FALL 2023

GOP Fairytales for Children, Kenneth Alan Adams

ABSTRACT: Conservative stories for children are examined as propaganda in light of the religious and political priorities of the Republican Party and the poisonous pedagogy in conservative families.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CHILDREN AND CHILDCARE

Psychohistory is premised on the importance of children as the source of human progress, but they cannot rear themselves.  Their wellbeing depends on their parents’ or caretakers’ efforts to provide for their needs and on the values and norms prevalent in the cultural milieu in which they are reared.  They thrive on loving care and are traumatized by abuse.  For a better world, enlightened childcare and a supportive social environment are essential.  They provide the nurturance for children’s human potential to blossom.  Concern for the needs of children, however, has not been the norm in human history.  As deMause has observed,

The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused.^[i]

[i] Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 1.

America’s Oligarchy, Seth Allcorn

Abstract: American history and its contemporary social and political nature have been heavily influenced by American oligarchs and will continue to be for decades to come. These influences, many of which are detrimental, are not fully recognized or appreciated because the oligarchs use their extraordinary wealth to control and dominate liberal democratic societies by exploiting the inherent weakness of the freedoms that they provide their citizens. These influences are self-serving in terms of acquiring and protecting the extraordinary wealth of the oligarchs. Their exploitation of America to serve their interests includes controlling the narrative by owning mass media in service to “owning” politicians, political parties, and the judicial system. Under appreciated as well is that these ultra-wealthy oligarchs may have personal traits that enable them to ruthlessly pursue their aims feeling little concern for the damage that they do to their countries and the global community. Better understanding American and global oligarchy and the underlying psychosocial pathologies is essential if democracy and liberal values are not to be turned against themselves creating compromised democracies.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics: An Expanded Version, Richard Melito

Abstract:  Utilizing Shapiro’s (1965) analysis of the paranoid character style, this paper expands Hofstadter’s (1965) concept of the paranoid style at the social level to include not only suspiciousness and conspiracy thinking, but also assertions of an extreme form of freedom, both of which are exemplified in current socio-political phenomena.  The expanded concept is based on an underlying connection between conspiracy thinking and assertions of an extreme form of freedom that Berlin (1997) has termed “freedom from” and Bellah et al. (2002), “radical individualism”.    This paper also investigates, theoretically, the relationship between the paranoid character style and the expanded version of the paranoid social style in a way that does not reduce one to the other.

Is There an Instinctual Basis for War? — A Reply to Ludwig Janus, Brian D’Agostino

ABSTRACT: The phenomenon of war, according to Ludwig Janus (2023), arises from an interaction between male instincts and the psychology of trauma in various forms. This theory is inadequate and mistaken because it appropriates evidence from primatology in a one-sided manner and uncritically adopts notions from ethology and evolutionary psychology that are not consistent with the known diversity of forager societies, the limits of genetic explanations, and neuroscience findings on neocortical and behavioral plasticity.

Book Reiew

Quantum Psychoanalysis: Essays on Physics, Mind, and Analysis Today, Gerald J. Gargiulo (International Psychoanalytic Boos, 2016) – Reviewed by Christopher S. Rigling

Psychohistorical Perspective: Drama

Excerpt, “Séance at Berggasse 19″ (one-act)—”And You Would Not Be!”, Robert L. Lippman

Abstract: As per Sigmund Freud’s death-bed behest, a seance is held at Berggasse 19, fifty years to the day of his death. Comprising the cast are four psychoanalysts– an Italian, an Englishman, and two Americans, both Jewish, one the lone female—and Freud’s ghost, looking as a vigorous 45-year-old (instead of the cancer-ravaged shrunken 83-year-old when he lay dying in self-exile in London). In the following scene the four psychoanalysts ‘discover’ that Freud’s transference, in September 1901, to Michelangelo’s Moses led to the creation of the classical psychoanalytic technique.

Keywords: Freud, Jakob Freud, father complex, Michelangelo’s Moses, transference, psychoanalytic technique.

Pscyhohistorical Perspectives: Poetry

Life Unworthy of Life—A Reply, Howard F. Stein

Elevator Tango: False Assumptions, June Gould

Dystopia: An American Holocaust, Allan S. Mohl