Volume 9 Number 1June 2002

child abuse, childrearing, family dynamics, history of childhood, psychohistory, sexualization of children, substance abuse

In this article, the author sets out two opposed views of the condition of children in modern, largely middle-class suburban America, calling the discussion brief and impressionistic. The optimistic view, as the author presents it, rests on children’s material comfort, rights, legal protection from abuse, and educational opportunity, and on comparison with infanticide, wet-nursing, swaddling, child labor, and conditions at the court of Louis XIII and in the less developed world. The pessimistic view holds that children receive everything except a consistent, secure, loving environment and clear parental role models. It points to divorce, whose lasting effects the author notes researchers dispute, a media culture of fear, overscheduled families, television, early sexualization, drugs, school security, and adolescent suicidal thoughts. Drawing on recollections from child therapy practice, the author suggests that parent-child role reversals in fragmented families impede emotional growth. The author also discusses the strain on professional women combining careers and motherhood, citing anecdotes from acquaintances and the case of Massachusetts Acting Governor Jane Swift, and attributes to Title IX a transformation of women’s athletics and competitive preparation. The author says the two positions express contradictory feelings heard from others, some shared, while affirming the value of having children. The article concludes that children are both better and worse off depending on the group and aspects examined, and notes that immigrant, urban African-American, and other children fall outside its scope.

childhood, gender roles, poem, psychohistory, tomboy

Ancient Mesopotamia, Centuries of Childhood, child abuse, child labor, history of childhood, language analysis, Phillip Aries, psychohistory

This article considers what surviving texts suggest about childhood in ancient Mesopotamia. The author opens by observing that societies differ in when they expect children to stop playing and learning and begin adult-style work, and that the timing of the end of childhood says much about a society. The author notes the argument that Western recognition of childhood as a special condition emerged only in the 18th century C.E., and observes that the earliest written information on children comes from the Mesopotamian culture that invented writing. That material concerns newborns and infants far more than later childhood. The author describes medical cuneiform tablets on birth, the appearance of newborns, and infant diseases, and terracotta amulets in three sizes invoking the god Ninurta, worn around children’s necks. The author notes that the Sumerian term LU2.TUR and the Akkadian terms šerru and šarru are used interchangeably for babies and young infants, and that a cerebral palsy case points to use of the terms through at least age four. The author cites a line in the flood episode of the Gilgamesh tale, in which Uta-napishti says a child carried pitch, as tentatively suggesting that the terms covered older children and that children may have done heavy, dangerous work. The author acknowledges that the limited material makes conclusions difficult, and remarks that Mesopotamians had no protective child labor laws.

child abuse, corporal punishment, culture, family dynamics, history of violence, psychohistory, psychology of childhood

In this article, the author compares ethnographic descriptions from a world sample of diverse societies to identify correlates of very frequent corporal punishment of young children, which the author describes as increasingly seen as inhumane and as a source of repeated family violence. Sixteen societies in which corporal punishment is rare are compared with twenty-one in which it is very frequent. The author reports that fathers are seldom close to their young children in most of the frequent-punishment societies and often close in most of the rare-punishment societies. The author associates rare punishment with monogamous marriage and bilateral descent, and proposes that the nearness of both parents may reduce corporal punishment. The author also reports stricter control of females, prohibition of sexual intercourse for unmarried girls, more adult assault and homicide, and a prevalent belief in the evil eye in the frequent-punishment societies, which include four Muslim societies. The author contends that the findings do not support claims that parents are predominantly punitive in large nations and indulgent in small independent tribes, or Lloyd deMause’s claim that infanticide and other child abuse are more frequent in small independent tribes. The author concludes that the findings indicate hope for continued reduction of corporal punishment, and suggests that fathers’ greater involvement, women’s and girls’ greater freedom, declining violent crime, and weakening magical beliefs may be both causes and consequences of that reduction.

family dynamics, parental guilt, play therapy, psychohistory, psychology of childhood, psychotherapy

