Volume 8 Number 2September 2001

courts, crime, criminality, fantasies, media circus, On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society, prison, psychohistory, racism

In this article, the author introduces the Clio’s Psyche special issue on crime, punishment and incarceration, setting out a concern about the gap between appearance and reality in American attitudes toward crime. The author observes that television news, crime dramas and courtroom programs such as The People’s Court feed a public fascination with crime. He reports that statistics showed a decrease in major crime in the 1990s, though Americans act as if crime were rising. He contends that Americans seek personal safety while their fantasies and emotions focus on violence, and that the range of activities defined as criminal keeps growing, with selective enforcement following. Drawing on his Connecticut boyhood, a psychiatric hospital internship and the history of punishment, he recounts how imprisonment began as a humanitarian reform. He cites figures on U.S. incarceration and racial disparities in capital punishment and describes a Texas death penalty case. He is sharply critical of the size of the prison population and of prisons’ effect on young offenders. He argues that spending on education would serve society better than incarceration, and he approves of Portugal’s decision not to jail drug users. He then previews the issue’s contributions on police violence in Brazil, interrogations and confessions, emotion in courtrooms and juries, expert testimony, the execution of Timothy McVeigh, prison sadism and rape, and education and myth as means of reducing recidivism. He concludes that courts, punishments and prisons need re-evaluation and that history and psychohistory offer useful tools for addressing them.

caregiving relationships, criminal punishment, Franz Kafka, group psychodynamics, In the Penal Colony, individual psychodynamics, metaphor, part-object representations, polarized mental representations, prison reform, psychohistory, sadomasochistic dynamics

In this article, the author takes the title from Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (1919), treating it as a metaphor for American criminal punishment, and applies psychoanalytic accounts of sadomasochism to the history of imprisonment in the United States. Drawing on The Oxford History of the Prison, the article outlines the shift from corporal and public sanctions to the nineteenth-century penitentiary and the reform enthusiasm of 1870 to 1950. It argues that flawed implementation left deterrence and rehabilitation discredited, so that incapacitation now justifies ever-expanding incarceration. It attributes this outcome to paranoid-schizoid regression at the group level, in which society divides itself into a good community and bad criminals. Using Elizabeth Howell’s model of victim, perpetrator, and bystander self-states, it contends that swings between punitive and rehabilitative attitudes leave rehabilitation ineffectively implemented. It reinterprets Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment as the product of dissociative reactions to membership in an unconscious group rather than of roles and situations alone, and maintains that sadistic and masochistic potentials are latent in everyone. Noting that immigrant groups, especially the Irish, and later African Americans have predominated among inmates, it suggests that societal splitting bears on populations already regarded as other. The article concludes that recognizing and integrating these splits could reduce vindictiveness toward offenders and support prisons combining firm authority, clear communication, and empathy.

analytic ethos, evil, group therapy, Milgram experiments, obedience to authority, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, research study, Stanley Milgram, What Evil Means to Us

In this article, the author recounts about fifteen months of weekly three-hour sessions with prisoners in a psychological remediation program at a maximum security prison in Patuxent, Maryland. The program combined group therapy with a chance to earn early release, and the sessions were part of a research project on evil reported in What Evil Means to Us. The author describes asking the prisoners to respond to a summary of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments at Yale in 1961–1962. The author reports that Milgram interpreted the results as submission to authority rather than sadism, and that most non-prisoner informants agreed with him, while hardly any of the prisoners did. The author relays one prisoner’s view that people enjoy violence and welcome sanction to act on it, and his contrast between a state execution and a private individual committing the same acts. The author contends that this difference lies in whether violence is bound to institutional forms, not in basic psychology, and observes that the prisoners in the group, who were not a random sample, were not more aggressive or sadistic than the non-prisoners interviewed. The author maintains that the freelance quality of criminal violence is what makes it intolerable to a civilized society and that prison is the right place to contain it. The author concludes that recognizing the psychological similarity between prisoners and others may make those outside more generous toward those inside.

crime, deterrence, Ernest Becker, irrationality, moral outrage, psychohistory, punishment, rehabilitation, terror management

