To the readers of The Journal of Psychohistory,
Starting with the Spring 2024 Issue of the Journal of Psycyhohistory, we began publishing Jay Gonen’s manuscript of his fifth and final book, written before he died in 2022 at the age of 88, titled The World and the Self in Early 20th Century Literature. We will be publishing all seven chapters of the book serially — in consecutive issues of the journal. In this issue we will be publishing Chapter 3 (Part2).
Book Excerpt
The World and the Self in Early Twentieth-Century Literature, Jay Y. Gonen
Chapter 3: André Gide: Opposing the Self and Opposing Society (Part 2)
Two of André Gide’s stories, The Immoralist and Lafcadio’s Adventures, deal with diverse cases of radical psychological transformations. Fairly suddenly, the characters deviate from their past ways and plunge into revolutionary new courses. The deviations typically annul either the past standards of conduct of the individual self or the prevailing standards of society. In one case the protagonist, Michel the immoralist, did both. The sharp turns from old ways to new ways, practically reverting from one thing to its opposite, lend themselves alternate interpretations. The psychological metamorphosis can signify a conversion experience, a psychological rebirth, a finding of the true self or, alternatively, launching the great revolt against society and the political establishment.
The artistic gimmick of incredible chance encounters, as it is employed in Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures, is typical of the comic tradition including the sotie. Members of the audience, or readers, understand full well that the probability of such meetings happening by chance is very low. They know that such meetings are purposely introduced by the author in order to expose ironic contrasts between one type of character and that of another, between someone who thinks and someone who acts, between what one person knows yet another does not, and last but not least, the glaring contrast between “action” in mere fantasy when compared to action in real life. Julius was enthralled with his imaginative idea of committing “a crime that has no motive either of passion or need!” The influence of a rather simplified version of the Nietzschean conception of “the will to power” is fairly apparent here. The gratuitous act, devoid of any ulterior motives served as the purest expression of a totally free will. Yet Julius’ Nietzschean bravado dissipated when he was confronted with a real-life murder where both victim and perpetrator belonged to his own family….Fearing for his own skin, he veered in an anti-Nietzschean direction and took flight back into good old religion….
Articles
History Near: Reliving Bearing Witness to an Atrocity, Seth Allcorn and Howard F. Stein
ABSTRACT: The article uses a psychosocial perspective to explore the underlying nature of the lived experience of bearing witness to historical events. Identification with the subjects of these events being studied is accompanied by empathy and by defensive psychodynamics such as projection and transference. This research project revisits an example of a past traumatic bearing of witness to an organizational atrocity and of what can be learned from embracing the risk of being retraumatized. We ask: What sense can be made of psychohistorians revisiting contemporarily experienced history, not only from an imagined detached distance, but also from a subjective experience-near, less than safe distance that may lead to relying on psychological defenses that distort the work of psychohistorians? More broadly, this paper contributes to psychohistorical methods in that bearing witness can be considered to be a specific form of observation, one grounded in the researcher’s psycho- social self-awareness.
INTRODUCTION: BEARING WITNESS IN TPSYCHOHISTORICAL RESEARCH AND WRITING
This paper poses a basic research question: What do psychohistorians and members of related fields do? They observe, listen, read, interview, interpret, and attempt to explain the world beyond them, in addition to trying to understand their own experience and the evoked emotions that may range from empathy to disgust. These tasks are associated with bear- ing witness to their own and their “subject matter’s” lived experience—people, events, atrocities, wars, and leadership. This includes the psychosocial dimensions of day-to-day psychohistorical practice that are rarely discussed or explored as a core element of the work. We will explore the meaning of bearing witness to history “near” that may include distorting defensive researcher projection and transference.
Father Disillusionment in Courageous Women— Two Perspectives, Susan Kavaler-Adler and Ken Fuchsman
Father Disillusionment in Three Courageous Women who Influence Art and Political Health: Psychodynamic and Psycho-Historical Implications, Susan Kavaler-Adler
Cassidy Hutchinson has shown herself to be a modern-day heroine. She spoke truth in the face of malicious attempts to control her testimony to the January 6th Committee, which investigated the Trump led insurrection against the transition of power to the duly elected President, Joseph Biden. On the way to her truth telling Ms. Hutchinson had to deal with the grief of painful disillusionment, both with the failings of her own father, and with the ever-increasing egregious failings of Donald Trump. She was humiliated by her father, when he emotionally attacked her, rather than supporting her, when she was subpoenaed to testify to the January 6th committee….Disillusionment with fathers and father figures is a common experience for many women. It pervades the psycho-historical context in which women live.