In this article, the author, a clinician writing from experience in child psychotherapy, reflects on what playing with children in treatment has taught in practice. The author maintains that exploring a child’s case should include the family constellation and the role of parents, and that parents should be made part of the treatment. The author describes relieving parents’ guilt and feelings of inferiority through listening, and coaching them to speak in collateral sessions. The author also observes that parents unsure of their parenting skills tend to be harshly critical of themselves and their children, and that a child’s play with the therapist can enact what a parent is like. Brief case vignettes follow: a child who works through fear of school by playing school games, a girl who expresses anger over her parents’ divorce by writing and drawing a story, and a father who learns to play with his toddler son. Referring to Freud, the author maintains that play helps children master fears, beginning with peek-a-boo in the first year. The author concludes that parents and teachers can help children express and overcome fears through play, art, dancing, and performing, and contends that playacting protects children’s fragile egos as they adjust and resolve emotional conflicts.

family dynamics, immigration, parental role, psychic transparency, psychohistory, separation anxiety, transcultural psychotherapy

In this article, the author, a psychologist in a Paris suburban hospital, considers the French-born children of immigrant families referred for separation anxiety, developmental and language difficulties, and behavioral problems. Drawing on her clinical practice and a transcultural therapeutic approach, together with the concepts of parentification, the holding environment, and psychic transparency, she contends that these children absorb their parents’ sadness, loneliness, and hopes attached to migration. She attributes the parents’ distress partly to the absence of the extended kin who share child rearing in their home countries, and she characterizes hospital birth and medical procedures as potentially bewildering or traumatic for families from other cultures. She maintains that role reversal and vulnerability do not necessarily signal psychopathology, and she reports that some children show resilience, drawing on both their family’s culture of origin and French culture. Two brief case vignettes illustrate her method, which examines representations of pregnancy, birth, and child rearing in the culture of origin and in France. She reports that discussing a child’s name and a parent’s life story allowed grief and family history to be expressed. The author concludes that therapists need to establish the whole family’s story and build interpretations together with patients.

case study, D. W. Winnicott, facilitating environment, parental loss, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, psychology of childhood, psychotherapy, suicide

This article presents the case of a young woman who entered psychoanalysis with the author in her early twenties. She sought help adapting to adult and professional life and with insecurity in love, including a fear that partners would inevitably leave her. The author recounts her history. Her parents left Brazil during the military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, and she grew up in Sweden, where she reports feeling accepted and admired by her peers. She returned to Brazil at fourteen, after her father’s death. The author reports that she then felt stigmatized as deficient, since her manner of speaking Portuguese set her apart while nothing else distinguished her. Drawing on Donald Winnicott’s concept of the facilitating environment and Freud’s proposal that anxiety follows a loss of love, the author interprets her adolescent regression and later jealousy as responses to three losses: her father, her distinctiveness among peers, and her fluency in language. The author cautions against attributing her difficulties to Brazil alone, arguing that the sharp change in her standing within her peer group was decisive. The author reports that analysis led her to a positive self-image, in which her life across two countries became a source of distinction again, and that her current relationships are more secure.

African American history, anti-black racism, genocidal childhood, ghetto violence, psychodynamic development, psychohistory, social conditions, toxic development

In this article, the author applies Ervin Staub’s account of the cultural and societal roots of genocidal and youth violence, together with psychodynamic and attachment theory, to homicide, incarceration, and execution among young Black men in inner-city ghettos of the United States. The evidence base is national statistics on prison populations, executions, and homicide victimization, plus published work on attachment, identification, and street culture. The article proposes that current conditions approximate a covert form of genocide. It contends that these conditions descend from slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and continuing discrimination, which are said to persist in the culture’s unconscious deep structures. It argues that violence and poverty impair mothers’ caregiving and foster insecure attachment. It further argues that father absence leaves boys to identify with older male figures characterized as hyper-masculine, that shame and a negative personal identity follow, and that these lead to self-deception, rationalization, and aggression. On this account, young men unconsciously identify, through their caregivers, with society’s devaluation of them and act it out self-destructively. The article also presents the street campaign for respect as a further expression of internalized devaluation. It concludes that, whether or not the processes are genocidal in the strict sense, they harm the African-American community, and it calls for identifying them and attending to them so that change can follow.

armed drug trafficking groups (comandos), favela, history of violence, police brutality, poverty, psychohistory, psychology of childhood, sense of self