In this article, the authors apply Terror Management Theory, which draws on the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, to public demand for severe punishment of offenders, taking United States support for the death penalty as a leading example. They note that roughly two-thirds of Americans favor capital punishment. They characterize this as puzzling on rational grounds, citing the death penalty’s record as a deterrent and the state’s commission of the act it condemns, and they point to the listing of homicide on Timothy McVeigh’s death certificate. They set out the theory’s proposition that awareness of mortality produces existential anxiety, which people manage by investing in cultural worldviews, and they review empirical studies of mortality salience. They report that Tucson, Arizona municipal court judges reminded of their mortality recommended much higher bail ($455, against $50 for controls) for a hypothetical prostitution defendant. They then describe studies in which mortality salience increased punitiveness toward offenders generally but produced leniency toward attackers of victims who threatened participants’ worldviews, and toward white targets espousing racist beliefs. They propose that these tendencies may contribute to racial bias in verdicts and sentencing, citing the O.J. Simpson and original Rodney King trials. They conclude that the need to defend worldviews introduces irrational and harmful biases into the criminal justice system.

Brazilian police, Brazilian society, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, conflicting ideals, conflicting identities, conflicting realities, police brutality, psychohistory, research study, trauma, victimization

In this article, the authors report on a research project conducted at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro together with the Rio de Janeiro police force, then undergoing reorganization, on how officers view violence and corruption within their own ranks. They define police violence as the willful infliction of unnecessary suffering through abuse of power and distinguish it from measured force that police work sometimes requires. They cite the 1992–1993 police killings of street children and working people, official data on police involvement in kidnappings, and Rio de Janeiro Institute of Criminology reports on crimes committed by officers. Drawing on interviews with officers, they contend that officers regard their victims as the Other, not as fellow human beings. They argue that this attitude mirrors and intensifies the outlook of a Brazilian society divided between a protected, white, wealthy elite and poor, lower-class, dark-skinned people who lack effective rights, a division they characterize as virtual apartheid. Noting that some officers come from the low-income neighborhoods they disparage, they ask whether officers identify with the aggressor and have introjected the ideals of another class. They conclude that police must stop treating the poor and Black Brazilians as second-class citizens and develop solidarity with them, and they note early steps in that direction.

coerced confessions, criminal justice practitioners, death penalty, interrogations, Miranda warnings, political leaders, psychohistory, psychology, social sciences, wrongful convictions

This article, part of the special issue on crime, punishment and incarceration, concerns the videotaping of police interrogations and confessions as a proposed safeguard against wrongful convictions. The author cites Death Penalty Information Center figures on 95 death-row exonerations across 22 states as of April 2001, along with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s acknowledgment that innocent defendants may be executed. The author notes that scholars, practitioners, and political leaders have urged videotaping all interrogations. He cautions that recording is no sure protection, because present-day psychological interrogation methods are not always recognized as coercive, and he describes the Peter Reilly case as an example of a false confession produced by such methods. Reporting on his own research program, he contends that a camera trained on the suspect alone leads viewers to judge a confession more voluntary than transcripts or audiotapes do. He regards this as a serious bias that runs against the presumption of innocence. He reports no such bias when suspect and interrogator are equally visible, notes that New Zealand adopted that approach nationally, and recommends it for the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. He also proposes that policymakers consider a camera focused on the interrogator, and he closes with a mother’s account of her son’s disputed confession video.

courtroom, emotions, gender stereotypes, hysteria, psychohistory, sexism, women victims

In this article, the author argues that women victims giving evidence in court face a double bind over displayed emotion, and that the bind sustains stereotypes of female victims within the legal system. The author contends that visibly emotional women are perceived as less credible, as hysterical or possibly lying, while composed women are perceived as unaffected by the alleged crime and, again, possibly lying. Citing a 1971 trial-technique manual, Successful Techniques for Criminal Trials, which characterizes women witnesses as prone to exaggeration, the author maintains that female witnesses have historically been treated with suspicion and that the courtroom remains male-dominated. The author reports work by Gregory Matoesian, who argues that courts reinforce patriarchal expectations of victim behavior, by Amanda Konradi, who finds prosecutors telling rape survivors that visible distress supports credibility, and by Sue Lees, who finds emotional women characterized as manipulative and unreliable. The author also recounts a personal experience in a housing dispute, in which male advisers counseled restraint but a male arbitrator took the case seriously only after the author became emotional. The author concludes that lawyers who win with emotional victims encourage others to be emotional, perpetuating the stereotype, and hopes that raising awareness will help eliminate it.

