SPRING 2018
A Fateful convergence: Animosity Toward Obamacare, Hatred of Obama, the Rise of Donald Trump, and Overt Racism in America, Howard F. Stein and Seth Allcorn
ABSTRACT: In this paper the authors, long-time collaborators, attempt to weave into a single narrative the many strands of the organizational, cultural, political, and historical story that account for the relentless effort by Republicans and the right to repeal and destroy the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We link this persistent battle to (1) the widespread race-based hatred of President Obama, (2) the 2009 Republican Party vow to obstruct all Obama legislation, (3) the rise of Donald Trump and his feelings of humiliation by President Obama, and (4) the emergence of open racism in America. We employ the image of a three-legged stool to understand the emergence and consolidation of this movement. In doing so, we uncover the personal, political, and cultural narrative behind relentless and irrational determination to rid the US of Obamacare.
The co-authors of this paper, who have been friends and collaborators for thirty years and have over 70 years of experience in academic medicine, have followed this same sequence in our exploration of various subjects. It began with the downsizing of a hospital, continued with deregulation of home loans and the banking industry, and most recently led us to explore the American saga of President Donald Trump. This exploration starts with a conventional understanding of this political, organizational, and cultural phenomenon. We then inquire into this understanding further and more deeply through psychodynamic and historical lenses, permitting us to offer an interpretation and explanation of the phenomenon that differs from the generally understood socially acceptable, even obligatory, version of the story. That is, to return to Paul Harvey’s newscasts, we would offer “. . . the rest of the story,” or at least a much more thoroughly researched version of the story that includes psychodynamic depth.
Lynching, Sacrifice, and Childrearing in the New South, Kenneth Alan Adams
ABSTRACT: This article examines the virulent white racism that energized terroristic lynching in the New South in the early decades of the 20th century. It looks at types of lynching and the extent of lynching by state and considers lynching as poison containment, purity crusade and human sacrifice. The article traces the developmental origins of lynching to punitive childrearing practices in the South, arguing that corporal punishment, fueled by Christian teachings, led to the formation in southern childhoods of toxic social alters, which were restaged in adulthood as persecutor alters during the social trance of lynching. Lynching helped unite a class-riven society. White southerners could come together by acting out their childhood rage at terrifying mommies against the socially-designated evil other of adulthood—African Americans.
Spatial Imagination Not for All: The Case of African Americans, Elyes Hanafi
ABSTRACT: Spatial imagination is a signifier of racial privilege in the US. Just as not all communities are treated equally in the US, not all communities can afford the privilege of constructively exercising and developing their innate faculty of (spatial) imagination for their own welfare. Taking African Americans as a case in point, this paper attempts to corroborate the idea that spatial imagination has not been accessible to all members of society on equal terms. The paper reflects on contemporary theories of the imagination in psychology which construe it as a faculty that is closely interlinked with, and very much dependent on, other properties such as free choice, autonomy, creativity and intelligence. For the most part, African Americans’ acquisition of such properties has either been unrecognized or inhibited, the imagination included. The paper also reviews discussions of such concepts as sense of place/place attachment, currently popular in environmental psychology and deemed crucial for the establishment of a certain level of bond with the space one occupies. Again, a significant portion of African Americans have been disassociated from this kind of affect by virtue of the deep correlation of the space given to them with the legacies of transatlantic slavery and segregation.
Key words: spatial imagination; African Americans; denied; psychology; the Black Diaspora
From Chimney Sweeping to Dual Alliances: How the Law of Reception Begot Mutual Analysis, Sharon R. Kahn
Abstract: The evolution of psychoanalysis, from chimney sweeping to mutual analysis, mirrors the evolution within Hungary of increasing religious tolerance and equality during the 19th century. By 1895, the law of reception declared Judaism a sanctioned religion in Hungary. Within five years, most Hungarian doctors were Jews. One was Sandor Ferenczi. Tolerance informed his practice of psychoanalysis. Freudian analysis spun chimney sweeping from a patient-informed practice into an authoritarian one, limned by oedipal conflict. Ferenczi’s two children therapy, by contrast, reflected his weltanschauung of tolerance and, restored psychoanalysis to its chimney sweeping roots, a collaboration with vulnerable partners who must cooperate with each other to thrive. A mutual therapy demands the therapist ally with patients to tolerate explorations; an oedipal therapy demands the therapists separate from the patient and conquer the patient’s neurosis. This paper will relate the evolution of psychoanalysis to the respective statuses of Austria to Hungary and then link these to both Freud and Ferenczi’s unique perspective on praxis.
BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS
The Flawed Political-Psychology of Populist Social Movements, Carl Ratner
Ngwane, T., Sinwell, L., & Ness, I. (2017) Urban Revolt: State Power And The Rise Of People’s Movements In The Global South. Chicago, Haymarket Books.