This article examines what it means for a child to be born and raised in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, and why many boys join the armed drug trafficking groups known as comandos. The authors draw on their clinical work with children at a university clinic, remarks by slum residents, police estimates of the number of youths and children in the trafficking workforce, and published figures on youth homicide. They use Winnicott’s concepts of the average expectable environment and the false self, and investigate the role of territoriality in the psychology of low-income slum youth. They report that violence, confinement, and the absence of creative play impair children’s progress from dependence to autonomy, and that the children they see show learning difficulties, sleep disturbances, withdrawal, or antisocial behavior. They contend that comandos offer recognition and respect where parental figures are devalued, and that the lack of a strong father figure is a major reason for joining. They criticize conservative and media portrayals of favela residents as blaming the victims, and argue that children who are treated as at risk rather than as having potential internalize society’s view of them. They conclude that violence in such groups is a symbolic protest and a search for affiliation from the outskirts of citizenship, and that it cannot lead to a better life outside the slums.

anxiety, child welfare, bureaucracy, family structure, institutional social control, Journal of Psychohistory (JOP), “The Myth of Altruism,” psychohistory

In this article, the author, a public child welfare worker of some thirty years, looks back on his earlier “The Myth of Altruism,” published in the Journal of Psychohistory about twenty years before. He recounts writing it over seven years while anxious that his employers would retaliate, a fear he reports proved groundless, and says colleagues rarely engaged with its conclusions. He restates those conclusions. The agency’s stated goal since its founding roughly a century ago is preserving family life, yet most of its services are substitute care such as foster care, group homes, and residential treatment. He concluded that the agency is a self-reinforcing system of social control that meets its workers’ needs to control and be controlled, and he says workers who stay tend to come from families where emotional control was an issue. He describes the work as stressful, poorly supervised, and bureaucratic, with staff turnover above 30 percent a year, and compares it to war. He maintains that rescuing children is an illusion and that the most workers can do is help them understand their lives. He recognizes the pattern in himself and connects it to his family background. He argues that psychohistory illuminates the scholar’s own motives but is not a form of therapy. He concludes that analysis will help him eventually leave the agency and that seemingly incomprehensible matters can be understood better than expected.

adoption, child abuse, child labor, childhood deprivation, childhood trauma, family dynamics, Liberian culture, Liberian history, poverty, psychobiography, psychohistory

In this article, the author, a Liberian-born economist, recounts his childhood and contends that childhood abuse and deprivation need not lead to adult lives marked by alcoholism, drug abuse, or crime. He reports that in 1968, at age seven, his parents, members of the Daan tribe, gave him for adoption to his former kindergarten teacher, a woman of Americo-Liberian descent. Lower-status families in Liberia sometimes placed children with higher-status families in the hope of social advancement. He describes the adoptive household as one where adopted children served as unpaid labor. He sold baked goods through town, did chores and field work, attended afternoon school, received little food, had almost no playtime, and endured verbal abuse and teasing. He also reports being beaten during a period of about six months with a relative in Monrovia, after which he returned. He credits his later scholarships, a teaching assistantship at the University of Liberia, and graduate degrees in economics from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois chiefly to his adoptive mother’s emphasis on education, honesty, and self-respect. He also credits his father’s example, his mother’s efforts to fund his schooling, dedicated teachers including Peace Corps volunteers, a meeting with President William R. Tolbert, and Christian faith. He maintains that children should not be subject to adoption-based labor, and reports sending money to relatives in Liberia. He concludes that his hardships motivated him to work tirelessly and to commit himself to effective public policy.

cell phone, education, psychohistory, psychology of childhood, socialization, technology

In this article, the author, a high school teacher, sets out a concern about the effect of pervasive technology on children and students, beginning with an encounter with a young girl and her mother both talking on cell phones. The author states no opposition to technology or progress and declares support for education, human contact, patience, silence, and solitude. Recounting episodes from homes and from the school where the author teaches, and citing a Cincinnati children’s hospital study reporting that 40 percent of two-year-olds watch at least three hours of television daily, the author contends that television serves as babysitter or background noise, competes with children for attention, and contributes to shortened attention spans. The author faults the school for placing televisions in the library entrance area and the cafeteria, and observes that e-mail, instant messaging, and cell phones are displacing face-to-face contact and that students tend to trust unverified Internet sources. The author concludes that children and students need adult guidance in navigating technology, that adults should question how schools use it, and that young people should see older forms of communication such as books, newspapers, and handwritten letters, so that technology remains a tool rather than an irreplaceable part of life.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), family dynamics, psychohistory, psychology of childhood, technology, television, World War II (WWII)