child abuse, court, custody evaluation, exoneration, family dynamics, invalid scientific evidence, psychohistory, psychological evaluation, wrongful conviction

In this article, the author, a psychologist who performs court-related evaluations, recounts a case in which a married couple, defended by an attorney who retained the author, were accused of abusing their newborn by fracturing her ribs, in a proceeding seeking a finding of abuse rather than termination of parental rights. The author reports that three physicians for the prosecution attributed the fractures to the parents’ care, and that the couple’s interview, psychological testing, and history, including no criminal record and no substance abuse, led to a belief in their innocence. The author describes searching medical literature, including an American Medical Association paper on expert testimony, on the dating of infant fractures. According to the account, the prosecution’s radiologist then revised his testimony on the stand, and a neonatal specialist retained by the defense gave an explanation the court accepted, after which the parents were exonerated. The author characterizes the prosecution’s medical testimony as incomplete and misleading, attributes it partly to defensive pressures on health care practitioners in a litigious setting, and cites Stephen Ceci on experts’ tendency to align with the side that hires them. Doubting that courts will adopt the American Medical Association’s recommendation of court-selected experts, the author calls for educating judges and lawyers in forensic procedure, pointing to Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project, and questions whether a preponderance-of-evidence standard, with the burden effectively on the accused, meets due process.

crime, emotions, jury verdicts, psychohistory, serial murders, victims, wrongful convictions

In this article, the authors consider how crimes perceived as heinous affect the 12 jurors who hear graphic evidence in criminal trials, opening with a forthcoming South Australian trial over the deaths of eight people. They contend that the legal system maintains the myth of jurors as rational decision-makers untouched by emotion. They argue that heinousness may legitimately bear on penalty after a finding of guilt, as in U.S. capital cases, but that the shocking quality of a crime biases jurors toward guilty verdicts irrespective of the weight of the evidence. They cite earlier mock-jury studies involving a mandatory death penalty, videotaped crime scenes, and autopsy photographs. They also report their own mock-jury studies at the University of New South Wales, which compared a murder involving mutilation with one without and, they say, found more guilty verdicts for the more gruesome case regardless of evidence strength. They interpret these results as pointing to a non-rational process. In it, emotional state acts as a decision shortcut that raises the perceived likelihood of guilt or enlarges the doubt considered reasonable, or a desire to give victims’ families satisfaction bypasses cognition altogether. They name this “heinousness-vilification” and describe their current research as a test of it. They conclude that, if supported, it would challenge traditional legal notions of the unemotional jury, refine models of jury decision-making, and identify a predictable mechanism by which innocent persons may be convicted.

American fantasy, cultural mystification, death penalty, Oklahoma City Bombing, psychohistory, terrorism, Timothy McVeigh

In this article, the author interprets the June 11, 2001 execution of Timothy McVeigh at Terre Haute, Indiana, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, as psychohistorical events joining individual biography and American group fantasy. Using news reports, official and media language about the execution, McVeigh’s final statement, and a letter from David Levine, he applies Erik Erikson’s totalistic identity, Vamik Volkan’s chosen trauma, and Weston La Barre’s failed prophet, alongside splitting and projection. He argues that McVeigh’s identity coalesced around the soldier-patriot role after the Gulf War and was transformed by the 1993 Waco siege into a war against the federal government. He speculates that unconscious identification with victimhood and a need to be punished shaped McVeigh’s surrender, his cooperation in the execution, and his choice of William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus.” Drawing on Levine’s letter, he also proposes that the conflict between controlling one’s fate and being controlled was central to McVeigh’s identity. He is critical of the public and official response, which he says treated McVeigh as beyond understanding, relied on procedural language, and demanded closure. He contends that refusing to understand displaces examination of painful aspects of American society, and conjectures that similar rationalizations will legitimate future violence. He concludes by characterizing McVeigh as a failed prophet whose act corresponded to no shared wish of the group for which he presumed to speak.

