WINTER 2016
The South Has Risen Again: Thoughts on the Tea Party and the Recent Rise of Right-Wing Racism, David Lotto
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the significance of racism in fueling the recent rise of the Tea Party and related Right-Wing political groups and activity. It briefly explores some of the history of racism in this country that has been directed toward African Americans and how it has influenced political developments from Colonial times to the present. It suggests that this racist resurgence can be seen, in part, as a re-enactment of the trauma of the Civil War by the descendants, and those who identify with them, who were on the losing side of that conflict.
Psychohistory and Family Among Antebellum Slaveholders, Kenneth Alan Adams
ABSTRACT: This article examines the macroscopic reasons for maternal rage and its injection into slaveholder children in the antebellum South. It is argued that the misogyny that infected antebellum life metastasized in southern mistresses and affected the way they felt about themselves and their children. As mothers, they were casual parents, concerned with molding the character of their charges, rearing warriors and proper ladies, but uninterested in caring for them and helping them realize their own aspirations. It is argued that the misanthropic rage that they injected into their children constituted the poison that each generation of slaveholders had to ventilate into poison containers, slaves, as a homeostatic means of psycho-emotional survival. This intergenerational process of poison injection—from father to mother, from mother to child, from child to slave, constituted the process that insured the perpetuation of the psychic structure necessary for the continuation of slavery from generation to generation.
Transformations in Emotional Structures throughout History, Ludwig Janus
ABSTRACT: Today, in my view, we can on the basis of the psychohistorical research understand the dynamic line of historical processes, and in particular the process of the development of our modern way of viewing the world. I try to describe in this development by bringing together European and American psychohistorical research. A deeper understanding of the psychic and social dimensions of historical development can be a resource for political action. In the global world it is important to both manage the mutual dealings between diverse cultural regions and support constructive interactions. This is only possible when the internal dynamics and the individual characteristics of the cultural developments in the regions can be taken into account. At the present stage of discussion, which talks of a “clash of cultures” and ultimately ends in military intervention, it is blatantly obvious that every potential for understanding and dealing relevantly with each other, should be exploited as provided for by the contributions of psychohistory.
Britain’s Bastard Child: Preface and Introduction, Helene Lewis
The following is the preface to and the introductory chapter of a soon to be published book about the history of South Africa and the origins of Apartheid. The book is titled: Britain’s Bastard Child. The author is Psychologist and Psychohistorian Helene Lewis who has been doing research for the book for the last fifteen years. The book seeks to understand the psychohistorical factors, which influenced the thinking and behavior of the European settlers who emigrated to South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries and came to be known as Afrikaners. The intergenerational transmission and re-enactment of trauma are seen as the pathway that led from the trauma induced by the Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century to the establishment of Apartheid.
The Journal of Psychohistory plans to publish several more chapters of the book in the next several issues.
PREFACE: What does trauma do to a people? What is the effect of, not decades, but centuries, of humiliation? What compelled the Afrikaner, a people traumatized by British barbarism, to inflict the legalized racism of Apartheid on their fellow black South Africans? With this question in mind, I was inspired to research Afrikaners’ 300-year historical journey.
My conclusion, and the central theme of this book, is how the humiliation Afrikaners experienced, starting with the arrival of the British in 1795, compounded by unprocessed grief for the losses suffered in the Anglo-Boer Wars (1881 and 1899-1902) – led to a fierce nationalism and a re-enactment of their trauma, in the institution of apartheid. My aim is not to justify apartheid, but to shed light on the historical events and psychological impact that informed its origination. One hopes this may help not only Afrikaners but also other groups and nations to reflect on their own painful experiences and learn from it.
Looking at my own past, I find it difficult to pinpoint where my awareness of this humiliation by the British, and more recently by white English-speaking South Africans, came into being. Growing up on a farm in northern Namibia, meeting English-speaking people was a rarity. Most white Namibians were Afrikaners and Germans, and there was no animosity between us. In school we learned English. Of course, our teachers thought us hopeless at English pronunciation and grammar, and drilled us constantly on our conjugations. But I grew up blissfully unaware of English prejudice towards us, and can recall only one childhood incident, when I was eleven years old, when my father referred to die blêrrie Engelse (the bloody English). I recall being shocked. The only English person I knew then was the magistrate’s daughter, a dear friend. So I simply decided that my father was weird – an opinion which, given the authoritarian patriarch that he was, I kept to myself.
Remarks on Latency: onset in different cultures, M. Leticia Castrechini-Franieck
ABSTRACT: The features of cultural identity in latency-age children along with the influences of cultural values, transmitted via the family, are the central focus of this essay. In this context, the understanding of how development can appear to bifurcate along a continuum of “individualist” versus “collectivist” cultures can be perceived in what Andreas-Salome referred to as the “dual orientation of narcissism”. This essay also discusses the impact of immigration and the adaptation of the individual in a foreign country.
Book Review Essay: The Whats and Whys of Modern Romance, by Harriet Freud, Harriet Fraad
Modern Romance, Aziz Ansari with Eric Klinenberg, New York: Penguin Press. 2015
Modern Romance is funny informative romp over the steep hills of modern dating. Aziz Ansari is a well-known comedian. He wrote Modern Romance in collaboration with Eric Klinenberg, a well-known sociologist. The book covers romance in the US. It touches on romance in Paris, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and Doha as well. Its primary emphasis is on the US. Its secondary emphasis is on dating in Japan.
Ansari reports on what is happening without analyzing why it happens. Modern Romance makes little mention of the impact of class in the transformations of intimate romantic life. There is also no mention of the impact of changing romantic and sexual practices on the lives of children and the transformations of family life. The psychogenic pump is foreign territory. However, both the class differentiations in and the metamorphoses of family life are radically different depending on the class positions of the Americans on whom the book focuses.
I will begin by sharing some of the accomplishments of Modern Romance. I will follow by discussing what is left out. Ansari shows the huge impact of the Internet on romantic life in every nation he covers. The net introduces a huge range of available men and women viewed with a tap of a finger. He explains that in the 1950s and earlier people married others in their same apartment building, their same block, or their same neighborhood. Friends and family introduced them. Marriages happened when people were in their early to mid twenties. Marriage was a next step into adulthood. Taking that step meant meeting someone that you and your family deemed suitable and settling down.