FALL 2019
Women’s Voices in Opera: a Psychohistorical Perspective on Three Arias, Ellen Toronto and Emily Wood Toronto
Abstract: Operatic characters and situations are passionate, larger than life, and yet highly relatable as part of the human condition. The object of this article will be a psychoanalytic exploration of three well-known operas—Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Verdi’s Rigoletto, and Bizet’s Carmen— whose narratives simultaneously oppress women even as the beautiful music expresses powerful, inspirational and subversive messages in the face of their oncoming deaths. …. In the operas we will be considering—Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia; Verdi’s Rigoletto and Bizet’s Carmen–we will focus on a common theme– the ways in which the culture attempts to control women’s sexuality. The women represent a spectrum ranging from purity to promiscuity and sexual power. From a psychoanalytic perspective however, it becomes apparent that they are victims of both the cultural standards of the times and the difficult environments in which they are living. They are attempting, through some of the most beautiful music ever written, to tell their story, attain some measure of power, and speak in behalf of human dignity for all. The characters in the three operas– Lucretia from The Rape of Lucretia; Maddalena from Rigoletto; and Carmen from Carmen are examples of women whose magnificent “sung deaths” transcend their “undoing” and allow them to emerge with authority, equality and power.
Hitler, Stalin, and Authoritarianism: A Comparative Analysis (Part 2), Mir Zohair Hussain and Scott Liebertz
Abstract: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin have both been the subjects of significant research. However, virtually no attempts have been made to compare and contrast them in light of recently developing social scientific notions of authoritarianism and authoritarian personalities. We analyze the lives of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, using these theories to analyze their relevant characteristics and policies. We do not enter into the debate about which theory of the authoritarian personality is superior, but merely seek to use important insights from each of these concepts to better understand our two subjects. In the second part of this essay, we will analyze and discuss these leaders’ early careers, rise to power, writings, economic policies, commonalities, differences, and legacies, concluding with a comparative chart that summarizes these aspects.
Introduction
In Part 1 of this article, which appeared in the previous issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, we discussed several major theories pertaining to authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality. Subsequently, we applied the theories to analyze and understand Hitler’s and Stalin’s family background, social class, religious faith, education, and relationships with peers, women, and children. In Part II, we will be moving beyond their families and personal backgrounds to analyze their early careers, rise to power, writings, economic policies, commonalities, differences, and legacies. Our paper concludes with a comparative chart that summarizes these aspects of Hitler and Stalin at a glance.
SATANISM AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: SOME HISTORICAL CASES, Gabriel Andrade and Maria Susana Campo Redondo
Abstract: Satanism has baffled many historians and cultural commentators. Who in their right mind would ever worship Satan, the representation of absolute evil? When in the 1980s, there was an alleged epidemic of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the United States, mental health professionals were pressured to approach this phenomenon from a clinical perspective.
In this article, we consider the way some diagnostic criteria laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), could (and could not) be applied to some historical and contemporary aspects of Satanism
KEY WORDS: SATANISM, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE, PSYCHIATRY
The Cunning of Thanatos: An Archeology of Consumerism Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Donald Mender
Abstract–This paper will endeavor to expose the intrinsic support that consumer capitalism, despite its conscious preoccupation with the pleasure principle, derives from unconscious machinations of the death instinct. Exploratory tools will include neural physics, psychological hermeneutics, critical and postmodern theory, and illustrations from popular media. A specific role played by psychoanalysis itself in enabling the consumptive cunning of thanatos through advertising’s “hidden persuasion”1 of consumers will be unpacked by a concluding look at the career of Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, a widely acknowledged “father” of Madison Avenue-style public relations.
Psychohistorical Perspective on Current and Past Events and Issues: Poetry
Disappeared, by Howard F. Stein
Mothers and young children / Severed from each other at the border / By a remorseless force / Of agents, whose only job / Is to protect the country’s / Vulnerable skin; ….
My Mother as Normandy, by Barbara Hyde Haber
My mother was the plateau and / steep cliffs that fell to the sea. / Wild flowers grew from her head, / blown by the breeze, / flattened by marine storms.….
On June 6, 1944 my mother / sang to the allied forces.
Boys jumped from landing barges. / Waist-high in water, hands overhead, / they gripped their rifles. / Though everything in them screamed, / “Turn back!” they slogged forward.
My mother’s rump became slippery with blood. / Heavy boots scrambled up her belly, / ….
Book Review Essays
One Man’s Escape from the Cage of Gender Expectations
The Man they Wanted Me to Be: Toxic masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making, Jared Yates Sexton, Counter point, Berkeley, California, 2019. Reviewed by Harriet Fraad
The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making is a treasure of psychohistorical analysis. It unites two phenomena. One is the male psychological trauma of fitting into the tight cage of traditional masculinity. Sexton explains how toxic masculinity creates an inevitable by-product which is rage engendered by emotional repression and shame at feelings labeled weak and unmanly. Another byproduct is the politics of Trump- supporting white men raging against the economic, political and gender transformations that have robbed them of their previously unquestioned economic, racial and gender supremacy. The power of patriarchal gender roles and emotional repression reverberates through every personal-political exploration of Sexton’s life. The book he writes is a psycho history of his personal political and intellectual struggle to be fully human.
The Making of the Modern Chinese Mind: An Early Psychoanalysis of a Literary Case of Female Narcissism
Feng Xiaoqing: A Study in Narcissism, Pan Guangdan, Crescent Moon Bookstore, Shanghai, 1929. Reviewed by Yanjun Jiang & Bo Wang
“Feng Xiaoqing: A Study of Narcissism”, authored by one of the most renowned sociologists, eugenicists, and ethnologists in China, Pan Guangdan (1899-1967, also known as Quentin Pan), was originally published in book form in 1927. It was based on a research assignment submitted in 1922 to Liang Qichao, a significant intellectual in China’s modern history.
Pan then took an MA under Charles Davenport (1866-1944) from Columbia University (Chung, 2010, p. 259) in 1926. Fei Xiaotong (or Fei Hsiao-Tung, 1910-2005), one of the founders of Chinese sociology and anthropology, was among Pan’s students.
Pan became fascinated with psychoanalysis as he encountered Sigmund Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis in around 1921 (Rocha, 2012). Appropriating psychoanalysis developed by Freud and Trigant Burrow (1875-1950) as a new conceptualizing and transforming tool, Pan reinterpreted the narcissism of an ancient Chinese woman Feng Xiaoqing (1595–1612) and thus engaged in the zeitgeist of the New Culture Movement of the mid 1910s and 1920s, namely modernizing the subjectivity of the Chinese people.