In this article, the authors examine the relationship between television viewing and attention in the classroom among American children. They begin with the spread of television in U.S. homes after World War II, from 44,000 sets in 1947 to over 8,000,000 by late 1950, and report Kaiser Family Foundation findings on children’s viewing time, television placement in the home, and parental rules. They also report from their diary study that some nine-year-olds watch R-rated films alone in their bedrooms late on school nights. The authors consider two explanations for teachers’ concern that viewing contributes to ADHD-type behavior, meaning inattention and behavioral impulsivity. The first is that faster-paced programming, including jump cuts, draws on the orienting response and accustoms children to having their attention directed externally. The second is that television produces a level of arousal that structured classrooms cannot match, leaving children bored. Drawing on their study of fourth- and fifth-graders, the authors report a significant relationship between amount of viewing and teacher-rated ADHD-type behaviors, and they report that boredom predicted greater later viewing within individuals. They maintain that the arousal/boredom explanation fits the evidence somewhat better. The article closes by anticipating faster-paced programming and greater electronic media use, and by asking whether children, schools, parents, or the entertainment industry should change.

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, Erik H. Erikson, Heinz Kohut, International Political Science Association, International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), interview, Louis XIII: The Making of a King, Political Psychology, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory, psychology of childhood, The Psychohistory Review, Research Committee on Psychopolitics (#29), scholar, Western Society for French History, The Young Richelieu: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Leadership

In this interview, the editors of Clio’s Psyche question political scientist and psychobiographer Elizabeth Wirth Marvick about her life and career in psychopolitics. She recounts her Chicago childhood as the daughter of sociologist Louis Wirth, her training at Chicago and Columbia, her psychoanalysis, and her teaching, chiefly at UCLA. She names influences including Harold Lasswell and Nathan Leites, while expressing reservations about Heinz Kohut and parts of Erik Erikson’s work. She describes her research on Louis XIII, drawing on Héroard’s daily record of the king’s childhood, and on Cardinal Richelieu, drawing on his handwritten corrections. She reports the reception of Louis XIII: The Making of a King and The Young Richelieu. She outlines her current comparative study of six Virginia founders, from Washington to Monroe, which she hopes will indicate what childrearing produces moderate, creative leadership. Marvick characterizes her method as spiral analysis, moving between childhood experience and adult political decisions. She prefers plain description to psychological terminology, rejects the charge of reductionism, is cautious about appraising living political figures, and discusses the difficulties of psychobiography of artists. She names psychobiographies she admires and concludes that the field should tie personality inquiry to the decision patterns academics ask about.

abolition of slavery, Charles Darwin, Frederick Law Olmsted (FLO), psychohistory, slavery

This article introduces two companion essays in the slavery and serfdom special issue, on Charles Darwin, Frederick Law Olmsted, and slavery. The authors describe a close transatlantic connection between New England intellectuals and their British counterparts in the decades before the American Civil War. They report that Olmsted’s books on the antebellum South, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860), were favorably received in Britain and influenced Mill and Darwin. The authors maintain that both men considered slavery immoral but reacted to it differently. They contend that Darwin, raised in a family anti-slavery tradition, responded with strong emotion, identification with the enslaved, and empathy. They contend that Olmsted, who resisted the abolitionist position, kept a detached attitude toward the enslaved themselves. The authors state that the essays that follow consider psychological reasons for these differing reactions and what slavery meant in each man’s life.

abolition of slavery, Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, The Loves of the Plants, psychohistory, slavery

This article, in the special issue on slavery and serfdom, is a psychobiographical study of Charles Darwin’s attitudes toward slavery, drawing on his letters, Beagle diary, notebooks, Journal of Researches, and family recollections. The author locates the roots of his anti-slavery feeling in the abolitionism of his grandfathers Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, his sisters’ letters, and his encounters with a freed slave in Edinburgh and with slavery in Brazil in 1832. It argues that Darwin’s identification with the vulnerability of slaves shaped his work: it inspired a notebook passage linking slaves, animals, and humans in common descent; it underlay his 1845 anger at Charles Lyell’s account of American slavery in Travels in North America, which the author reads as expressing Darwin’s own exposed position as a secret evolutionary theorist; and it appears in his comparison of himself to a flogged slave while writing The Origin of Species, following his reading of Frederick Law Olmsted. It contends that hostility toward the Union during the American Civil War compromised Darwin’s convictions, that he later misremembered his position, and that his 1866 anger at his son William over the Governor Edward Eyre controversy reflected unwelcome memories of that compromise, which remorse then let him repress. It concludes that Darwin’s empathy for slaves was unusually intense and enduring, and attributes it to family influences and his own vulnerability.

