SPRING 2023

A Journey into the Heart of Darkness:  Psychosocial Insights into Predatory Behavior, Seth Allcorn and Carrie M. Duncan

ABSTRACT: Understanding toxic and destructive social and organizational dynamics is both essential and challenging.  There is a tendency in societies and in organizations to “depersonalize” toxic leadership because people prefer to focus on group and organizational dynamics.  This avoids the distressing reality that some individuals are dysfunctional and toxic toward others.  Focusing on group and organizational dynamics overlooks the “elephant in the room” when a leader, a person in a powerful position, is a predator and harmful to others, the organization, and the larger society.  Psychopaths, sociopaths, and malignant narcissists — often enabled by organizational and social structures — wreak havoc in organizations, societies, and in the interpersonal world. In this article we do not look away from this distressing reality and instead focus on a triangulation of psychopathic, sociopathic, and malignant narcissistic personality features that offers insights into predatory behavior and how organizational and social dynamics enable it.

Key Words: Psychosocial, organizations organizational dynamics, psychopathy, predatory leader-follower relations, heart of darkness, leader toxicity

ZAWAHIRI AND BIN LADEN’S EVANGELISTIC LEGACY: ISIS and Al Qaeda’s Magnetism for Arab and Muslim Youths, Peter A. Olsson

ABSTRACT: Why do many young Arab, Muslim, and even Americans continue to become entranced with Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s Pied Piper theological music of radical Muslim Jihad? It is a serious mistake to label and glibly dismiss deceased men like Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as simply dead mass murderers, psychotics, thugs, psychopaths, or criminals. For American leaders to imply that Al Qaeda or ISIS are defeated because their leaders are killed is like saying Christianity died when Jesus Christ was crucified.

THE SUICIDAL EMBRACE REVISITED, David Beisel 

 ABSTRACT: This paper examines the findings of the book The Suicidal Embrace twenty years after its original publication.  The paper´s goal is to establish the relevance of the book´s findings for today and to look at how those findings may be used as a model for understanding international and domestic policies in the present.  Primarily a study of the unconscious irrational forces driving the international diplomacy of the 1930s, the book´s additional aim was to offer readers an introduction to the several types of psychohistory being practiced at the time.  Massive documentation proved the existence of a group fantasy, which envisioned the European ¨family of nations¨ as a real family writ large.  The policies of the powers were acted out in the context of this family system, the powers projecting issues from their own dysfunctional families onto the blank screen of European foreign affairs.  This paper then goes on to explore examples of similar acting out in current US politics and international relations, including the Trump phenomenon and the war in Ukraine.  Several references in the text cite secondary sources where clusters of quoted primary documents support the paper´s arguments.

RELIGION AND DEATH A CENTURY LATER, Brian D’Agostino and Dorothea Leicher

ABSTRACT: About a hundred years ago, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud penned influential writings on the nature of religion and how the religious imagination construes death. This article assesses the current relevance of their ideas in light of experimental psychology, neuroscience, and psychohistory research in recent decades. Topics include Terror Management Theory; the psychology of fundamentalism; Jungian archetypes as emergent outcomes of nature-nurture interaction; and the continued relevance of archetypes for understanding the psychology, history, and sociology of religion. We then subsume these disparate topics into a unified and evidence-based perspective on religion and death, and conclude with clinical and social implications.

Psychohistory: Definitions and Standards, Ken Fuchsman   

ABSTRACT: Psychohistory has long contained contested conceptions. This extends to definitions of the field. This paper provides three such accounts by editors of psychohistory journals. It then explores some of the central issues these overlapping and contrasting definitions raise about psychology, psychoanalysis, history, and psychohistory.

These accounts are by the former editor of the now defunct Psychohistory Review, historian and psychoanalyst Charles Strozier, the present editor of the Journal of Psychohistory, psychoanalyst David Lotto, and historian and psychoanalyst Paul Elovitz, who founded and edits Clio’s Psyche.

Keywords: The Best of Clio’s Psyche, Descartes, definitions-of-psychohistory, history, Ken Fuchsman, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, unconscious-and-conscious-motivations 

PSYCHOHISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: POETRY

Refugee Kitchen, June Gould

Beyond Local Knowledge, June Gould

My Fall leaves and the Wind, Howard F. Stein