SUMMER 2018
Donald Trump: Empty Vessel and Sum of All Projections, Seth Allcorn and Howard Stein
ABSTRACT: Most attempts to understand and explain Donald Trump have focused on his personal characteristics and traits. In this paper we explore the crucial role of Trump’s followers in the creation and sustaining of Donald Trump. The mirroring process between leader and followers is discussed, and the role of projective and introjective identification in this dynamic is examined. The critical role of Fox News in intensifying this mirroring and group polarization is portrayed. Finally, we explore the dynamics of the triangulation of Trump, Fox News, and Trump’s followers.
INTRODUCTION: The election of 2016 yielded an unexpected outcome with Donald Trump as the new leader of the most powerful nation on earth. This election of a leader who is a ruthless and self-serving executive (Buettner & Baglijune, 2016), and a reality TV star of a program in which he was the focal point, has led to a predictable chaotic outcome. Considerable efforts to understand the leader from a psychodynamic perspective have emerged. Diagnostic questions have been posed: e.g., does he have some combination of personality disorders such as narcissistic, antisocial, paranoid, or some other clinical label such as sociopath (Lee, 2017)? In this paper, we do not wish to plow this fertile ground further, but look instead to understand those who elected him to fulfill their fantasy of “draining the swamp,” Making America Great Again, and the leader’s relationship to his loyal followers.
Queen’s Great Pretender: A Psychohistorical Sketch of Freddie Mercury, Paul J.P. Fouche, Dewald A. Louw, Pravani Naidoo & Roelf van Niekerk
ABSTRACT: Freddie Mercury (1946—1991), a legend in the entertainment industry and vocalist of the band Queen, was renowned for his stage persona and expression of his sexuality. On stage he was a “great pretender”, entertaining fans to compensate for his own sense of mistrust, inferiority, role confusion and need for love. This icon continues to intrigue admirers across the globe. The aim of this study is to reconstruct the Eriksonian psychosocial development of Mercury in a socio-cultural context. A psychohistorical sketch of his life was created through publicly available primary and secondary archival information. Six historical periods were identified in Mercury’s life-span, and salient developmental themes were extracted for analysis by utilizing Alexander’s model of saliency and a psychosocial-historical conceptualization. Findings indicate that Mercury’s sense of mistrust, inferiority, and role confusion resulted in the formation of a compensatory persona as a “great pretender.”
Keywords: Freddie Mercury, Farrokh Bulsara, Queen, Erikson, psychosocial personality development, psychobiography.
Solace in Music: A Narrative Reflecting Lingering Traces of Community Trauma, Susan Goldberg
ABSTRACT: Through this article I seek to understand my mother’s melancholic inner life as it influenced me. I use a qualitative methodology integrating several methods, including eulogy, psychobiography, and autoethnography. I conclude that both my mother and I, despite our privilege, reflect the lingering traces of community trauma of Jewish suffering over generations. For my mother, music, and particularly opera, provided solace to unresolved pain and inexpressible ancient trauma.
INTRODUCTION: Music is the silence between the notes. —Claude Debussy (2001, p. 96)
METHODOLOGY: After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. —Aldous Huxley (1960) I have created an integration of methods in this piece of qualitative inquiry. It is a form of psychological autoethnography. The methods incorporated into this article are eulogy, psychobiography, and autoethnography. I set out to write a psychobiography of my mother, deconstructing her life, but during the drafting I realized it is equally autoethnography, as it reflects my perspectives on how both of our lives were affected by the lingering traces of trauma in a privileged Jewish post-war community. Autoethnography is not as concerned with facts as with the “truth” of emotional reverberations (Denshire, 2013). It is a method that is in “an intermediate space we can’t quite define yet, a borderland between passion and intellect, analysis and subjectivity, ethnography and autobiography, art and life” (Behar, 1996, p. 174). This work is halfway on the continuum between evocative and analytic autoethnography (Wall, 2016).
Roman Polanski’s Chinatown in Its Time and Ours, Ken Fuchsman
ABSTRACT: Chinatown is a 1974 film noir movie that debuted in the Watergate era, and reflects the darkness and disillusionment of that period. Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes a private detective who specializes in catching spouses committing adultery. A major motif of the movie is that Gittes is actually an innocent when it comes to human evil. John Huston as Noah Cross is the embodiment of political and personal corruption. Cross is Gittes’ foil. Chinatown embodies that things may be even more dire than they seem. It is part of the disillusionment phase that characterizes the end of American liberal periods.
In 1938, Bertolt Brecht wrote: Truly I live in dark times!…. What kind of times are these….All roads led into the mire in my time. (Brecht, 2003, 70).
It was not as ominous in 1974 when the film Chinatown opened as when Brecht wrote, but politically in America it was quite dark. The United States was at the tail end of a cycle of liberalism and radicalism. Civil rights activism and student radicalism had ascended in the 1960s, but later fragmented and dissipated. The grand hopes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech were partially fulfilled, but then stalled. Opposition to the Vietnam war had galvanized many, but after 1970, the anti-war movement diminished. As the sixties turned into the seventies, for many liberals and radicals hope turned into disillusionment, some stayed the course, others turned from political activism to personal fulfillment, and some ended up adhering to the values they had opposed. In 1972, an anti-radical President Nixon won a landslide re-election over an anti-war Democrat. This election was further evidence that the heyday of this cycle of liberalism and radicalism had passed. But Nixon’s triumph was short lived.
Book Review Essay
Social Activism and Identity Formation in Late Adolescence and Early Adulthood, James B. McCarthy
Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force Of The New Deal Federal Writers’ Project, Susan Rubenstein DeMasi, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016
ABSTRACT: As an outgrowth of the influence of psychoanalytic psychology on the methodology of literary biography, the interplay between one’s internal psychological world and the influence of historical forces has become a mainstay of scholarly inquiry. This biographical examination of the relatively forgotten American writer, diplomat, Zionist and social justice activist, Henry G. Alsberg (1881- 1970) offers inspiring insight into the psychological atmosphere of the Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Federal Writers’ Project. From the perspective of psychoanalytic developmental theory, it strikingly illustrates Erikson’s view that mature identity consolidation requires self-reflection and integrating a commitment to personal values with an exploration of the impact of sociocultural conditions.