Parallel themes are seen in the stories of the well-known British writer, Charlotte Brontë, and of the prima ballerina of the Balanchine New York City Ballet, Suzanne Farrell. Charlotte Brontë writes about father-figure disillusionment in her novels, along with her reparative engagement with these father-figures (Jane Eyre and Villette). In her own history, taken from several biographical accounts, one reads of a woman who stood up to a narcissistic father, fighting for her literary and personal independence, in the face of her father’s threats to control her and to prevent her from entering a mature marriage. Her father needed to be confronted. She needed to separate from him, to allow her psychological individuation process to unfold.
Suzanne Farrell tells the tale of how she entered into a sublimated artistic father-daughter relationship with George Balanchine, with the loss of her father after her parents’ divorce. She writes of how she had to fight to say “No” to a real marriage with Balanchine, and of how she married, instead, a man who was closer to her age who was a dancer in the company.
All three of these women were able to tolerate the pain of disillusionment with their fathers, and father figures.
Father Disillusionment and Professional Daimons in Three Important Women: A Commentary on a Paper by Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ken Fuchsman
Sigmund Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess that psychology was his daimon, it was a preoccupation that centered his life. With the three subjects of Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler’s paper on “Father Disillusionment” presented above, she has selected women each of whom had a daimon. For Charlotte Brontë and Suzanne Farrell their daimons were an art form, for Cassidy Hutchinson, it was Republican politics.
In looking at the lives and careers of these three women, what is striking is that father disillusionment for each took such different forms. Cassidy Hutchinson made a complete break with father figure Donald Trump. Choreographer George Balanchine was ballerina Suzanne Farrell’s mentor and father figure. After a 6 year-long split between Balanchine and Farrell, they reconciled, and she danced again as part of his company until his death. In her two major novels, Charlotte Brontë first characterized older male father substitutes in less than admirable terms—even saying that one of them was like Napoleon. But as the novels unfolded, the father figures were presented more favorably, and the female protagonists became romantically inclined towards them.
Each of the three women presented by Kavaler-Adler had suffered major family disruptions and losses in childhood. Brontë’s mother died when Charlotte was 5, and her 2 older sisters also died a few years later. She was primarily raised by her father and an unmarried aunt. Farrell and Hutchinson’s disruption was the divorce of their parents—leaving their respective mothers as the primary parent.
Mixed in with these similar losses is that somehow each of these females found a passionate activity that became a center of their lives. Each found a profession, and each excelled. All three were fortunate to find a daimon to channel their lives. Farrell became a prominent ballerina in her teens, Hutchinson was an official in the Trump White House in her early twenties, and Brontë published Jane Eyre at 31. My approach in this commentary will be more psychobiographical than psychoanalytic.
Book Review
Freud, Jung, and Jonah: Religion and the Birth of the Psychoanalytic Periodical, Maya Balakirsky Katz. Cambridge, UK; New York, U.S.: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 383 pp., hardcover and paperback,Reviewed by Candace Orcutt
Freud, Jung, and Jonah is a monumental scholarly undertaking, shifting to a new context historical perspective on the development of psychoanaly- sis. Through an extensive, detailed exploration of primary sources—including the fine points of (mis)translation—Maya Balakirsky Katz reconstructs the rise of psychoanalysis as an ambitious, and eventually divided, inter- national phenomenon contained and propagated within a new literary form. Contending periodicals vied for definition of psychoanalysis—the psychological substructure that they maintained underlay personal, artis- tic, religious, and cultural interests—within the turbulent and creative time preceding and overlapping the great World Wars.
This innovative work describes the origin of psychoanalysis, as it was realized through the pages of periodical publications. The dissemination of the psychoanalytic periodical served as an expanded channel of communication for the diverse themes and elements that eventually shifted our culture toward its psychological trend. As Katz demonstrates—by exhaustive research through the dusty shelves of primary publications—the progress of the printed periodical widened and accelerated the communication of ideas, debate, and eventual partisan organization of psychoanalysis. Quotations from brilliant and competitive personalities fill the pages with dedicated, calculating, and often highly emotional voices.
Psychohistorical Perspectives: Poetry
Down the Rabbit Hole, Howard F. Stein
Remnants—Hurricane Debby (2024) and Far Beyond, Howard F. Stein
Conversation with Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’, Peter PetschauerHoward Stein’s comments regarding Peter
Petschauer’s “Conversation with Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ ”
Petschauer’s thoughts about his poem,‘The Kiss,’ and Stein’s conversation about it.