SUMMER 2020
Climate Change: Your Money or Your Life, Kenneth Alan Adams
Abstract: This article sketches the outlines of the catastrophic eco-future that awaits us unless extraordinary measures are taken to limit carbon emissions. It argues that fossil fuel interests block progress toward solving the problem of climate change and suggests the massive resistance to a carbon-free future that corporate interests will mount, which may include armed conflict. The issue of hyper-consumption is another crucial component of the climate problem. American consumption habits have been engineered to meet the recurrent problem of a capitalistic economy, overproduction, and a variety of initiatives have been devised to resolve this dilemma, including planned obsolescence and massive advertising. Contemporary consumer capitalism, it is argued, is premised on infantilization, a deliberate effort to utilize human development as a weapon against citizens, turning consumers into kids and kids into consumers, as the inchoate boundarilessness of early human development becomes the regressive basis for ensnaring the populace in endlessly varied inducements to consume. The primary goal of infantilization is hyper-consumption, which utilizes advertising as propaganda favoring the continuation of the capitalistic status quo. Advertising creates group-fantasies as the basis for consumption, the primary one being that consumer choice offers the avenue to a better life. In so doing, the obligations of a shared social world are ignored and a privatized existence is privileged. The market thus trumps democracy. With regard to climate change, it is suggested that we are at a tipping point. The road to the future will be paved, one way or another, with sacrifice. Either consumers will sacrifice the choices, aspirations, and lifestyles that have been assiduously cultivated in them for decades, or millions will be forced to sacrifice their lives. The article closes with an effort to contextualize the role of psychohistory and a call for psychohistorians to practice advocacy research.
Cultures of Grievance: Creating Polarization from Chosen Traumas, Seth Allcorn
Abstract: Understanding the consistently high approval rating for President Trump among his followers is the subject of much speculation. This article takes up the challenge by reviewing the work of two authors who explore the nature of the red states cultures of grievance that have been so successfully exploited by Trump. He speaks for them and in doing so exploits their sense of being an aggrieved group that has suffered at the hands of the liberal elite. The voice this gives is documented by these authors of books on Kansas and Louisiana. The sense of grievance is then further explored from the perspective of revisionist historical social traumas being resurfaced, recast and used to mobilize the Republican voter base.
Responses
Human Nature in Psychohistory Revisited
Beyond Hierarchy: A response to Allcorn and Stein: Brian D’Agostino
Abstract: The prevailing paradigm in organizational research neglects the role of unconscious dynamics in organizations. Allcorn’s and Stein’s critique of this literature, appearing in the Winter 2020 issue of this journal, corrects this omission. The authors then attribute hierarchical organizational structures to “human nature,” which adds no explanatory power to their analysis and entails two fallacies. This review essay builds upon the authors’ description of organizational dysfunction while offering an alternative analysis of fundamental causes. Topics include family origins of authoritarianism, the evolution of capitalism, workplace democracy, parenting education, and collaborative schooling.
Keywords: authoritarianism, bureaucracy, capitalism, hierarchy, human nature, parenting education, worker cooperatives, workplace democracy, school reform.
Hierarchy, History, Culture, and Being Human: A Response to D’Agostino by Howard F. Stein and Seth Allcorn
We wish to thank Dr. D’Agostino for taking much time and effort to pen a thoughtful review essay to our paper. Our response here will focus on what we see as the central arguments in his critique. He argues that our essay rests on two logical fallacies:
(1) a form of reductionism (a term which he does not use, but implies) in which a constant is invoked to explain variation, in particular, variation in organizational structures over time and culture, thus the necessity of co-variance of causes and different effects; and
(2) an indulgence in circular reasoning which attributes an effect to a cause, as a result of which the explanation and what it is to be explained are identical (i.e., that human nature accounts for human nature). He then utilizes the evolution of child-rearing model of Lloyd deMause and others to account for the variations in societal and organizational forms.
Dr. D’Agostino concludes that our arguments are ultimately less than adequate as theory, and that what we mistake as explanations are perspectives that remain to be explained – by approaches and a model he offers in their stead.
We begin by acknowledging the enormous contribution of deMause to understanding cultural and historical variation, but as a partial theory, and not an overarching theory that explains everything. Specifically, one of deMause’s signal contributions to understanding the role of unconscious forces….
A FURTHER REPLY TO ALLCORN AND STEIN, Brian D’Agostino
I agree with most of what Seth Allcorn and Howard Stein say in their response to my critical review essay, but don’t see how it really addresses the two fallacies that I attributed to their analysis. Regarding the first fallacy—invoking a constant factor to explain variable effects—they say that they are not fundamentally concerned about variation, but rather about recurring and invariant patterns. Regarding the second fallacy—circular reasoning—they cite psychodynamically informed research on the origins of the will to dominate, as I will call it for lack of a better term. To see why neither of these responses adequately engage the fallacies I indicated, let us begin with an excerpt that summarizes the authors’ position:
In our paper, however, we suggest there are underlying similarities if not an identity between disparate forms of social organizational and production, even though on the surface they appear to be different. The underlying organizing dynamics of bands of hunter-gathers, agricultural villages filled with craftspeople (cottage industry), and vast corporate- and state-operated modern-day industries are, from a depth perspective, much more alike than they are different.
….
Book Review Essay
The Prince Who Could Have Been King? A Psychological Profile of John F. Kennedy, Jr., Joseph G. Ponterotto
America’s Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr., Steven M. Gillon, New York, NY: Dutton, 2019.
Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short,William D. Cohan, New York, NY: Flatiron Books, 2019.
The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation – – A Legacy of Tragedy and Triumph., J. Randy Taraborrelli. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
Abstract: This Book Essay reviews three new books on the life of John F. Kennedy, Jr. (JFK Jr.) (1960-1999) within the context of the author’s long-standing psychobiographical research on JFK Jr. All three books were published in 2019, marking the 20th anniversary of the deaths of JFK Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her older sister Lauren Bessette, in a tragic plane crash off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts on July 16, 1999. The books reviewed are: America’s Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr., by professor and political historian, Dr. Steven M. Gillon; Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short, by investigative journalist, William D. Cohan; and The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation – – A Legacy of Tragedy and Triumph, by popular Kennedy biographer, J. Randy Taraborrelli. The essay highlights the strengths and unique contributions of each book in advancing the historical and psychological record on JFK Jr., and it offers an updated psychobiographical sketch of a young man with great promise whose future was unknown.
Footnote to Review Essay
Erik H. Erikson Meets John F. Kennedy, Jr: An Historical Footnote, Joseph P. Ponterotto
Abstract: this article reviews the historic meetings between Erik Erikson and John F. Kennedy, Jr. (JFK Jr.) in the mid-1960s, sometime after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Limited but accumulated evidence indicates that Jacqueline Kennedy did consult with Erikson over concern for her children’s grief and behavior after their father’s murder. Erikson worked directly with JFK Jr., and likely Caroline Kennedy, for at least two sessions at Erikson’s Cotuit, Massachusetts house, and at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Integrating first-second- and third-person documents, inclusive of a personal letter written by Erikson, and conversations with Erikson’s daughter, Sue Bloland Erikson, this article recreates the context and circumstances of the encounter. That one of the 20th century’s most famed analysts worked with one of the 20th century’s most iconic personalities and beloved Kennedy, is, indeed, a historical footnote worthy of the psychohistory archives.