To the readers of The Journal of Psychohistory,
Starting with the Spring 2024 Issue of the Journal of Psycyhohistory, we began publishing Jay Gonen’s manuscript of his fifth and final book, written before he died in 2022 at the age of 88, titled The World and the Self in Early 20th Century Literature. We will be publishing all seven chapters of the book serially — in consecutive issues of the journal. In this issue we will be publishing Chapter 3 (Part1).
Book Excerpt
The World and the Self in Early Twentieth-Century Literature, Jay Y. Gonen
Chapter 3: André Gide: Opposing the Self and Opposing Society (Part 1)
Two of André Gide’s stories, The Immoralist and Lafcadio’s Adventures, deal with diverse cases of radical psychological transformations. Fairly suddenly, the characters deviate from their past ways and plunge into revolutionary new courses. The deviations typically annul either the past standards of conduct of the individual self or the prevailing standards of society. In one case the protagonist, Michel the immoralist, did both. The sharp turns from old ways to new ways, practically reverting from one thing to its opposite, lend themselves alternate interpretations. The psychological metamorphosis can signify a conversion experience, a psychological rebirth, a finding of the true self or, alternatively, launching the great revolt against society and the political establishment.
….
Experiencing intensely, one’s own existence, occupies a cardinal place in the life of Michel, who is the protagonist in André Gide’s story, “The Immoralist.” It is a story about a radical psychological transformation that pitted the individual hero against his own past standards as well as against society at large.
Articles
America’s Past and Future: 2025 Win or Lose, Seth Allcorn
ABSTRACT: I find myself being resident in an ahistorical Orwellian and movie-like ground hog day repetitive cycle of bearing witness to the American political scene. This addendum revisits, consistent with this cycle, my earlier paper on sentience groups. “Sentience In Contemporary Conservative American Politics” that was published in this Journal in 2020. It made the argument that sentience groups exist in many forms where the bonds are of an emotional nature but can become rationalized by formulating them into ideological perspectives (backward engineering). This sociopolitical dynamic provides a basis for acting on these shared emotions where, for example, MAGA paranoid leaders see that there are enemies everywhere that must be defended against by constructing boundaries, barriers, and walls to maintain their sentience bonds and their group’s “purity.” The accompanying fears and threats have become the basis for these shared social bonds that create a binary polarized societal distribution. Now in 2024 the binary political landscape is one that is hard to believe. It is filled with hard to imagine metaphoric rabbit holes that lead to what are hard to imagine possibilities within the MAGA sentience world—not dissimilar to the failures to imagine that are said to have led to 9/11 (Allcorn, 2024).
Turning Point: When, How, and Why Killing Civilians in War Surpassed Military Fatalities, Ken Fuchsman
ABSTRACT: World War II saw enormous changes in human life: nuclear weapons, genocide, and when the majority of those killed were non-combatants. How and why slaughtering civilians became an intentional aim of war is the story told here. It is a tale of advanced weapons, airplanes with extraordinary capabilities, and the mindset that targeting non-combatants in cities become a legitimate military activity. What these new weapons of war says about human beings is also discussed.
Behaviorism and the Shaping of the American Mind (Part 2), Marc-André Cotton
ABSTRACT: Historically founded on animal experimentation, behaviorism made withdrawal of parental attention—or ‘time-out’—one of the instruments of its Parent Management Training programs. However, the question of the effectiveness, or even harmfulness of this measure is still being debated. The aim of this second article is to examine the possible side-effects of ‘time-out’ for children’s psycho-affective balance, and the evolution of its social acceptability.
Keywords: ‘time-out’, emotional regulation, developmental psychology, adverse childhood experiences, traumatic reactivation, ostracism.
Loving Lacan: The Story of an Intellectual Guru Whose Gnomic Utterances Took the Term Intellectual Terrorist to New Levels, Robert M. Kaplan
ABSTRACT: Jacques Lacan set himself up as a new school of psychoanalysis, positing a ‘return to Freud.” To do so, he divorced himself from the official psychoanalytic body, setting up not one but two schools to continue his work. He went to extreme lengths to distance himself from his bourgeois origins, totally ignoring conventional morality as much as boundary restrictions with his patients, becoming enormously rich in the process.
As he went on, becoming a Parisian intellectual cult figure, his thinking became increasingly obscure and difficult to follow, something he glorified in. Eventually he descended into an incomprehensible morass of concepts, attempting to define human behavior in inept mathematical formulae and, finally, with Borromean topology. The most intriguing aspect of his work is the near-fanatic enthusiasm of his followers, who refuse to see any faults in his incomprehensible ideas or his often appalling personal behavior.
Lacan joins the line of charismatic doctors who, throughout history, have beguiled their followers as a near-magical figure, going on to create catastrophe at every level, not least for their patients, in order to maintain their dominance.
Book Review
Visual Culture in Freud’s Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination, Mary Bergstein (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Reviewed by Maya Balakirsky
Mary Bergstein’s much-awaited volume Visual Culture in Freud’s Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination presents a smorgasbord of visual materials and texts that circulated in Vienna circa 1900. She draws from the photographic archive connected to the birth of modernism that began with the Vienna Secession in 1897 and the new art (Jugenstil) first introduced in the field of photography and graphic design, women’s fashions, the photographic record of the unwrapping of mummies, laced-up shoes, and domestic objects so central to the world in which early Freudian psychoanalysis took shape….
Psychohistorical Perspectives: Poetry
Simple Math, Howard F. Stein
In second grade arithmetic class,
I learned simple addition:
Two plus two always equaled four— Two apples, two bananas, two violins, Two anything.
What counted most
Was the abstraction, the idea— Valid anytime, anywhere.
Nearing my eighth decade, ….