FALL 2018
A Bully in the Bully Pulpit v. the Hillary Monster and Feminization Part I. Kenneth Alan Adams
ABSTRACT: This project, which examines support for Trump, fundamentalist childrearing, and the social trance, assesses how Donald Trump won and maintains his presidency against the opposition of more than half of the country. Focusing on Christian fundamentalists and those influenced by them, it is suggested that support for Trump is sustained by a network of conservative groups, institutions, and individuals charged with molding and coordinating religious and political interests to maintain and extend GOP governance. Psychohistorically, it is argued that conservative voters, especially fundamentalist Christians, are immersed in a group-trance that sustains the Trump presidency. The dynamism and rudimentary components for the trance originate in childhood, when children are traumatized by biblical teachings and the utilization of corporal punishment. It is asserted that the response to trauma is the formation of social alters, which are mobilized into group-fantasies and harnessed in adulthood for the benefit of conservative political interests. At the macro level, the article argues that fundamentalist religion propagandizes believers with the Big Lie, a group-fantasy that Donald Trump is an emissary of God; with God in control, Christians need not worry. At the micro level, the Big Lie succeeds because fundamentalist parents’ childrearing practices create authoritarian personalities, who obey authority and are susceptible to trance induction. Such individuals are thus easily-influenced targets for manipulation by the network of institutions that promote and support Donald Trump.
The Auction Block, the Battlefield Angels, and the Politics of Purity, Dan Dervin, Ph.d
ABSTRACT: The evolution of psychoanalytic theory entered new territory with the work of Melanie Klein (1882-1960). Previously, apart from Freud’s formations on narcissism, the prevailing framework was the Oedipal triad of desire, conflict, defense, adaption, and self-identity issuing from the child’s struggles to master issues involving both parents. Klein took a step back in child development phases and forward in clinical theory when she honed in on the dyad of infant and primary caregiver. Hers was the realm of preoedipal issues involving primal urges and frustrations. These she epitomized as good breast/bad breast. However resolved, transformed, or displaced, they set the stage for subsequent development. We don’t want to yield to reductionism, yet in psychohistory we continually observe regression to primitive levels of splitting one’s object-world into either/or absolutes of all-good vs all-bad. These dyad derivatives have increasingly dominated our polarized cultural and political discourses. Noting Trump’s “all-or-nothing” governing style, Lindsey Ford cites his off-and-on-again tactics with North Korea (NY Times, 25 May 18, p. A21); in this light Trump epitomizes these primitive processes. The present study examines this polar mode manifest in wide-ranging ideals of purity. Group-fantasies of white supremacy from our Civil War period are being revived. We see this in the controversies over Confederacy names and monuments: grappling with them anew injects our troubled past into our present. What we had assumed to be dead and buried evidently thrived in the margins, biding their time. More disturbing, their reentry is being aided and abetted at the highest levels of government. As these disparate phenomena echo and reverberate, psychohistorical perspectives fit them into larger patterns cued by the politics of purity.
Boundary Violations of the U. S. Constitution: The Case of Old Hickory, Donald Mender
ABSTRACT: The U. S. Constitution’s authors sought through a deliberately designed equilibrium to maintain boundaries delineating the branches and constraining the reach of America’s federal government. The Framers aimed to pit opposing agendas of powerful persons and of aggregate interest groups against each other in order to mute political excesses. However, this constitutional architecture neglected the potential of intrapsychic conflict within individuals to resonate through group psychodynamic processes and thereby weaken constitutional boundaries safeguarding republican institutions. Andrew Jackson’s presidency is analyzed in that context.
INTRODUCTION
At many stressful times in American history, unscrupulous politicians have tried with varying degrees of success and popular support to undermine constitutional checks and balances among the three separate branches of the federal government, between the federal and state governments, among the state governments, and between the government in general and individual citizens.
Such checks and balances (1) can be viewed schematically as mutually negative feedback mechanisms between and among branches and levels of the American polity. The negative valence of that feedback is meant to promote self-stabilizing equilibrium, rather like a….