abolition of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted (FLO), A Journey in the Back Country, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, A Journey Through Texas, psychohistory, Puritanism, racism, slavery

This article offers a psychobiographical interpretation of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), landscape architect and Superintendent of Central Park, focused on his attitude toward slavery. The author draws on Olmsted’s dispatches to the New York Daily Times and the New York Tribune from his early-1850s journeys through the slave states, on the books that grew from them, including A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States and The Cotton Kingdom, and on his letters in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Applying concepts of identification, repression, and unconscious rage, it argues that Olmsted, who opposed slavery and favored gradual emancipation over abolition, could empathize only with people with whom he could identify. It compares the dispatch and book versions of his account of an overseer flogging an enslaved girl, and contrasts his detachment there with his indignation over the treatment of sailors and schoolboys. It attributes this pattern to his boyhood in a series of boarding schools run by rural clergymen after his father remarried, and to his own experience directing work forces, which it says allowed him to identify with overseers. It proposes that Olmsted regarded the enslaved as childlike, seeing in them a repressed part of himself, and that this shaped his paternalist idea of amelioration. Turning to letters of 1863, written after the Emancipation Proclamation, in which Olmsted called for the extermination of Southern slaveholders, it concludes that a rage originating in his childhood produced a sense of victimhood that blocked empathy with the suffering of the enslaved.

Athenian citizens, Athens, childhood slavery, infanticide, parental debt, Plutarch, psychohistory, Solon

This article considers the enslavement of children for parental debt in ancient Athens and the wider Greek world. The author maintains that in antiquity the consequences of a father’s offenses, including unpaid debt, could be visited on his children. Before the archonship of Solon, around 592/1 B.C.E., an Athenian citizen could pledge himself as surety or sell his children into slavery, and the author judges it likely that most debt slaves died in bondage. The article cites ancient writers, including Plutarch, Aristotle, Lysias, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Menander, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Isocrates. It reports that Solon’s cancellation of debts forbade loans secured on the person of the debtor or his children and brought back those who had been sold. It contends that these protections covered citizens only, leaving resident aliens, freedmen, and visiting foreigners able to sell their children, and that similar prohibitions in other Greek city-states cannot be assumed. It also describes slave traders who profited from buying children and trained or sold them as prostitutes or eunuchs. The author proposes that references to child sale reflect an unconscious Athenian ambivalence toward children, especially sons, who were needed to inherit property, maintain family worship, and care for aged parents. The author further suggests that these references disclose infanticidal urges, and that sale may have been practiced covertly or may have remained a parental fantasy.

Andrew Brink, Ann Marie Plane, Edward Cody, North America, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum Biography Research Group, serfdom, slavery

In this article, the author recounts an inquiry prompted by a remark at a Psychohistory Forum Biography Research Group meeting. Lee Shneidman of Adelphi University stated there that serfdom existed in some New Netherland settlements, including Orange and Kings counties, and continued under the patroon system on estates such as those of the Livingston and Van Rensselaer families until the New York legislature ended it in 1791 or 1792. The author distinguishes slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude, and reports asking Shneidman whether the alleged serfs were bound to the land, worked the lord’s land, held land in common, and needed permission to marry. Shneidman’s answers supported his thesis. The author then reports consulting colleagues. Andrew Brink relays the view of historian Patricia U. Bonomi that colonial Dutch and Huguenot settlements had slavery and tenancy but never serfdom. Edward Cody dismisses the idea, and Ann Marie Plane prefers the terms patroonship and tenancy. The author also reports reading A Factious People, Stubborn for Liberty, The Patroon’s Domain, and Colonial New York: A History, and finding tenant-landlord disputes and feudal language but no direct evidence of serfdom. The author concludes that it is quite unlikely that bondage approximating European serfdom was created in the Dutch Hudson Valley settlements or extended into the early national period. The author remains open to new evidence and invites Shneidman and others to submit responses.