This book is about contemporary populist political movements for social change. It is not directly about psychology, however, the populism that is espoused is based upon a social-political philosophy that has strong psychological elements. A major political-psychological construct of contemporary populism is that individual and social fulfillment/emancipation consists of individuals – singly and in groups — freely deciding how to act. The essence is this “agentive freedom” to decide and choose. The essence is the freedom to choose whatever one (individual or group) decides. This is why democracy is a cornerstone of populism. Democracy is a decision- making process where every individual is an agency who has a voice. Democracy is indifferent to the content of what is decided. What is important is that agency/voice chooses, and speaks to express its creative, distinctive, individuality. That is what inclusiveness and diversity denote: everyone’s choice/expression shall be encouraged, included, accepted, and validated, regardless of what they think/do/look like.
This is an individual, subjective orientation. Subjective individualism is a psychological orientation about the nature of individual freedom, action, and fulfillment. (It is also an ontology about how reality is formed – by individual wishes.) This is the psychological-social-political kernel of contemporary populism.
Talking in Words and Images as a Psychohistoric Method, Howard F. Stein
Sandra Indig. Talking Colors: Seeing Words/Hearing Images. New York: MindMend Publishing, 2016. 61 pp.
The book under review pairs poems and color paintings by the author, Sandra Indig, the poem on the left face and the painting on the right face. Most of the poem/painting pairs were composed at the same time. A few were painted and written years apart, and only recently did the author/artist/poet link them emotionally and thematically as drawing from the same deep well, and then arrange them on pages of a book. The result is the experience behind the title of the book: talking colors, seeing words, hearing images. The entire work is informed by Indig’s rootedness in ritual, ancient texts, identity, history, Jewish culture, and Torah study. It evokes the “story of a life told through images associated with words and words associated with images” (MindMend Publishing flyer).
Indig draws from and weaves seamlessly together art, poetry, psychoanalysis, and dance. In her preface, she writes: “Words/Images are places to which one goes to live or to die again and again. They are personal attempts to concretize the meaning of exploratory, unspoken thought. Words/Images, like gestures in dance, unlock associations, connections, and transform the way it was to the way it will be. They create the us-to-be.” (p. 3) Their subject is life and about renewing ourselves. Indig’s intermodal approach is both creative and refreshing.
BOOK REVIEW
James M. Skelly, The Sarcophagus of Identity: Tribalism, Nationalism, and the Transcendence of the Self. Ibidem Press, Stuttgart, 2017. https://cup.columbia edu/book/the-sarcophagus-of-identity/978383821038
Reviewed by David Lotto
James Skelly, is a sociologist, peace activist, educator, scholar, ethicist, and long time member of the Wellfleet psychohistory group started by Erik Erickson and Robert Lifton in 1966.
The book he has written is an exploration of identity, both as a personal account of the author’s journey through his evolving identity, and a rich and scholarly meditation on certain aspects of identity, particularly the destructive consequences that can and have followed from the politics of identity – chiefly, the many forms of violence inflicted on people in the name of some large group identity.
Several psychohistorians, most notably Vamik Volkan, for example in his book Killing in the Name of Identity, have addressed the issue of the psychological motives and structures that are implicated in the violence and destruction of war, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.
As its title implies, Skelly sees identity as something that can be constricting and limiting, often imposed from the outside. In his words:
The basic thesis of this monograph is that having an ‘identity’ appears to solve the most fundamental existential problem – who we are, and to an extent, the corollary problem of why we are on this planet. But the consequence of this impoverished ‘solution’ is that we not only kill in the name of identity, but that we are imprisoned within the identity from the moment of birth by others far more powerful, until we at least tacitly agree to become our own jail keepers while besotted with the illusion of our freedom. (p. 25-26)
Skelly uses Daniel Ellsberg as an example of rejecting one’s identity, who, as a member of a circle of high-level government employees who facilitate government policy, in this case, conducting the war against the Vietnamese, to take on a new identity as a whistleblower, a truth teller; one who values democracy. Ellsberg came to believe that for democracy to work the people of this country needed to know the truth about what its government was doing so that they could make informed choices about what policies to support or disavow. Ellsberg has been quite vocal with his praise for both Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, both of whom made the same ethical choice that he did; but going public to make the American people aware of some of the things their government was doing in their name, was more important than obeying the law and upholding their oaths to keep the government’s dirty secrets – to keep hidden information about what violence and violations of privacy our armed forces and intelligence agencies were committing in the service of carrying out their missions in the Global War on Terror. For Ellsberg, the most serious rupture and casting off his former identity was not that he expressed antiwar sentiments, but that he was disloyal to the group to whom he belonged.