SPRING 2022
The Group-Fantasy Origins of Segregation and the Superman, or How I Got into Harvard, Class of 1965, Kenneth Alan Adams
ABSTRACT: The personal is political. Psychohistory contends that social life is founded on sacrifice, which group-fantasies rationalize and justify. This article uses the author’s admittance to Harvard in the early sixties to illustrate how sacrifice formed the foundation of opportunity allocation and social stratification in the segregated South. Individuals or groups targeted for sacrifice function as poison containers for the split-off emotions of the privileged, i.e., White males who tout patriarchal prerogatives and racial superiority as justification. The group-fantasy of White supremacy empowers the group-fantasy of miscegenation. The talents and contributions of African Americans were sacrificed for the elevation of White male interests, and the group-fantasy of miscegenation rationalized and justified the sacrifice.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …”
THE IMPORTANCE OF GROUP-FANTASIES
Group-fantasies matter. Our vision of ourselves is embodied in our aspirational dreams, such as our commitment to equality, even as we acknowledge that such aims have been more honored in the breach than the observance. Like nothing in over a century, the past five years have demonstrated the fragility of American democracy and the importance of We the People as author and director of the collectivity’s efforts toward a more perfect union….
Surrender Without Defeat: The Cultural Psychodynamics
of Non-Recognition, Seth Allcorn and Howard F. Stein
ABSTRACT: This paper explores a specific form of group loss and unconscious responses to it. Defeat in war and the absence of formal and unconditional surrender can lead to profound dysfunction psychosocial outcomes. Our “case example” is the ambiguous conclusion to the Civil War in the U.S. (1865), in which surrender by Confederate generals was a serial process lacking a formal conclusion to hostilities. We explore how this sense of incompleteness left sufficient mental space for Southern whites to think and believe that their defeat did not constitute surrender and that the (white) South could therefore “rise again,” restoring its former glory.
Vamik Volkan’s framework of “chosen traumas” provides for retroactively revers- ing historical events to restore a defeated group’s “chosen glory.” The historical and psychopolitical legacy of this wished-for rewriting of history is explored through to the present and the Age of Trump. The recent emergence of white supremacy and grievance and the rise of overt and violent racism against blacks including renewed restrictions on voting rights is such an example where there is a reversing of history to restore the former glory of the South that was defeated but did not surrender.
The article concludes by situating the case study in widespread, if not universal, culture and history, as an expression of unconscious psychosocial dynamics in response to traumatic loss when defeat on the battlefield is not accompanied by formal and unconditional surrender creating a clear time boundary—before and after.
Capitalism and its Discontents, David Lotto
ABSTRACT: This paper is about trying to use a psychohistorical and psychoanalytic perspective to understand how and why we have gotten to the point where the world we live in is governed by our current economic system of free market capitalism. It seeks to explain how this economic and political reality has come to be and what might account for how entrenched it has become. It emphasizes the motivational strength of what has become an ideology of the free market which conflates economic with political freedom.
Pharaohs, Philosophers, and Freud—Tracing Bias in Modern Correlates
of Hysteria, Tyler Durns
ABSTRACT: ‘Hysteria’ is a historical term that encompasses several modern-day neuropsychiatric conditions. The chronicle of this illness is fraught with prejudice from the time of its inception through subsequent adaptations. Relics of cultural misconceptions have been carried forward into contemporary correlates of the illness. The consequences of these follies in present-day are best understood through a detailed account of prevailing cultural norms at the time of their inception. The saga of hysteria serves as a reminder that social pressures and misogyny can and do continue to impact care. Furthermore, better understanding the history of hysteria may suggest a need for diagnostic reconsideration and inform better practices today.