antisemitism, Clio’s Psyche, Frederick Law Olmsted: Passion of a Public Artist, Melvin Kalfus, memorial, psychobiography, psychohistory

This memorial tribute marks the death on February 24, 2002, of Melvin Kalfus, psychobiographer, psychohistorian, adjunct professor of history, and business executive. The author recounts his life in sequence: childhood respiratory illness and a family move to Arizona, where he encountered anti-Semitism; an engineering degree at Purdue University; work as a journalist, community relations director, and advertising executive, retiring in 1989 as senior vice president; a doctorate in history from New York University in 1988; and later teaching in Florida and a term as synagogue president. The author reports his 1984 lymphoma diagnosis, his treatment, and his growing dependence on supplemental oxygen, and characterizes his response to illness as courageous. The tribute surveys his scholarship, including Frederick Law Olmsted: Passion of a Public Artist (1990), which the author regards as a major contribution, and the article “Richard Wagner as Cult Hero: The Tannhäuser Who Would Be Siegfried,” which received the International Psychohistorical Association’s Glenn Davis Award. It also mentions an unpublished study of Herbert Graf. It reports his service to the association as secretary, president, treasurer, and newsletter editor, and his work for Clio’s Psyche as special-issue editor and referee. Drawing on Kalfus’s published interviews, the author describes his insistence on rigorous standards in psychohistory. The author concludes that Kalfus will be remembered for scholarship, teaching, methodology, institution building, and courage.

Alma Kalfus, historiography, Melvin Kalfus, memorial, primary sources, psychobiography, psychohistory, scholar

This memorial tribute to the psychohistorian Mel Kalfus (1931–2002) is written by a friend who characterizes his work as grounded in traditional historiographic standards and close attention to primary sources. The author recalls a correspondence beginning in the early 1980s, Kalfus’s expertise on nineteenth-century America, New York City, Wagner, and German-Jewish relations, and his service to the International Psychohistorical Association as president and as treasurer. It notes his history doctorate from New York University and the publication of his dissertation as Frederick Law Olmsted: Passion of a Public Artist (1990). The author recounts an anecdote in which Kalfus’s business associates rejected his suggestion of unconscious motivation in a fatal accident, and says he uses the story in teaching to illustrate denial, rationalization, and irrationality.

anti-slavery, Charles Darwin, Frederick Law Olmsted, “Genius and Empathy,” Melvin Kalfus, memorial, psychobiography, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum

This memorial tribute, one of several remembrances of the historian and Olmsted biographer Melvin Kalfus (1931–2002) in the issue’s Memorials section, is a personal recollection by Ralph Colp, Jr. The author recounts how the friendship began in 1990, when both men gave papers at the Psychohistory Forum under the title “Genius and Empathy,” drawn from their biographies of Charles Darwin and Frederick Law Olmsted. He reports that his own paper described Darwin’s empathy for slaves, while Kalfus’s paper argued that Olmsted lacked it. He describes their later meetings in New York, where they discussed current work, Forum events, and books. He notes that he did not share Kalfus’s Zionism but learned from him about Ludwig Lewisohn, and he thinks Kalfus might have written Lewisohn’s biography had he lived near the relevant library. The author recalls Kalfus’s conversation as intellectually exhilarating and closes by expressing the pain of knowing their talks have ended.

Amla Kalfus, Frederick Law Olmsted: Passion of a Public Artist, Melvin Kalfus, memorial, New York University (NYU), psychobiography, psychohistory, student

This memorial tribute to Melvin Kalfus (1931–2002), part of the journal’s memorial section, is written by his former doctoral advisor and friend. The author recalls Kalfus entering New York University’s graduate history program in his mid-forties while serving as an advertising agency vice president. He completed his coursework while working full-time and raising a family. The author recounts advising him to take graduate psychology courses for a dissertation on Frederick L. Olmsted, and Kalfus taking eight, becoming a psychohistorian and psychobiographer. The author describes helping publish the dissertation as Frederick Law Olmsted: Passion of a Public Artist in a New York University Press series and judges it a standard work on Olmsted. The author characterizes Kalfus’s roughly fifteen-year illness as met with determination to continue his profession, mentions their shared interest in sports, and concludes by expressing gratitude for the friendship.

