers in Eastern Europe, is almost entirely unknown to the world at large. The story of the “codes” provided a cover story for the more important history of Weissmandl. At the same time, the book includes previously undiscovered aspects of Renaissance history. For example, Satinover argues that the early cryptographic encoding wheels that Leon Battista Alberti appears to have come up with “out of nowhere” (as is conventionally stated), are copies of 1st century Kabbalistic devices that Alberti, along with other Neoplatonists and so-called “Christian Kabbalists” of the Florence Academy, Leonardo da Vinci and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola among them, learned directly from Kabbalistic Rabbis of the era.
Satinover’s most widely read and debated book is Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (Baker Book House, 1996; see Ex-gay) The book is an analysis of the debate over homosexuality viewed from psychological, religious and scientific perspectives. The book was distributed to all bishops at the 1996 Lambeth conference, and at many other similar gatherings. He subsequently authored a number of monographs and critiques on related subjects. His testimony as parts of amicus curiae briefs have been cited in US State and Federal Supreme Court cases, in Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Though not an attorney, he has taught Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties at Princeton on the basis of this background.
Satinover's current scientific research, with Didier Sornette of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (see Stock Market Crash), centers on studies of game theory and in particular the Minority Game, attending to the "illusion of control" in these games.
Satinover was asked to assist key United States Senators and their staffs in the ultimately successful battle to win confirmation for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Emmanuel Margolis, the then-president of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) holds Satinover chiefly responsible for Thomas’ confirmation.A number of Satinover’s public policy speeches are available from C-Span. Search Results : C-SPAN Video Library, Created by Cable. Offered as a Public Service
A founder of Connecticut’s Committee to Save Our Schools (CT:SOS), Satinover was also active in the mid-1990s nationwide in the resistance to so-called “Outcomes-Based Education” (i.e., O.B.E., under whatever name or acronym) and associated educational “reforms.” Under his co-leadership, CT:SOS won a significant victory in the Connecticut legislature, defeating a broad-based coalition of government, educational unions and certain major corporations (in particular, Union Carbide) in their attempt to replace local and locally-elected school boards with a single state-appointed board. The CT:SOS program of alternate, traditionalist reforms co-authored by Satinover, “Academic-Based Education”, was ignored in Connecticut but formally adopted at the time by the Board of Education of San Diego, California, then the nation’s sixth largest public school system.
