SUMMER 2019
The Past in the Present: Authoritarians Attaining, Holding, and Losing Power, Peter Petschauer
Abstract: It is no secret that authoritarians are being voted into, or are catapulting themselves into leadership positions around the globe. Some authoritarians are far from being dictators, others aspire to be in absolute control of every aspect of their societies, and some are already full-blown dictators. The main point of this essay is that these men, whether autocrats or tyrants, use similar techniques to attain and to retain power. ….
Authoritarians use many tools to assert themselves over others around them, be they family members, co-workers, subordinates, or fellow citizens. They exude confidence, suppress different opinions, oppress and sideline those whom they dislike, argue, manipulate, ridicule, use temper tantrums, induce fear, exploit the trust and confidence placed in them, and/or lie obsessively; in extreme cases, they ostracize, fire, imprison, torture, and murder. To look at these behaviors is part of the point of this essay.
Hitler, Stalin, and Authoritarianism A Comparative Analysis, Mir Husain & Scott Lieberetz
Abstract: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin have both been the subjects of significant research. However, virtually no attempts have been made to compare and contrast them in light of developing social scientific notions of authoritarianism and authoritarian personalities. We begin with a short overview of these different theories of authoritarianism. Then, we analyze the lives of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, using these theories to analyze their relevant characteristics and policies. We do not enter into the debate about which theory of the authoritarian personality is superior, but merely seek to use important insights from each of these concepts to better understand our two subjects. Our paper investigates their family background, social class, religious faith, education, and their relationships with peers, with women, and with children. In each of these we find evidence, to varying degrees, of the sources and manifestations of the authoritarianism that would come to define their legacies.
This is Part I of a two-part series on Hitler and Stalin. In Part II, which will appear in the next issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, we will discuss the leaders’ rise to power, writings, economic policies, commonalities, differences, and legacies.
The Enormous Price We Have Paid for Allowing the Explicitly Racist Policies of federal and Local Governments to Segregate America, Gilda Graff
Abstract: This article argues that the unconstitutional and racist policies of the federal government and of local governments have segregated housing throughout the United States and that the consequences of these policies have had an enduring negative effect, not just on African Americans, but on our whole society. African Americans have been excluded from most of the benefits of American social policy, yet they have been treated as if their lower resulting medium household wealth ($11,030 for African Americans compared to $134,230 for whites) is their own fault. In 1993 it was predicted that if housing segregation was permitted to continue, poverty, crime and drugs would become more widespread in the black community, and racial inequality would grow as would white fear and hostility toward blacks. Currently racial polarization has corrupted our politics so that interracial political alliances have become difficult to organize. Unless we make genuine efforts to end segregation, we cannot hope to move forward as a people and a nation.
“Secret Guilt by Silence Is Betrayed”1: Navigating Contradictory Narratives of Sexual Trauma and Symptom Formation in Freudian Theory and the Early Work of Karl Abraham, Marcia Anne Newton
Abstract: This paper addresses a pivotal moment in Freudian psychoanalytic history, 1905-1907, which marked an important shift from clinical narratives of sexual trauma that showed symptoms of hysteria and dementia praecox (commonly known today as schizophrenia) to sexual trauma being interpreted as symptom formation attached to infantile sexuality and neurosis. Karl Abraham, a young practicing psychiatrist at the time, observed a correlation between many patients who displayed symptoms of dementia praecox and those who provided clinical narratives of sexual assault. Within the space of two papers written in 1907, however, and with Freud as his new mentor, Abraham shifted from pursuing this line of inquiry to adopting Freud’s developing views on the link between sexual trauma, infantile sexuality, and neurosis. I suggest that Abraham’s first paper, which integrates elements of Freud’s seduction theory, actually serves to reveal Freud’s conflicted position on his seduction theory that he had allegedly renounced in 1897.
Review Essays
The Individual and the State: Who Is Responsible for the Nuclear Threat?
The Doomsday Machine,Daniel Ellsberg, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, Reviewed by Diana Birkett
I opened this book on the day in October 2018 that Donald Trump announced that he was planning to withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaties with the Soviet Union. Trump’s presidency may well have exacerbated what most people dread about nuclear war – the fear of the ‘madman pressing the button’ – but the thrust of Ellsberg’s argument is summed up in the epigraph from Nietzsche that opens the book: ‘Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule’.
The brief Prologue makes the deeply shocking revelation that, in 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had responded to President Kennedy’s question on the number of deaths that would result from a US first strike on the Soviet Union, its allies and China, with an estimate of 600 million deaths. This included the subsequent fallout over other countries as close as Western Europe, and as far away as Japan and India. Finland would be wiped out. Ellsberg saw this document, marked ‘For the President’s Eyes Only’ while working at the White House, because he had drafted the original question. ‘From that day on, I have had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of any such plan’ (p.3).
This dense and complex book, published 56 years later, is the result, and traces the extraordinary steps and fateful delays that have led to its belated publication.
Gaslighting
The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, Robin Stern, New York: Harmony Books, 2018, Reviewed by Ken Fuchsman
Gaslighting as a term had been around since the 1960s but came into vogue when Donald Trump announced for President. A gaslighter seeks to manipulate another or others into thinking that their own perceptions of reality are mistaken, and for the gaslightee to believe what the manipulator claims instead. It owes its origins to a 1938 British play, Gaslight, by Patrick Hamilton that in 1944 became an American movie. It starred Charles Boyer as a husband who deceives his wife, Ingrid Bergman, and manipulates her into thinking that she is mistaken about events and occurrences. He wants her to doubt her sanity as part of his desire to manipulate his spouse to get her inheritance. A police inspector played by Joseph Cotton suspects something foul and helps Ms. Bergman recover her self-belief and exposes the deceptions of her husband.
The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life has been revised and republished in 2018. It is essential reading in the Age of Trump.
Book Review
Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe (New York: Doubleday, 2019), reviewed by Dan Dervin
Anthropologists from the islands skirting Australia report a common experience. Friendly villagers warn the visitor against the dangerous inhabitants over the next hill: they’re bloodthirsty cannibals, etc. When the fieldworker ventures into that no-man’s-land, he is warned the villagers he had just left perpetrate identical brutalities. The pattern of projecting the bad stuff onto collective scapegoats is age-old and widespread. The “civilized” Cro-Magnons were probably wary of the “primitive” Neanderthals, though some did intermarry. The English translation of Native American peoples like the Cherokee is “the real people” in contrast to their “ancestral enemies,” as the cliff-dwelling “Anasazi” translates. The American Civil War split Johnny Rebs from Yankee-doodles, and in our Western frontier, the law-abiding ranchers were wary of the lawless cowboys (play it again, “Shane”). Today’s Israelis and Palestinians rub elbows but seem unable to overcome their perceived differences.