incarceration, prison rape, psychohistory, sexual violence, trauma, West Virginia Penitentiary

In this article, written for the special issue on crime, punishment and incarceration, the author sets out a concern about sexual assault among male prisoners in the United States. The author draws on nine months as a guard at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville in 1963, a later conversation with a guard there shortly before the prison closed in 1995, and an informal survey of inmates at several West Virginia state prisons and regional jails. Reports from the ABA Journal, National Review, and the New York Times supply further examples, including a Texas prison policy, an Arkansas warden’s testimony, and a federal civil rights suit pending in Fresno, California. The author describes how newly arrived young inmates are targeted, the pairing arrangements that form between inmates, the risk of HIV infection, and the lack of reliable statistics, noting one study’s extrapolation of over 240,000 male victims a year. The author contends that prison officials and others tend to dismiss such assault as voluntary, minimize it, or treat it as an ordinary part of incarceration. The author also reports one inmate’s view that it serves as a tool of prison management. The author maintains that sexual violence is not a punishment the law prescribes and that it amounts to an unauthorized addition to sentences. The piece characterizes incarceration as prompting psychological regression to the schoolyard. It closes with a young inmate’s account of what he tells visiting family.

denial, H. John Rogers, prison rape, psychohistory, sadism, sexual violence, trauma, unconscious

This article, a response within the special issue on crime, punishment and incarceration, replies to John Rogers’s “The Prison Band” on two points: rape in relation to ordinary prison sexuality, and administrative and societal attitudes toward prison rape. The author describes the range of sexual expression in prison, from masturbation to staff-inmate contact and relationships between inmates, and observes that attachment and power operate in relationships generally. Some staff and inmates with significant antisocial personality features, the author proposes, relate mainly through position in the power hierarchy rather than attachment. Inmates relegated to a feminized role are, the author maintains, devalued within the prison worldview however they arrived there. Drawing on clinicians’ typologies of rapists, the author distinguishes rape aimed at gaining compliance for sexual gratification from rape that serves to hurt and humiliate the victim, and notes that Rogers’s piece alludes to these types. The denial, underrepresentation, acceptance, and rationalization of prison rape by administrators and society are interpreted as acting out, possibly through unconscious or conscious sadism toward inmates. Crowding, minimal medical care, unsanitary conditions, and poor food are suggested as further expressions of this. In a society the author characterizes as homophobic and as viewing sex as dirty, tacit complicity in sexual assault is said to add humiliation and punishment. The author calls the account an oversimplification and concludes that acknowledging our own issues may reduce institutional acting out and contribute to more humane prisons.

Brazil, prison rape, psychohistory, sexual violence, trauma, victimization

This article addresses sexual violence in prisons and a Brazilian visitation practice that the author presents as a partial remedy. The author contends that prison rape is underreported because victims are ashamed, fear retaliation, and doubt that custodians will act. The author maintains that guards, administrators, and public opinion often treat it as inevitable or deserved, and that prison staff use rape or its threat to manage gangs, contain aggressive inmates, and recruit informers. The author characterizes such assaults as human rights violations and identifies likely victims as young, non-violent, first-time offenders from the middle class. The article describes the program introduced in the late 1980s in the State of São Paulo, under which adult male prisoners may have sexual relations with female visitors, with cells prepared and rules set by the prisoners. It notes early criticism from prison staff and conservative groups. The author reports that prison rape decreased greatly and that some prisoners kept intimate and family ties, though homicide, assault, and stabbing continue. The author cites a 1991 survey at the House of Detention of São Paulo in which 90 percent of interviewed prisoners judged that the visits reduced sexual violence, and reports that the warden agreed.

corrections, crime, criminal imprisonment, incarceration, prison reform, psychohistory, rehabilitation

