SPRING 2020
Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Origins, Nina Cerfolio
Abstract: Using a psychoanalytic lens, this paper explores the cycles of violence and the deeper human aggressive and destructive instincts underlying terrorism. Muslim humiliation and the subsequent desire for retribution against America and its allies is one of the driving forces of war-generated terrorism. The author’s first-hand community outreach during the Second Chechen war to provide medical and psychological support to Chechens, both stranded in Grozny and scattered throughout the North Caucasus, provided a glimpse into this Muslim sense of oppression and shame as a result of war with the more powerful Russian army. Both the Tsarnaev brothers (the Boston Marathon bombers) and Mohammad Atta (the 9/11 pilot and ringleader) identified as Muslim, and their desire for violent retribution may have been motivated by a sense of marginalization and isolation. The ability to hate can provide a distorted sense of object constancy to terrorists who have suffered narcissistic injury severe enough to threaten their sense of survival. The Tsarnaevs and Atta may have unconsciously sought radicalization as an ideological, sacred object to effect an environmental transformation that they deceived themselves into believing would deliver personal, familial, social and moral change
SENTIENCE IN CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN POLITICS, Seth Allcorn
Abstract: Conservatism is, according to conservative thought leaders, based on sometimes consistent and many times inconsistent and conflicting ideological perspectives. This may be attributed to Adam Smith’s perspective of moral sentiments, where he asserts that the foundation of conservatism is based on shared feelings and sentiments, and this basis in sentience may account for the changing and conflicting basis of conservative thought. Exploring these sentiments leads to considering Wilfred Bion’s sentience based basic assumption groups – fight or flight, dependency and pairing. These groups and their underlying theoretical foundations contribute to understanding not only conservative ideologies but also liberals’ systems of beliefs.
The last half of the second decade of the twenty-first century offers those trying to understand and appreciate the American political scene a vast banquet of dynamics that are being explored from a plethora of perspectives only limited by the imagination of historians, political analysts and mental health professionals. There is, attendant to this appreciation, a humbling awareness that contributing yet one more perspective, one I suggest that is under appreciated, sets a high bar for this author. It is my intention to make it over this self-imposed bar by introducing the notion of sentience as an under-appreciated but important way to understand contemporary American politics.
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This article focuses primarily on understanding conservatism and its values, positions and ideologies to the exclusion of an equivalent consideration of liberalism due to the limitation of what can be accomplished in one article. Comments and insights are, however, provided in the conclusion as to how sentience groups apply equally well to left leaning liberal values and beliefs.
Historical Perspectives on the 9/11 Conspiracy Movement, Charles B. Strozier
Abstract: This article traces the rise of the 9/11 conspiracy movement that took shape at first mostly outside of the United States but then caught the rapt attention of a surprisingly large number of Americans in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. There were many strands in the movement, but the most remarkable dimension of those drawn to the conspiracy is that they were progressive intellectuals. That differentiated the 9/11 conspiracy movement from the more familiar conspiracies in American history that tend to be populist, racist, and often carry a paranoid edge. The article contextualizes the 9/11 conspiracy movement in that history. It also traces the detailed history of the conspiracy from its rise to its more bizarre forms after about 2008 and notes how it helped pave the way for what has been called the recent “new conspiracism.” There are general psychohistorical reflections on the nature of conspiracy in the American self—that enduring sense of continuity, shared values and meaningful structure at the group level—and the relationship between the 9/11 conspiracy and the pervasive forms of paranoia in the Trump era.
Construction of Post-Revolutionary Utopias in 19th Century France, Brigitte Demeure
Abstract: At the beginning of the 19th Century, the industrial Revolution exposed French society to major new and unprecedented turmoil. The first socialist and utopian doctrines emerged in this context. The utopians aspired to construct and experiment with a new ideal society. That time was creative ideologically. I have chosen to discuss the first project for a communist society which was described by Etienne Cabet in his novel “Travels in Icaria”. But it seems important to me to focus on the historical and ideological context, and to recall the historical and ideological sources which Cabet used, before addressing the novel’s legacy and its interpretation in the light of the work of certain psychoanalysts.
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….The French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu uses his long years of experience with groups to advance certain hypotheses. For what interests me here, he believes that human subjects go into groups the same way they enter into dreams in their sleep. According to Anzieu, the group is a dream. The imaginary realization of dreamed desire is a group imagined as a fabulous place – a utopia – where all desires would be satisfied. It is the dream of a society exclusively governed by the pleasure principle, of a collective life where the primary processes would act in pure state. Anzieu observes in groups and dreams the same regressions, including the chronological regression to primary narcissism, and also the structural regression: the ego and the superego lose in favor of the id and the ideal ego. It was on the basis of these findings that Didier Anzieu developed the notion of “group illusion”.
Book Review Essay
Institutional Discrimination and Enactment in Child Welfare, Denis J. O’Keefe
When the Welfare People Come: Race and Class in the US Child Protection System,Don Lash, (Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois, 2017).
Social consciousness of institutional forms of discrimination has become popular again in American academic culture. The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have helped spark renewed interests in the social policy field of the latent processes that allow well intentioned individuals to unwittingly partake in the creation and maintenance of institutional bias and aggression. The U.S. child welfare system, being a tremendous network of bureaucratized institutions, provides a pristine example of such enactments with a stated purpose of providing for the welfare of children, yet a damning history of overt neglect, abuse, child deaths, systemic racial/ethnic and socio-economic bias and a modern, but longstanding foster care to prison pipeline. What remains largely unanswered in child welfare research has to do with the underlying motivations and processes that continually sabotage reform efforts from realizing their stated purposes in practice. This being a psychohistorical inquiry at its core places the implicit and explicit functions in direct opposition. Such a perspective may provide a glimpse into how child welfare has continued to produce the torture and sacrifice of children and in the survivors, the production of personalities capable of destructive acts and involvement in violent crime.
Psychohistorical Perspectives: Poetry
Body Language, Howard Stein
The photograph seized me;
My frozen eyes could only stare at it –
A man’s outstretched, brown-skinned
Arm, reached as far as it could
Upward toward the side of
An old yellow bus, door now closed,
Bursting with people from El Salvador,
Honduras, and Guatemala,
Fleeing vigilante militias,
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YELLOW HALO, Willa Schneberg
Bloomingdale Asylum, New York, 1846
I plead, and they answer crooked, especially
Superintendent Pliny Earle. I birth curiosities so unique
and wondrous that they belong in the Peale Museum
next to fossilized mastodon teeth and the prong-horned antelope.