Volume 10 Number 2September 2003

The Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause, politics, psychohistory, social change, unconscious motivations, war

In this symposium response, part of the symposium on Lloyd deMause’s The Emotional Life of Nations (Karnac, 2002), the author is admiring of the book and advocates for it. The author credits deMause with a more sustained treatment of unconscious motivation in history than any that has followed Freud’s opening of the field, and acknowledges that few scholars, and very few professional historians, accept deMause’s theories. The author contends that the book’s standing depends on wider availability, observes that neither a university press nor a commercial press has taken it up, and asks whether a promised sequel on why nations go to war will fare better. The author compares its prospects to the eventual reception of Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Mills’s The Power Elite, and Ellul’s The Technological Society, while noting that deMause asks more of readers. The author maintains that deMause’s research findings on traumatic childrearing undercut moralizing about war, and concludes that his ideas warrant the fullest possible hearing.

Andrew Brink, Clio’s Psyche, David Felix, The Emotional Life of Nations, Fred Alford, Howard Stein, Joseph Dowling, Lee Shneidman, Leon Rappoport Lloyd deMause, Peter W. Petschauer, psychohistory

This article is the editor’s introduction to the symposium on Lloyd deMause’s The Emotional Life of Nations, which Howard Stein reviewed in “Exploring The Emotional Life of Nations” in the December 2002 issue of Clio’s Psyche. The author recounts how the symposium came about at the request of editorial board member Andrew Brink. Board members Fred Alford, Joseph Dowling, Peter Petschauer, and Leon Rappoport contributed comments. After Brink questioned why historians were not more accepting of deMause’s work, the author invited the historians Lee Shneidman, David Felix, and Lawrence Tritle, each with at least one book of psychohistory to his name. The author reports that the result is markedly divergent comments from six historians, a literary scholar, a political scientist, and a psychologist. The article states that the views expressed are the contributors’ own. It then reviews deMause’s career, describing his founding of the Institute for Psychohistory, the International Psychohistorical Association, and the Journal of Psychohistory. It characterizes his work on childhood as innovative and influential, and his work on historical group fantasies as less widely accepted. It reports that he is admired within the association for his devotion to children’s rights and opposition to war.

childrearing, Clio’s Psyche, The Civilizing Process, The Emotional Life of Nations, The History of Childhood, Lloyd deMause, Norbert Elias, psychohistory

This response article, part of the symposium on Lloyd deMause’s The Emotional Life of Nations, replies to the book itself, which the author describes as holding few surprises for readers of deMause’s earlier work, including The History of Childhood. The author credits deMause with a lasting evocation of the suffering in childhood but questions his practice of naming a single real reason for complex events, citing his explanation of the first Gulf War. Two examples illustrate the concern. The first is deMause’s reading of Oliner and Oliner’s The Altruistic Personality, which the author contends is at odds with the study’s appendix figures on physical punishment of rescuers (32 percent) and non-rescuers (39 percent). The second is deMause’s claim linking England’s earlier reform of childrearing to its lead in science, democracy, and industrialization, which the author notes coincided with leadership in colonization and imperialism. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, the author proposes that violence has changed in quality, becoming bureaucratic and organized by states rather than declining, so that gentler childrearing need not imply a less violent society. The author faults deMause for disregarding multiple causality and for not engaging Elias, Christopher Lasch, Alice Miller, and Wilfred Bion, whose work the author suggests could add complexity. The author concludes that the strength of deMause’s idea is also its weakness, expresses admiration for his three decades of persistence, and wishes his theory drew more on the work of others.

Adolf Hitler, The Emotional Life of Nations, empirical metahistory, Lloyd deMause, psychoclasses, psychohistory, World War II (WWII)

This response article belongs to the symposium on The Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause’s book, and is a historian’s reply to it. The author says the range of the book’s neurological, clinical, and historical evidence makes it hard to assess in full, and that the neurobiological literature is less unanimous than deMause suggests. He questions whether deMause’s claim that war and social violence restage fetal trauma follows from that evidence. He asks whether German resentment over the Versailles Treaty reflects childhood abuse or was instead set off by the historical event. He disputes deMause’s account of German enthusiasm for war, pointing to the limited public support for war in 1938 and to the diplomatic successes preceding 1939, and asks how one can document that Germans knew they were courting suicide. He finds the psychoclass concept as hard to define as economic class, and notes an apparent inconsistency in the section on German childrearing. He faults deMause for accepting the revisionist view that Roosevelt provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, citing Joseph Persico’s Roosevelt’s Secret War as a rebuttal, and attributes the error to reliance on secondary sources. Drawing on Weber’s Protestant ethic, Scottish Calvinism, and a review in The New York Review of Books, he asks how psychoclasses relate to the institutions they create and how a group or nation is to be defined. He is favorable toward the Reformation section and concludes that the book’s ideas would enrich current debates on economic growth.