In this article, the author, a former psychological consultant to federal and state prisons including the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, recounts his experience of the Asklepieion Therapeutic Community program (1969–1978) and contends that rehabilitating prisoners is possible, though difficult. He cites Bureau of Justice Statistics figures on the growth of the U.S. prison population and of probation and parole caseloads, and estimates from his own experience that about 20 percent of prisoners could be rehabilitated long-term. He attributes the turn toward punishment and custody to policy under Bureau of Prisons Director Norman Carlson. He describes Asklepieion’s treatment philosophy, including its high-confrontation group technique called the Game, videotaping, and psychodrama. He reports fewer than 12 percent recidivism among about 250 graduates and compares this with national rearrest, reconviction, and reimprisonment rates for 1983 releasees. He notes that the program’s records were lost when it closed. He describes prison culture as organized around a persecutor, victim, and rescuer triangle. He maintains that the program ended because of opposition from the Bureau of Prisons and because its staff failed to build alliances with guards and prison counselors, toward whom he says they came to feel superior. He concludes that rehabilitation should be favored over custody and calls for support from all parts of the prison system.

computer applications, education, human development, Pierce College, prisoners, psychohistory, recidivism

In this article, the author reflects on more than six years teaching computer applications to male inmates at McNeil Island Corrections Center in Washington State, as an instructor for Pierce College in Tacoma beginning in 1994. Drawing on this experience, the author maintains that education reduces recidivism and describes the classroom as a setting for human development beyond its formal curriculum. The author reports that research, including a 1996 study of Canadian prisons by Steven Duguid, links higher educational attainment to lower recidivism, and that departments of corrections in the United States nonetheless call the findings inconclusive, while grant money is scarce and education is cut in budget shortfalls. The author recounts two inmates’ experiences of changed self-regard, mentions European prison courses in the arts and Kenyon Judson Scudder’s California experiment described in Prisoners Are People, and cites the cost of incarceration as an argument for education. The author concludes that prisons encourage brutality rather than rehabilitate, suggests that society projects unacknowledged guilt and shame onto prisoners as scapegoats, and calls for a long-term view of prisons and for connection with prisoners.

anxiety, crime desistance program, fear of rejection, Jason and the Golden Fleece, myths, prison education, prison groups, psychohistory, recidivism, self-enlightenment

In this article, the author recounts his experience leading myth-based discussion groups with inmates at a maximum-security prison in Wisconsin, as a volunteer with the crime desistance program Self-Help of Wisconsin. He describes his initial apprehension that the men would dismiss the subject as irrelevant and see him as an out-of-touch academic. He then retells the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, which he presented to a group of about forty inmates, and mentions having also used the Persephone and Demeter myth and the Hopi Coyote Parables. He reports how participants related the story to their own lives. Some likened the Argonauts to the associates who exploited them or to family elders and role models they had overlooked. Others spoke of desires that mattered less with age, of misplaced trust and judging character, and of the harm their actions caused to people beyond themselves, including fellow African-Americans. He maintains that myths capture universal aspects of the human condition and that the sessions foster self-insight and a sense of connection among participants. He concludes that the experience of being understood by others is foundational to rehabilitation, and that fellow prisoners can serve the function of the Argonauts in helping one another survive prison and desist from crime.

American law, letter to the editor, litigation, psychohistory, psychotherapy, Ramapo College’s Law and Society program, social work

In this letter to the editor, the author, a professor in the Law and Society program at Ramapo College who is also a social worker, women’s advocate, and attorney, offers observations on the role of law in American society. She characterizes the United States as the most litigious culture in history and compares the number of lawyers per capita there with England and Japan. She recalls a comparison of law to a rock and of social work, therapy, and psychology to glass, and maintains that control is the sociological function of law. She contends that law arises only in large, complex societies, whereas simpler societies rely on custom, ritual, and religious prohibition. She proposes that American litigiousness stems chiefly from an individualistic, materialistic, rights-oriented culture rooted in settlement and the frontier. She notes that Derek Bok and other social critics, including English observers, consider litigation in the United States excessive.

Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, interview, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory, The Psychohistory Review, self-psychology, Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology (TRISP)

In this interview, Bob Lentz and Paul H. Elovitz question Charles B. Strozier about his biography Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (2001), psychobiography as a practice, and his own career. Strozier, a historian and psychoanalyst, recounts knowing Kohut in Chicago from 1973 and meeting opposition from Kohut’s family and colleagues while writing the book. He describes Kohut as both rebel and conservative thinker who, from about 1973, set out to replace Freudian drive theory with self psychology. Strozier contends that self psychology, with its emphasis on empathy and idealization, is distinctively American and useful to historians, and that Kohut abandoned the concept of narcissism. He reports Kohut’s obscuring of his Jewish origins, his early relationship with his tutor, and his identity as the subject of the case of Mr. Z. On psychobiography, Strozier defines it as biography attentive to psychological themes, holds that clinical training improved his book, and argues that empathy is essential to the method, so a psychobiographer should not take on a disliked subject. He recommends works by Ward, McCullough, Lifton, and Erikson, ranks Kohut as the most important clinical psychoanalyst after Freud, says he passed on writing about George W. Bush for lack of empathy, and plans a study of the religious and political right in America.

book review, Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, idealization, myths, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychology of the self

This book review assesses Charles B. Strozier’s Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (2001), a biography of the founder of self psychology (1913–1981). According to the reviewer, the biography draws on interviews with people close to Kohut and on letters and papers previously withheld from public view, and it interweaves his life with expositions of his books and papers. The life runs from childhood in Vienna through departure after the Anschluss, his Chicago career, and his illness and death. The reviewer, a former student of Strozier at the Training and Research Institute of Self Psychology, reports that Strozier reads Kohut’s paper “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z.” as autobiographical. Strozier is said to use it to characterize Kohut’s mother as a damaging influence, to discuss a childhood relationship with a tutor that he notes would today be termed sexual abuse, and to describe a conflicted and dissociated attitude toward Jewish identity. The reviewer reports that Strozier portrays Kohut as narcissistically disturbed yet capable of clinical empathy, and argues that Kohut’s early experiences shaped his theoretical constructs. The reviewer credits Strozier with avoiding idealization, notes that he does not address whether Kohut was aware of his own personality difficulties, and judges the book to break new ground. The reviewer wonders whether dissociation affected Kohut’s clinical judgment about childhood sexual abuse. The review concludes that the self-psychology movement is mature enough to tolerate such questions.

Anthony Storr, creativity, memorial, musician, psychoanalysis, psychohistory

This memorial to the English psychoanalyst and writer Anthony Storr (1920–2001) joins the author’s personal recollections to an appraisal of Storr’s books. The friendship began after the publication of The Dynamics of Creation in 1972. The author outlines Storr’s education at Winchester and Christ’s College, Cambridge, his Jungian analysis, his private practice in London, his musical life, and his struggles with severe asthma. He maintains that Storr’s central idea was that creative work is an attempt at psychological integration, most evident in music. He also maintains that Storr weighed competing psychodynamic theories, among them those of Jung, Freud, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Bowlby, without committing to one school. Discussing The School of Genius, Churchill’s Black Dog, Kafka’s Mice, and Feet of Clay, he judges Storr’s brief psychobiographical vignettes suggestive but too undeveloped to persuade professional biographers. He is critical of Human Destructiveness, contending that it gives too little weight to childrearing, abuse, and trauma and omits the work of Alice Miller and of psychohistorians. He prefers Felicity De Zulueta’s From Pain to Violence. He argues that literary and art criticism, shaped by twentieth-century rejections of biographical and psychological readings, has largely disregarded Storr’s approach. He concludes that, whatever the limits of Storr’s books, Storr was an independent and open-minded educator in psychoanalytic thought, and that gratitude for his efforts is more fitting than criticism.

alcoholism, Byzantine Christianity, cultural stereotypes, defense mechanisms, psychohistory, Russia, unification, Vladimir the Great

This article is a first-person account of the author’s annual visits to Moscow and a concern about heavy drinking among Russian men. The author reports observing public drunkenness, cites life-expectancy figures of 58.83 years for Russian men against 72.95 for American men, and attributes the decline chiefly to alcohol. Starting from Prince Vladimir’s tenth-century remark on drink and the adoption of Byzantine Christianity in 988, the author characterizes drinking to excess as the accepted sign of trust and intimacy, describes Russian cuisine and banquet customs as built around alcohol, and maintains that Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign failed. Ivan Durak, the folktale youngest son who stays by the stove in his mother’s house, and Venichka in Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line are offered as illustrations of a continuing cultural pattern. The author proposes that Russians have used alcohol as a defense against unconscious anger, and links this to an unresolved attachment to a pre-oedipal maternal image in Russian culture. The author concludes that emotional growth, beyond political and economic change, is needed to lessen this reliance on alcohol, and expresses hope for Russia’s future.

