Probing Gender, Political Correctness, and Trump

The uniqueness of the Psychohistory Forum Work-In-Progress meetings is that the presenter receives intense feedback from a group of people who have previously read the paper. Each member of the seminar introduces him- or herself and then states a question about the paper or its subject. The questions help the presenter deepen her/his knowledge. The scholar who has submitted the paper has the option to speak for 20 minutes after the introductions. Irene Javors chose to go directly to questions and the rest of our time was devoted to probing her materials. Trump’s campaign against Clinton, the first female major party candidate, was closely related to the paper’s emphasis on gender, political correctness, and gender relationships. These were so much on people’s minds that we spent most of our last hour probing these topics.

Irene Javors’ presentation, “Do Ask, Do Tell: Contemporary Questions for Psychohistorians and Psychobiographers” was aimed at enlarging the psychohistorical paradigm. As a young woman she set about the task of integrating the psychological and the social Freud and Marx—and in the following three and a half decades she took degrees in history, philosophy, and clinical practice. She sought to understand the relationship between the individual psyche and society. This is no easy task because emotions and thoughts for both the individual and society are so often conflicted, confused, and muddled. Central to her thinking is C. Wright Mills, author of The Sociological Imagination: Thinking Outside the Box (1959).

As a therapist Irene works with individuals, but her focus is very much on how we as a society influence and interact with the individual. Much of her work is with the LGBT community and their struggle for equal rights as well as to be seen and heard in our society. Part of this endeavor is for the psychohistorical community to incorporate their experience. In theory this should be easy, but in practice many (perhaps most) psychohistorical authors of an older generation are inclined to see homosexuality as a private endeavor that should not be highlighted unless it is specifically related

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to the subject’s creativity or difficulties in life.

Some who are analysts, without the strength of Irene’s inclination to merge the societal with the personal, are concerned that this endeavor could result in diluting their psychoanalytic insights about the individual and becoming too speculative regarding society. Intersectionality is a concept important to the author, so a group member asked her to clarify the term. Irene defines it as individuals and groups having many overlapping identities of sexuality, race, gender, class, and so forth in “institutionalized systems of domination and oppression.” At any point one identity may be the dominant concern.

Developmental issues are central to Javors’ understanding of her clients, her students, and people in general. Javors teaches graduate students studying diversity, gender, multicultural, and sexuality counseling in her classes in the Mental Health Counseling program at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology of Yeshiva University. She declared that most of the younger generation does not really believe in free speech because they expect to be protected from uncomfortable thoughts, with faculty acting as a type of helicopter parent shielding them. The clients she works with tend to be so focused on prior traumas that they often can’t hear what is being said because their own powerful emotions are evoked. Thus, things become more than they appear to be at the moment since different ideas bring forth what Vamik Volkan calls “chosen traumas.” This is related to people becoming flooded with emotions that interfere with their sensory and cognitive abilities. They are incapable of hearing certain things at all or they mishear them because they are such hot button issues. Clearly this connects to the difficulties in maintaining free speech on campuses when a subject is too painful or when an icon that a group wants to hold onto as only theirs is utilized by others. Those who are traumatized go back to a very early, concrete understanding, which is more fitting to an earlier stage of development.

Thus speakers on major university campuses are shouted down or disinvited because what they are saying is not politically correct. With certain audiences, political correctness gets in the way of freedom of expression. Considerable discussion was devoted to the weekend protest launched by members of the Black Lives Matter Movement that tried to block the view of the abstract art portrayal of the lynched Emmett Till at the Whitney Museum. The protest was reportedly motivated by the fact that since it was paint-

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ed by a white woman, they felt it was an injustice to the black community. They think that a white person had no right to use Till’s image since she had not endured what African Americans have suffered. They gained attention for their cause by serving as the “thought police.”

There’s a great deal of discussion of political correctness of both the right and the left, with Alice Maher warning that we face a powerful prejudice against people thinking differently than we think. As a psychoanalytic psychiatrist, Maher has devoted an enormous amount of energy toward working to educate young people to be able to listen to varying views of other people, however uncomfortable these may feel. She will run a workshop on this at the International Psychohistorical Association meeting in June. Javors stressed this inability to hear when individuals felt traumatized, including on the left. Today, in liberal circles, including academic and clinical ones that most of our members come from, the danger is not hearing and instead demonizing those who voted for Trump. There was discussion of what nice people Republican Trump voters are in person.

To whom do we express our empathy and what in fact are the boundaries of empathy? Joyce Rosenberg ardently voiced the opinion that there appears to be very little empathy in the younger generation, who are very much caught up on social media and rather disconnected from the older generation. At that moment, I pointed out that students I don’t know at my college rush to open doors for me in deference to my professorial look and white hair. I argued for levels of empathy being very much a mixed bag with the younger generation. My freshman class last semester, while studying the election, expressed incredibly little empathy, nor do I see strong signs of it in my current world history course. However, my Hitler, the Holocaust, and Genocide class students show enormous empathy.

The 20^th century American historian Ken Fuchsman raised the issue of empathy for ordinary and suffering people in politics. He argued that there are three 20^th century Democratic Party traditions. The first Democratic Party 20^th century tradition combines concern with the economic and political concentration of power of corporate interests and desire to assist those suffering from inequities. This characterizes Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, and in some ways Bernie Sanders. The second tradition is still concerned with the less fortunate but is not as disturbed by

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the practices of big business. This would characterize FDR in WWII, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Bill Clinton. The third tradition of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is also somewhat in favor of corporations, has sympathy for minorities and women, but is not as focused on the plight of all Americans who suffer from economic dislocations. In short, feeling for the ordinary person has diminished in the party that has claimed to speak for them.

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