anthropology, childhood, The Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, violence, war

In this response article in the symposium on The Emotional Life of Nations, the author, a historian and psychoanalyst, reviews Lloyd deMause’s book on childhood, violence, and war. The review is framed by Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between hedgehogs and foxes in “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” with deMause cast as a hedgehog and the author as a fox. The author credits the book’s range and its anthropological, clinical, historical, and neurological evidence. The author is critical of its sweeping generalizations across eras, coined terminology, heavy self-citation, minor errors, and missing bibliography, and faults it for not crediting Rudolph Binion with the concept of traumatic repetition. The author maintains that the data do not support deMause’s claims about American presidents’ childhoods, and questions his claim that no American war began in a president’s first year and his four-stage sequence of presidential leadership, citing the 2001 Afghanistan war and the author’s own research on Bill Clinton’s first year. Drawing on psychoanalytic training and roughly a decade of practice with group fantasy analysis, including a 1985 project with Henry Lawton and George Luhrmann, the author regards the method as suggestive only, because analysts’ projections are hard to separate from the material, and argues it needs supervised training. The author reports that funding for a proposed study of this problem was not obtained. The review concludes by hoping deMause’s forthcoming book on war will tighten its argumentation and engage scholars outside his circle.

childrearing, Christine Stansell, The Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause, psychogenic theory, psychohistory

This response article, contributed to the symposium on The Emotional Life of Nations, assesses Lloyd deMause’s book of that title. The author contends that the book is not the history of the emotions that Lucien Febvre called for in 1941. He sets it against Theodore Zeldin’s two volumes on emotion in the series France: 1848-1945 and Peter Gay’s five-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, which he credits with greater range and depth of feeling. He argues that the book is in substance a selective history of childrearing. He maintains that it treats a narrow band of emotion across scattered medieval and modern European, American political, and New Guinea material, and that its psychoclasses displace the nations of its title. He disputes deMause’s claim that changes in childrearing precede social change, holding that the conclusions were fixed before the research began. He also faults the book for dismissing political, economic, and territorial motives for war, for its epigenetic argument, and for reversing the proportions in anthropologists’ reports on maternal love. He contends that deMause’s institute and journal helped generate the data, risking circular reasoning. He questions the Table of Historical Personalities and doubts the closing hope placed in The Parenting Place in Boulder, Colorado. He nonetheless grants that childrearing is a worthy subject and that deMause has helped redress its neglect.

childrearing, The Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause, Nazi Germany, psychohistory

This response article, part of the symposium “The Emotional Life of Nations,” reviews Lloyd deMause’s book The Emotional Life of Nations from the standpoint of a historian of childrearing. The author, Peter W. Petschauer, is admiring of the book, regarding it as extending several areas of psychohistory, and reports that he wrote most of his own articles to modify deMause’s approach. He questions whether history is only the working out of childhood experience. He disputes the attribution of England’s eighteenth-century industrial breakthrough to advanced childrearing, citing child labor, Swiss industrialization, Württemberg’s parliament, differing national economies, and the possibility that German children were treated less harshly than deMause maintains. Drawing on Württemberg’s literacy rate, the music and art of France and Central Europe, letters of the period, and twenty years of data on more than 2,000 eighteenth-century German women artists, musicians, and writers, he contends that many were well treated and supported by their families. He also cites Athens, Rome, and the Etruscans against a fixed link between childrearing and political or cultural forms. He doubts that childrearing alone explains the National Socialist takeover, pointing to older Germans’ accounts of ordinary childhoods and everyday accommodation. He proposes that premodern children grew up in extended households rather than nuclear families, and that role confusion may account for the rage expressed in such societies.

childrearing, The Emotional Life of Nations, George Kren, History of Childhood Quarterly, Lloyd deMause, group fantasy analysis, psychohistory

