SPRING 2024 VOL 51 #4

SPRING 2024

To the readers of The Journal of Psychohistory,

Starting with this issue we will be 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 the seven chapters of the book serially — in consecutive issues of the journal.

Book Excerpt

The World and the Self in Early Twentieth-Century Literature, Jay Y. Gonen

Chapter 1: From the Age of Reason to the Age of Uncertainty

The interaction of the self with the world is traditionally reflected in literature. The literary works that will be explored in this study belong to the first half of the twentieth century. They all differ from the narrative style of most novels of the nineteenth century. In his classroom lectures, my teacher Baruch Kurzweil kept reiterating that the most important change that took place was the shift of focus from the subject of society to the inner life of the protagonists. Society still counted, but in twentieth-century novels, readers could learn about it not from direct descriptions by the authors, but only from the way society was experienced by the protagonists. At this point we should add that, with this narrowing of the focus on the individual, personal identity became the exploratory target of the modern novel. In consequence of this, the literary use of memory in the individual’s search for identity received a quantum jump. Henceforward, memory played an indispensable role in the psychological hunt for lost components of one’s identity. What is more, the growing literary resort to memory had an impact on the time dimension. As we shall see with the protagonists of Thomas Wolfe and Virginia Woolf in the course of their identity quest, the contiguity of times tended to assert itself while the importance of chronology receded. The self is, after all, a mosaic of related contents that are integrated and preserved in accordance with their relevance to one’s identity. And in the attempt to discover, reconstruct, and put together this rich mosaic, the important issue for each added component is what happened rather than when it happened. In other words, the reconstruction of the whole need not follow the chronological order of the parts. 

These basic changes in the art of the novel did not happen by chance. They reflected deep psychocultural undercurrents that came to the fore during the early part of the twentieth century….

Articles

Russia’s War Against Ukraine—Large Group Dynamics and the Effects of Transgenerational Influences, Angela Moré

ABSTRACT: Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, was met with disbelief in the West. A war in the center of Europe was no longer considered possible by many. Yet Russia’s aggression against Ukraine had be- gun eight years earlier. The fading out of imperial behavior of other former Soviet republics requires its own explanation. This article focuses primarily on historical events that were reflected in the Russian and Ukrainian large group matrix that had an impact on the emergence and course of this armed conflict. In doing so, the author draws on Vamik Volkan’s findings on the significance of chosen traumas and glories in collective memory, as well as on Earl Hopper’s fourth basic assumption about the consequences of unprocessed traumas in the unconscious life of small and large groups.

KEYWORDS: Large group matrix; Group dynamics; Chosen traumas; Chosen glories; Traumatization; Transgenerational transmission

Bridging Existential-Relational Positions to Theistic and a-Theistic
Perspectives in Search of Kindness, Richard E. Webb & Philip J. Rosenbaum

ABSTRACT: In an effort to better understand our world, which is so challenged to find kind recognition of otherness, we look at the “not much” and “yet much” epistemological differences between Judeo-Christian-Islamic theists and agnostic, post-modernists. We propose that such theists devolve into particularism or inclusivism, and that agnostics correspondingly devolve into positive or negative atheism. We propose that these stances align with either a paranoid-schizoid or a depressive level existential-relational position in psychological development. We hope that articulation of this helps locate us all in our ongoing challenge to engage respectfully both the otherness of others and the otherness we have to our own selves.

KEYWORDS: atheism, agnosticism, particularism, inclusivism, existential develop- mental positions

Why 21st Century Psychiatry is Decadent and Depraved, Robert M. Kaplan

Abstract: After 150 years of careful progress, despite setbacks along the way, psychiatry is in a state of crisis. This can be attributed to huge acceptance of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM), which has changed the practice of psychiatry. Its iterations have added large numbers of new conditions that are being used to medicalize normal life, notably in poorly defined and now over-treated conditions like PTSD, autism, and ADHD. The DSM produces new conditions by committee decisions, ignoring the careful observation of cases over long periods that characterized psychiatry in the past. This has been a bonanza for pharmaceutical companies producing drugs of dubious benefit. It is difficult to see a solution to the situation until someone emerges to change the existing paradigm.

Psychohistorical Perspectives: Poetry

The Haunted Hayfield, Howard F. Stein

Then and Now, Howard F. Stein