French resistance to organic explanation of tic behaviors after WWII

“The fact that the Nazis and their Vichy allies had attempted to eradicate psychoanalytic theory in favor of a reconstituted Nazi psychology informed by eugenic explanations would influence (in a negative way) the French psychiatric community’s attitude toward most organic explanations of tic behaviors for the next half century. To this day psychoanalysis remains strong in France because it portrays itself as a bulwark of defense against detested racist medical practices. Criticisms of psychoanalysis are often labeled as protofascist and anti-Semitic” (Kushner, 150). “By the 1990s, leading French psychoanalysts would take the offensive, decrying organic explanations of Gilles de la Tourette’s syndrome as a construction, almost a conspiracy, of the North American medical establishment” (162).