9/11, antisemitism, defense mechanisms, infantile regression, psychohistory, psychology of terrorism, trauma

In this article, the author offers a psychohistorical view of anti-Semitism in the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The author contends that the attacks prompted a collective regression to earlier stages of development, pointing to public idealization of police and firefighters and a wish for a strong protective father figure. In this account, higher public regard for Rudy Giuliani and President George W. Bush reflects a change in perception, not in the men. The author proposes that scapegoating accompanies such regression and reports having catalogued, over six months, a rise in the number and stridency of pro-Palestinian articles in national and local print media. Many of these come from long-standing opponents of Israel, including the Roman Catholic Church, mainline Protestant denominations, and the political left. Noting that the articles urge reduced American support for Israel and no other change in American conduct, the author compares this with the three grievances Osama bin Laden stated after the U.S.S. Cole attack. The author characterizes the selectivity as intellectually dishonest and presumptively anti-Semitic, cites a 1967 statement by Martin Luther King, Jr. equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and applies the judgment to Jerry Brown and Pat Buchanan. The author also discusses Susan Sontag’s foreword to Leonard Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden, and reads passages from Genesis and Numbers. The author concludes that critics of Israel have a duty to explain why they focus on the Levant, and that those who do not are making common cause with the Islamist attackers.

Clio’s Psyche, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, letter to the editor, Michael Nielsen, psychohistory, war, “A Window on the Middle East”

This letter to the editor responds to “A Window on the Middle East,” Michael Nielsen’s piece in Clio’s Psyche (March 2002), which describes a friend’s rage at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Writing as a Holocaust survivor who was a hidden child during World War II, the author says she shares that anger but directs it at what she characterizes as Islamic demonizing of Jews and Israelis. She is sharply critical of Arabs and Palestinians, whom she faults for unwillingness to accept responsibility for the conflict. She attributes this to a sense of honor bound up with never admitting wrongdoing and to a self-image as the injured party. She contends that the Arab world started the 1948 war by rejecting the United Nations partition, and that its rejection is responsible for the refugee problem and the later violence. Drawing on family history, she asks whether Israelis can respond otherwise given Palestinian slogans and what she describes as the teaching of hatred to Palestinian children. She maintains that reciprocal hatred only produces further bloodshed and that the conflict can end only through dialogue in which each side’s fears are acknowledged and its humanity restored. She cites the documentary Promises on Palestinian and Israeli children attempting reconciliation. She reports her work with a survivors’ group on reconciliation, states that she opposes West Bank settlements and supports a divided Jerusalem and a Palestinian state, and invites Nielsen’s friend to begin a dialogue with her.

9/11, Charles Strozier, meeting report, National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP), Phyllis Cohen, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, psychology of terrorism, “Trauma and Change: Psychoanalysis in a Time of Crisis,” Vamık Volkan

This meeting report covers the April 27, 2002 New York City conference “Trauma and Change: Psychoanalysis in a Time of Crisis,” held by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP), which focused on psychoanalytic understanding of September 11 and its impact. It summarizes three presentations. Vamik Volkan, the main speaker, argues that religious fundamentalism cannot be understood without the concept of large group regression. He lists twenty signs, among them rallying around a leader, division of the world into followers seen as good and non-followers seen as bad, shared projective and introjective processes, magical thinking, and efforts at purification. He cites the Taliban, Nazi Germany, Turkey, Latvia under Soviet rule, and Slobodan Milosevic’s revival of the Battle of Kosovo. He compares the Branch Davidians at Waco with the Taliban, discusses Osama bin Laden’s family background, and maintains that democracy does not protect groups from regression. Charles Strozier draws on his ongoing interview study to discuss the apocalyptic dimension of the attacks, differing zones of sadness, and the rhetorical structures of victims’ language. He proposes that the attacks represent a new kind of violence tied to the evolution of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Phyllis Cohen, who worked with survivors, families, and rescuers near Ground Zero, faults national and international media framing and stresses the therapeutic value of telling personal stories. She reports that PTSD symptoms later showed that storytelling alone was insufficient, and she believes the courage of ordinary people will be remembered most.