WINTER 2020
Ideology, Bureaucracy, Hierarchy, and Human Nature in Psychohistory, Seth Allcorn and Howard F. Stein
Abstract: This paper contributes to psychohistory theory by addressing several key social/behavioral science concepts — ideology, ism, bureaucracy, hierarchy, and human nature. These concepts are often the core elements of academic disciplines. They co-exist in a specific relationship to each other, namely, a recurring historical spiral where repetitive cycles in society, culture, and history all too often lead to “making the same mistakes over and again”. The interactive nature of ideology, ism, bureaucracy, hierarchy, human nature helps to explain “why history repeats itself” in what may be thought of as a form of repetition driven by often undiscussable and out of awareness social dynamics.
Hurting for Solace: Internal State Terror, Self-Injury and the Soviet Union during the Interwar Period, Ilai Z. Saltzman
Abstract: While the study of internal state terror (IST) has grown dramatically, most of the work has ignored its psychological origins. This article utilizes the concept of Nonsuicidal Self-Injury (NSSI) to provide a psychological account of IST. Furthermore, the article addresses the symbiotic effect of domestic and international politics on the instigation of IST. To illustrate this psychologically- driven approach, the article uses Stalin’s IST during the interwar period.
I feel responsible, but not guilty!
~Emilio Massera
The Dilemmas of Psychohistory, Ken Fuchsman
Abstract: Psychohistory courses are not taught at any major American university. Prominent historians friendly towards psychoanalysis criticize psychohistory for not meeting scholarly standards. Few books with psychohistory in the title have been published in the last twenty years, and the field is no longer included in recognized specialties by the American Historical Association. Psychohistory faces daunt- ing epistemological challenges in integrating historical knowledge with findings from the various domains of psychology. To meet historical criteria of aggregating all relevant knowledge means psychohistory should include research from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, experimental psychology, and other psychologically related specialties. How to do so is a daunting challenge. This paper explores the complex dilemmas psychohistory faces and how to deal with them.
Psychohistorical Perspectives on Current and Past Events and Issues: Poetry
The Second Flood, Howard F. Stein
Signs, abundant signs, all unheeded,
Advance warnings by scientists of every stripe, Unlikeliest prophets with their vast granaries of data: Warming oceans, melting polar ice,
Methane released from thawing permafrost,
Dying coral reefs, perishing species,
Accelerated mining and burning petroleum and coal From insatiable humans and their Fossil-fuel-devouring machines.
….
Once, Joyce Jacobson
I stand tall now
in my own identity,
remember red rivers,
broken branches on thick trees,
women who taped their breasts flat, rapes no one cared about.
….
Book Review Essays
Nature, and State of the Art in Childcare, Dan Dervin
Act Natural; A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting, Jennifer Traig (New York: HarperCollins, 2019).
To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
So, at the outset, we’re tripped up by language. Is acting natural equivalent to being natural? Or are the two modifiers in opposition? If a situation prompts us to act natural, wouldn’t that entail acting a part? Then if “all the world’s a stage” and we’re “merely players” as the Bard beat Oscar to the punch, where do we ground our reality? Jennifer Traig incidentally credits Shakespeare with “a play on words”: stage, both as theatre and “phase of life” (p. 158). In any case, Being/Acting natural encompasses our sense of a subsisting self-identity along with the often perplexing roles we don on our developing inner stages and surround.
But no avoiding it, the usages of Natural have an equivocal history. Variously associated with the objective, the organic, the true, the simple, the pure, the perfect, it connects superiority to legitimacy. In my super-market’s produce area, I can pay a bit more for organic bananas, as opposed to, say, plastic ones? No; organic distinguishes those species being spared herbicides and other chemical contaminants. Our spraying preserves our harvest but putrefies Nature’s Eden of purity; on the other hand, its allegedly primal condition falls easy prey to opportunistic marketing where we’re apt to slip on the huckster’s banana-peel bait. Consider the pluses and minuses in the faddish Paleo diet’s proposal for a return to foods free from modern preservatives; some of the advocates would go further and avoid cultivated legumes and insist on raw foods over the cooked—for purists,….
Paul Elovitz on the History of Psychohistory: A Review, Ken Fuchsman
The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors, Paul Elovitz, New York: Routledge, 2018, 138 pp.
Paul Elovitz has written the first book that is a history of psychohistory. For several reasons, he is in a unique position to do so. Dr. Elovitz is the founder and editor of the psychohistorical journal, Clio’s Psyche, a publication that regularly conducts Featured Scholar Interviews. From 1994 to the present, Elovitz has personally interviewed many of the leading psychohistorians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The International Psychohistorical Association held its first conference in 1978. Paul Elovitz is the only person who has both attended and presented a paper at every conference. He has held many offices in that organization, including that of President. Professor Elovitz is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Psychohistory, the other still existing scholarly psychohistory publication. In 1982, the Psychohistory Forum was established by Elovitz and is still ongoing, it holds seminars in Manhattan where scholars discuss psychohistorical works in progress.
One of the sub-fields of psychohistory is psychobiography; Elovitz is a scholar in this area. Since 1976, he has written psychobiographical profiles of American Presidential candidates in almost every such election cycle. For more than forty years he has been a first-hand witness to much of the history of psychohistory and personally knows well, many of the most important scholars in this interdisciplinary study.
He has another qualification that few others have. There is hardly more than a handful of psychohistorians who have been formally trained in both history and psychoanalysis. Paul Elovitz has a doctorate in history from Rutgers, and has trained and practiced as a psychoanalyst. ….
….
One of the remarkable features of the book is how the author illustrates the history of the field by profiling six distinguished psychohistorians: Peter Gay, Peter Loewenberg, Robert J. Lifton, Vamik Volkan, Rudolph Binion, and Lloyd deMause. The two Peter’s held academic positions in prominent his- tory departments and were formally trained in psychoanalysis. Lifton and Volkan are psychiatrists, Binion was Professor of History at Brandeis, and deMause was instrumental in the founding of both the International Psychohistorical Association and The Journal of Psychohistory. All those profiled in the book were interviewed as Featured Scholars in Clio’s Psyche. These portraits are a mixture of the scholarly accomplishments of each of them, and Elovitz’s reflections on his experiences with some of them. He interacted frequently with both DeMause and Binion, is very friendly with Loewenberg, has known Lifton for over four decades, and interviewed Gay and Volkan.
Book Review
The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction, James Marten. First edition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press 2018, Reviewed by Philipp Reisner
As the founding member of the Society for the History of Children and Youth (2001-) and editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (2008–), James Marten offers this short introductory volume as a kind of summary of the concerns and preoccupations in this field (xix). He makes clear in his introduction that the lives of children “reveal important and sometimes uncomfortable truths about civilization” (1). The history of childhood as a relatively young field of study thus addresses broader societal concerns. Referring to the construction of the notion of childhood, Marten astutely points to the limitations of age as a category and raises important questions about the reasons and motives for its centrality in early education and the Western world at large (4). Rejecting Philippe Ariès’s idea that there is no premodern conception of childhood, Marten approaches the topic in five chapters: “Traditions,” “Revolutions,” “The rise of ‘modern’ childhoods,” “Creating a worldview of childhood,” and “The century of the child and beyond.”
The first chapter on traditions offers a selective survey, starting with Confucian concepts of childhood, childhood in prehistory, and childhood outside the ancient West (7–11). This comprehensive approach is characteristic of the aim of childhood studies more generally, namely, to point to areas neglected by more adult-focused and Western-centered historical accounts.