This response article belongs to the symposium “The Emotional Life of Nations” and replies to Lloyd deMause’s book The Emotional Life of Nations. Writing as a long-time follower of deMause’s psychogenic theory of history, the author recalls a 1973 paper, “Clio and Psyche,” co-written with George Kren and published in History of Childhood Quarterly. He is admiring of the book and identifies three contributions: its documentation of how prenatal and childhood traumas translate into adult behavior, its presentation of the methods and theory of group fantasy analysis, and its proposal for parent training centers. He reports that he was initially skeptical of reading national moods from magazine covers, cartoons, and film advertisements. He remains uneasy with the technique but now finds its imagery and its predictive claims hard to deny. He notes that evidence for the effectiveness of parent training remains anecdotal. He is pessimistic about prospects for enlightened childrearing, citing economic inequality and problems affecting American children. He asks whether good parenting depends on adequate socioeconomic conditions, and what accounts for children who emerge intact from poverty. He concludes that the book’s aims may depend on the economic life of nations.

childhood, The Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause, psychohistory, psychology of terrorism, violence, war

This response belongs to the symposium on The Emotional Life of Nations, which assesses Lloyd deMause’s book of that title. The author confines the review to the book’s historical evidence and declines to judge its cartoon and comic-book sources. He faults deMause for relying at crucial points on his own earlier publications, on articles in the Journal of Psychohistory, which deMause owns and edits, and on cartoons and magazine pieces. Drawing on his own memory and research, he disputes deMause’s accounts of American public feeling during the Cuban missile crisis and of public sanction for the Kennedy assassination. He questions deMause’s reading of Ronald Reagan’s autobiography title, noting that it comes from a line in the film King’s Row. He observes that the chapter on terrorism omits non-Muslim groups such as ETA, the IRA, and the Ku Klux Klan. He questions the sourcing of the claim about Hitler’s beatings, and maintains that stamp images of Athena, Marianne, and Britannia contradict deMause’s account of maternal imagery. He contends that explaining the Holocaust through German childrearing cannot account for the conduct of Britain and France, since history is over-determined. He finds some data on New Guinea of interest and accepts that childrearing has changed. He calls deMause’s closing plea to end child abuse heartfelt but unrelated to history. Citing deMause’s autobiographical remarks in the book, he concludes that the work tells more about its author than about its subject.

E. H. Carr, The Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause, psychohistory, psychology, violence, What Is History?, World War II (WWII)

In this symposium article, part of the symposium on The Emotional Life of Nations, a historian responds to Lloyd deMause’s book of the same title, which the author reports as attributing war and violence to harsh childrearing and to an evolution through successive psychoclasses. Writing from the perspective of history rather than psychology, and drawing on service as an infantry lieutenant in Vietnam, the author opens with E.H. Carr’s discussion of causation in What Is History? and contends that single-factor explanations of war are rarely convincing. He disputes deMause’s claim that happy people do not start wars, citing Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War. He argues that child abuse persisting today undercuts the book’s thesis, and he faults its account of the U.S. Civil War for omitting slavery. He questions its view that soldiers kill without overwhelming guilt, citing Aeschylus’s Persians, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. He also criticizes its treatment of cultures and individuals as uniform, leaving no room for free will, as in the case of Timothy McVeigh. He lists etymological and factual errors, including on genital mutilation and infant exposure. He agrees that historians neglect psychology and regards the book’s discussion of stress-related brain change as valid. He concludes that deMause’s dismissal of historians, focus on child abuse, and jargon discourage receptivity, and that the book overlooks evidence that children were loved, as in Euripides’s Trojan Women.

Basic Books Publishers, The Emotional Life of Nations, The History of Childhood, Lloyd deMause, Martin Kessler, psychohistory