KEYWORDS: functional neurologic disorder, history, hysteria, personality disorder, somatic symptom disorder
BOOK REVIEW ESSAY
Psychoanalytic Responses to the Holocaust, Ken Fuchsman
Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich, by Emily A. Kuriloff. New York and London: Routledge, 2014.*
In her book, New York psychoanalyst Emily Kuriloff juxtaposes two top- ics, the Nazi Holocaust and the ways that refugee Jewish psychoanalysts and their descendants have dealt with this traumatic horror. Her reasons
for being drawn to this subject are both personal and professional. She is “a Jewish child in a family of survivor-emigres” (p. xiii).
Kuriloff writes, “I grew up with the past in the present.” In her family in the 1960s, “the dinner table talk was as much about Nazi collaborators, leftist heroes, and family members I had never met” as about the contemporary struggles over civil rights or the Vietnam War. Much later, after becoming “an interpersonal psychoanalyst,” Kuriloff wondered how displaced European psychoanalysts responded to their own traumas, and what impact “their personal histories have upon their theoretical and clinical work.” She surprisingly found that at least initially “the catastrophe of the Shoah” did not “appear in the written record of psychoanalysis” (p. xiii). Kuriloff writes that the “post-war metapsychology” amongst psychoanalysts “privileged intrapsychic conflict over traumatic loss” (p. 155). This emphasis on the internal emotional life over the influence of external reality initially kept the Holocaust at bay in many psychoanalytic publications.
Kuriloff’s methods of investigating the legacy of the Third Reich within psychoanalysis follows multiple tracks….
* All quotes are from this work unless otherwise specified.
BOOK REVIEW
Genres of the Imagination: Essays by David Beisel and Irene Javors. Circumstantial Productions, West Nyack, New York, 2021, Reviewed by Michael Britton
I find this well written volume to be a rich and profound treasure, all the more amazing because it has so much packed into so few pages. The words introducing the book, and the only words to appear on its back cover, are Duke Ellington’s: “You’ve got to find a way to say it without saying it.” And so it is with this book. The authors have found ways to openly say a great deal, and to say still more, the most important thing, without explicitly saying it. The book is all the more powerful for this.
What the book does say is organized into three sections, with an essay each by David and Irene, first on (film) Noir, each recounting one film and then plunging into the historical contexts that gave rise to it (post-war Europe in one, post-war America in the other); the second on Jazz, some- thing of the history and nature of this art form, its historical unfolding with who did what, why and how it turned out; and a final section, Riff, reflect- ing and elaborating on the prior essays and taking the discussion in more personal directions. Their writing is powerfully evocative of historical situations, particular individuals, their labors, struggles, defeats and their transcendence: To read this is to be taken many places in the way only good historians who are also good writers can take us.
That is an outline of what in this book is said by saying it. But those sections and their essays are also a vehicle for saying something more without explicitly saying it. In its deeper organization, this book is a drama, each of its three sections serving as acts in the drama, setting its terms and building towards its completely unexpected and powerful conclusion.
POETRY
Signs*, by Howard F. Stein
On a four-lane road in town I drive west toward home.
I approach a road sign
On the right: “Work Area Ahead.”
Soon another instruction: “Right lane closed ahead.” Shortly thereafter, as
All traffic slows down,
“Merge to the left, single lane.” Then, “Two lane traffic ahead.”
I do not drive for long
In single file
Before a huge construction site Emerges on the right.
….
….
….
* Poet’s Note: What the poem means to me.On the surface, it is a mundane account of being stuck in traffic because of construction ahead. As it proceeds, it becomes surreal, and at least to me, calls to conscious thought many horrific historical/psychohistorical moments and ages of groups’ dead ends in history, Western and beyond, in which ethnic, racial, nationality, tribal, religious, etc., peoples suddenly found themselves trapped in space and time and had nowhere to go. Sometimes, often, they were killed.
Masks and Eyes, Howard F. Stein
Faces bifurcated
By two plagues entwined, COVID-19 and the Age of Trump—
Lower parts of the face Covered by polyethylene Or cellulose medical grade, Now KN95, thanks
To Omicron mutation— Even high fashion cloth; Face masks, that ….
….