FALL 2022

PSYCHOHISTORY, IDEOLOGY, AND UKRAINE: A Reply to Juhani Ihanus and David Beisel, Brian D’Agostino, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT:  Ideology can be defined as ideas that have the effect of legitimizing or delegitimizing power, especially in the political-economic arena.  U.S. and NATO policies towards Ukraine, for example, require such legitimation to keep taxpayers funding the current war.  Scholars may participate in legitimation, whether deliberately or unintentionally, by their choices of what they talk about and what they omit in a given context.  In this article, I critique the legitimation of American militarism, including articles by Juhani Ihanus and David Beisel that appear in the Spring 2022 issue of Clio’s Psyche.  By putting Vladimir Putin on the couch and omitting objective security threats to which the Russian leader apparently responded, these psychohistorians demonize Putin and implicitly exonerate the U.S. and NATO for their roles in the conflict, even if inadvertently.

Responses to D”Agostino

David Beisel: Brian Dagostino´s commentary is a welcome reminder of this caution since in their quest to get to the bottom of psychological motivation, the writings of some psychohistorians sometimes lose sight of historical contexts and the ways external events influence internal decisions.

Brian finds fault with what I and Juhani Ihanus have written on Putin on just these grounds.  His critique is well intentioned but bends too far in the other direction. Brian´s near-exclusive focus on externals ignores the internals. It produces an out-of-balance, one-sided essay that does the very thing Brian charges us with doing. but in reverse, ending up ignoring Putin and the war´s psychological dimensions.

Juhani Ihanus: At first, it was somewhat bewildering to notice that, according to Brian D’Agostino, my earlier article “unwittingly contributes to a bigger false narrative that demonizes Putin and implicitly exonerates the United States and NATO for their roles in the conflict” and that my focus on Putin’s personal psychological issues amounts to “psychohistorical reductionism.” After comparing our views, I reached non-reductionist reflections on the psychohistorical endeavor and its bases, also finding some common ground between my approach and the one sketched by D’Agostino. He seems to admit that there is “interaction between his [Putin’s] motivations and an objective security threat,” which I agree with, pinpointing that such “objective” threats go through the personal, cognitive-neural, emotional, and motivational filters of the leaders.

         I believe one of the crucial issues here is how to psychohistorically analyze the legitimations and justifications for war, considering “both sides,” both “objective” (military, political, and economic) “legitimate” interests as antecedents and highly “subjective” psychological developmental and motivational issues involved in the personally “justified” decision-making of those in power. Personal justifications lean on individual associations, transferences, memories, motives, and fantasies, but they are nurtured by legitimized, lawfully guarded ideologies, myths, symbols, and rituals as well as surrounded by collective traumas and unconscious group fantasies. D’Agostino gives a realpolitik, military, media, and academic context to US-NATO staging and provoking the Ukrainian hotspot and conflict to push forward the western interests—that I also called “values” in general.

CONCLUDING REPLY TO IHANUS AND BEISEL, Brian D’Agostino

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Psychoanalysis’ Troubled Encounter with Gay Men: How It Lost Its Way, and How It May Yet Find It, David Schwartz

Abstract: Using historical analysis, the author offers an understanding of the sources of the devaluing of gay men in psychoanalytic theory and practice.  He situates the contradiction of our disciplines’ theory and values that is inherent in the disparagement of male homosexuality in the larger context of the history of xenophobia in the United States.  This includes special attention to the negative contributions of Sandor Rado, among other mid-century psychoanalysts.  The author concludes by suggesting that the antidote to the development of such xenophobic trends in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is three-fold: 1) Thoroughly include the history of our discipline in training, 2) Always give consideration to relevant scientific findings in the development of psychoanalytic theory and psychotherapeutic practice and 3) Re-engage the tradition of social criticism as part of training.

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The history of the othering of gay men by psychoanalysis is different from its history with other minorities in at least one very important way.  Institutional psychoanalysis may have harmed people of color through acts of omission and exclusion, and some active racist writing.  But the devaluing of gay men by psychoanalysis was entirely active, self-conscious and extravagant.

Splitting in Individuals, Families and Groups as a Result of Transgenerational Legacies of Trauma and Guilt, Angela Moré

ABSTRACT: Splitting is one of the most elementary defense mechanisms of the human psyche. This mechanism kicks in when the psychological processing possibilities threaten to collapse due to excessive demands. It occurs naturally in early childhood development as well as later on in times of severe stress such as trauma. As Lifton’s work shows, this defense process is also activated in connection with the performance of cruelty and murderous acts. It then regularly combines with other defense mechanisms such as projective identification, denial, displacement, or identification with the aggressor. This text first describes the different mechanisms of trauma transmission. It then illustrates the psychological consequences of splitting processes and of transgenerationally inherited traumas and feelings of guilt using examples from the descendants of Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators.

KEYWORDS: Transgenerational trauma transmission; Holocaust; Trauma; Guilt feelings; Shame; Defense mechanisms; Second generation; Third generation

Hitler as a Narcissistic Leader, John M. Mankelwicz and Robert B. Kane

Abstract: Despite his infamous legacy, Adolf Hitler remains one of the most significant and well-studied figures of the last century, with well over 120,000 books and articles about him, and including his recorded speeches, writings, letters, memos, and directives, as well as anecdotes about him in publications about other Nazi figures. Yet, there remain tremendous gaps in our understanding of Hitler. This psychohistorical study partially addresses the gap and attempts to obtain a finer grained description of Hitler’s progressively narcissistic behaviors and their outcomes. It utilizes historical data, Grapsas’ episodic model of narcissist interactions (Grapsas, et. al., 2020), Williamson’s (1964) “managerial utility” function, and Chatterjee and Hambrick’s (2007) archival/unobtrusive measurement schema as an analytical framework. The authors, who are not clinicians, treat narcissism as a personality trait rather than a clinical diagnosis.

Emerging at the right historical moment with a popular message, Hitler relied on his natural oratory skills, studied impression management, and took personal control of party and government funds to facilitate his rise to power. Early successes provided further referent power. Hitler received little of what might be critical feedback from his in-group of unquestioning sycophants, and that little bit was apparently drowned out by the noise of his cult-like following. Rejecting inconvenient evidence, he narcissistically blamed others when failures occurred.

Keywords: narcissism, Hitler, psychohistory, leadership, personality

POETRY

Executive Logic, Howard F. Stein

A Shirt’s Tale      Howard F. Stein