A Preliminary Look at the Possible Relationship Between Mass Consumption of Legal Alcohol and the Existence of Modern Democracy: Evidence that the Latter Requires the Former, Gregory S. Paul
ABSTRACT: For reasons that are obscure, little research has been conducted regarding the grand impact of mass consumption of alcohol on national societies over human history until today, or on its nonuse by societies or by individuals. This study observes significant correlations between levels of alcohol consumption, gender equality and sociopolitical conditions, with the latter two being the most optimal when alcohol ingestion is legal and moderately high. Observation and experimentation have found that alcohol is an efficacious social lubricant, especially regarding courting and first sexual encounters. It is proposed that widespread use of legal alcohol may be an important prerequisite for the courting cultures that appear to be required for women to enjoy the social and sexual freedom that is in turn necessary for the development of the democratic politics that in turn generate the highest levels of socioeconomic prosperity and security. Societies that render alcohol illegal appear unable to achieve gender equality, full democracy and prosperity. The typical Islamic religious prohibition may play a critical role in hindering Muslim nations from achieving sociopolitical modernity. Nonuse can also adversely impact individuals by hindering their ability to socialize, including sexually, although nonuse also has it positives. Excessive use of alcohol also appears to be detrimental to nations, albeit not as much as is nonuse.
Keywords: alcohol, ethanol, legal, prohibition, gender equality, sexual activity, socioeconomics, democracy, Islam
BOOK REVIEW ESSAY
Psychoanalysis or Politics, Ian Parker
Robert Samuels (2016) Psychoanalyzing the Left and Right after Donald Trump: Conservatism, Liberalism, and Neoliberal Populisms. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN: 978-3-319-4480707.
The scope of this very interesting and useful book is deceptively broad. Robert Samuels, a psychoanalyst who teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), sets out “to explain how someone like Trump can rise to power.” Note that this is “someone like Trump,” and Samuels has his eye on the broader political context in which psychoanalysis can be put to work to help understand a variety of different political movements, including the unexpected triumph of Trump in the US presidential election. The book examines a number of different political analyses, which seek to explain the rise of the Right, and subjects their arguments to psychoanalytic scrutiny. He also addresses the question of why liberal solutions to our current political problems have been a failure. In each case, we are led to conclude that existing analyses are wanting, and that it is only psychoanalysis that will provide the full explanation, providing, Samuels says, the “missing link” to help us not only understand but also change the world.
Book Reviews
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Bandy Lee (Editor) . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017, x1x + 360 pp., Reviewed by Herbert Barry III
This book contains more than two dozen essays, all expressing fear or horror about the presidential performance of Donald Trump. The origin of most of the essays was a conference at Yale University soon after the inauguration of President Trump.. All of the essays are concise and clearly expressed. Most of them contain a sizable reference list.
Most of the authors are M. D. Psychiatrists or Ph.D. Psychologists. Their principal point of agreement is that Trump is narcissistic. Malignant narcissism is a frequent label. Narcissism is defined as egotism, an excessive concern for oneself. Examples cited by some of the authors are Trump’s claims that fraudulent voters accounted for recording of almost three million more votes for Hillary Clinton than for himself, and his claim that more people attended his inauguration than Barack Obama’s first inauguration.
Orange, D. (2017). Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics. New York: Routledge. Reviewed by Donald L. Carveth
In my review (Carveth, 2015) of Elizabeth Kolbert’s (2014) The Sixth Extinction, I wrote: “For Melanie Klein … in psychic reality ‘Mother Nature’ is exactly that: a projection of our first landscape, mother’s body. A sign of our evolution beyond the primitive, narcissistic universe of the paranoid-schizoid position is the emergence of depressive guilt for our attacks upon her and anxiety lest it be too late to make reparation. Kolbert’s book … certainly stimulated depressive guilt and anxiety in me. We must weep for what we are losing and have lost.”
In the work under review, philosopher and relational psychoanalyst Donna Orange applies the perspectives of relational psychoanalysis and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to the crisis brought on by ACD (anthropogenic climate disruption). In so doing, she contributes meaningfully to the sparse literature that brings psychoanalysis to bear on what, despite widespread denial, is an impending environmental catastrophe threatening both human and non-human life on this planet.
Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry: The Unconscious on the World Scene, William Meyers Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Reviewed by Burton Norman Seitler
An In Vivo Scientific Description of World Events
The twin presumptions that (1) what is currently happening on the world scene and (2) what has previously occurred historically cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny are without merit. Both of these allegations are spurious and were recently debunked by William Meyers in his groundbreaking book, Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry: The Unconscious on the World Scene.
To narrow the scope of my review of this book, I am focusing on the latter, common but incorrect, contention that an empirical analysis of psychohistory cannot be rendered using events of interest to and examined by the social sciences. Even if these suppositions were ever true previously (which I seriously doubt), now, with the advent of William Meyers’ book, we have a set of methodological approaches by which to consistently make sense out of a multitude of world events, past and present.