book review, dreamwork, Jerry Kroth, leftist orientation, Marvin Forest, personality theory, politics, psychohistory, Psychology Underground: From Politically Correct Orthodoxies to a New Century of Inquiry, psychotherapy, research methods

This book review assesses Psychology Underground: From Politically Correct Orthodoxies to a New Century of Inquiry (2001) by Jerry Kroth with Marvin Forest, several chapters of which were first presented at International Psychohistorical Association conventions. The reviewer reports that Kroth challenges orthodoxies in academic psychology, contending that the leftist orientation of most psychologists has biased their scientific agendas, for example by favoring learning theory over innate patterns of behavior. It describes Kroth as treating the unconscious as real and favoring Jung’s mythopoetic approach. Three chapters are covered. In “Media,” Kroth draws on decades of research to characterize television as harmful to young people and as a form of child abuse. In “Maleness,” he connects Nikolaas Tinbergen’s Innate Releasing Mechanisms to Jung’s archetypes. In “Mystery,” he argues that psychologists resist parapsychology because they retain a Newtonian model that, he says, theoretical physics has abandoned, and urges them to accept that experimental parapsychology and physics offer a scientific basis for new work, drawing on Jung’s theory of synchronicity and Wolfgang Pauli. The reviewer judges the case convincing, endorses the media critique on the basis of over fifteen years of teaching in New York City public high schools, and maintains that popular media contribute to a culture of insensitivity underlying school shootings. The reviewer compares Kroth’s iconoclasm to that of Norman O. Brown, author of Love’s Body (1966).

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, adult fairy tale, archetypes, Carl Jung, film review, Freudians, George Lucas, Joseph Campbell, Jungian consistency, Luke Skywalker, metapsychology, Oedipal crisis, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud, Star Wars, Steven Spielberg

This film review of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence reads the film through Freudian oedipal theory and Jungian archetypal psychology, and is sharply critical of it. The author summarizes the plot: a robot child, programmed to form an irreversible attachment to his adoptive mother, is abandoned by her, searches for the Blue Fairy so that he can become real, and after 2,000 years is granted one day with his resurrected mother. The author credits the film with illustrating attachment theory, and describes the child as barred from other developmental tasks in Erikson’s sense. The review contrasts the film with the fairy tales of Hansel and Gretel and of Jack and the beanstalk, in which the author says the protagonists mature and come to care for their parents. It also contrasts the film with Star Wars, whose hero the author attributes to George Lucas’s consultation with Joseph Campbell. The author argues that the film resolves the oedipal crisis through a return to infancy, that it destroys the Jungian icon of the idealized mother in the Blue Fairy, and that the protagonist’s prolonged fixation leaves neither adults nor children able to identify with him. The author concludes that the film is unsupported by archetypal patterns and fails psychologically and commercially.

addiction therapy, advocate for Vietnam veterans, Chaim F. Shatan, group therapy, hypnosis, memorial, obesity, phobias, psychiatry, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum, psychotherapy, William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis

This memorial tribute, written by a fellow member of the Psychohistory Forum, marks the death on August 17, 2001, of Chaim F. Shatan, a psychiatrist, teacher, psychohistorian, and advocate for Vietnam veterans. The author recounts his birth in Wolclawek, Poland, in 1924, his upbringing in Toronto and Montreal, his degrees at McGill University, his training at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, his academic appointments, and his practice of individual and group psychotherapy and hypnosis. The author credits him with helping to label post-traumatic stress disorder and describes his rap groups for Vietnam veterans, his 1972 New York Times op-ed “The Grief of Soldiers,” and the self-help movement that followed. Also covered are his work toward including the diagnosis in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), his congressional testimony, his part in founding the Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and his work with Holocaust survivors and their children. The author notes that he lectured more than he wrote and reports his 1974 award for “Bogus Manhood, Bogus Honor: Surrender and Transfiguration in the U.S. Marine Corps.” The piece closes with recollections of his continued learning despite health problems, his socialist commitments, and condolences to his family.