In this article, the author replies to the reviewers in the symposium on The Emotional Life of Nations, addressing Lawrence Tritle, Lee Shneidman, C. Fred Alford, Paul Elovitz, David Felix, and Peter Petschauer. He recounts a publisher’s refusal to accept the opening claim of The History of Childhood. He maintains that later histories of childhood ignore the primary-source evidence he and his associates gathered and published in the Journal of Psychohistory. He is sharply critical of Linda Pollock’s diary-based method, offers a prize for evidence of a “good-enough” mother before the eighteenth century, and attributes critics’ rejection of his work to personal resistance rooted in their own childhood experience. He contends that neurobiological research supports a developmental account of war and violence, which he says his forthcoming War as a Psychological Disorder will expand. He answers reviewers point by point. He disputes Alford’s reading of the Oliners’ study and of declining per-capita rates of violent death, and rejects Elovitz’s claims about his training as a historian and psychoanalyst. He denies Felix’s account of his childrearing modes and of his New Guinea chapter, and disputes Petschauer’s paraphrases concerning nuclear families, Reagan, and Rudolph Binion. He maintains that his findings are not anti-economic. He reports that few academics read or cite his work, and concludes that more loving treatment of children would make the world happier and more peaceful.

Erik Erikson, Paul H. Elovitz, Pioneers of Insight: The Making and Makers of a Psychological Society, political psychology, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud

This article introduces the Makers and Making of Psychohistory research project and its planned book, Pioneers of Insight: The Making and Makers of a Psychological Society. Writing as a participant-observer and as editor of Clio’s Psyche, the author surveys the development of psychohistory, psychobiography, and psychopolitics, generally without distinguishing among them. He recounts early applied psychoanalysis among Freud’s circle and the American figures Preserved Smith, L. Pierce Clark, and Harold Lasswell, then postwar work by Erik Erikson, Robert Jay Lifton, and others, William Langer’s 1957 American Historical Association address, and the founding of organizations and journals from the 1970s, including the Group for the Use of Psychology in History, the International Psychohistorical Association, and the International Society for Political Psychology. He observes that the field, unlike other historical paradigms, has lacked systematic graduate training, and reports the closure of The Psychohistory Review and of the Center for the Study of Violence and Human Survival. He recounts his own involvement since the 1960s and reports that the journal has published 44 interviews and 17 obituaries. He offers provisional observations: major contributions come later in life, scholars usually reach the field independently of its well-known figures, and women are underrepresented outside the International Society for Political Psychology. He describes the project as a study of contributors’ backgrounds, education, and views, and is concerned that psychoanalytic language is accepted while its insights are rejected. He invites readers to share recollections, conduct interviews, and submit documentary manuscripts.

book review, capitalism, Denise Paraná, family conflicts, Getulio Vargas, Lula: O Filho do Brasil, poverty, presidential psychobiography, psychohistory

This review of Denise Paraná’s Lula: O Filho do Brasil (Lula: Brazil’s Son), a Portuguese-language biographical study of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (São Paulo: Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2002), begins by observing that Brazilian political biography seldom examines leaders’ private lives. It suggests that the book, originally a University of São Paulo doctoral dissertation and first published in 1996, may end that reluctance. The reviewer describes a work modeled on Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sanchez and built on interviews Paraná conducted in the early 1990s with Lula and several siblings. It applies Lewis’s culture of poverty, and her proposed alternative, a culture of transformation, to the family’s move from the northeast to São Paulo, Lula’s training as a lathe mechanic, and his rise in the auto-industry labor movement. The reviewer reports that Paraná draws on Freudian concepts, including the Oedipal conflict, to interpret family accounts of Lula’s childhood, and that she presents these readings as unprovable hypotheses. He judges them no less defensible than many psychohistorical analyses and better grounded than many, given the interview material. Extending her approach, the reviewer suggests that the socialist ideology of Lula and his supporters may serve psychological functions comparable to migrants’ positive memories of the rural northeast. He contends that Lula’s presidential policies are close to those of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and concludes that Lula’s success will depend more on who he is than on new programs.

Ku Klux Klan (KKK), psychobiography, psychohistory, racism, Robert C. Byrd, United States Senate

This article considers why U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd (Democrat of West Virginia), after pledging silence for the duration of the 2003 Iraq war, resumed pointed personal criticism of President George W. Bush following Bush’s landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The author recounts Byrd’s career: his upbringing in a coal-mining family in southern West Virginia, wartime shipyard work, and membership in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s. Byrd has described the membership as brief, while the author cites a former governor’s claim that Byrd held a leadership role. The author also covers his voting record on welfare, Vietnam, and civil rights, his rise to Majority Leader and Appropriations chairman, and his direction of federal spending to West Virginia. Contrasting Byrd with Senator Sam Ervin, the author distinguishes patrician and poor-white strands of Southern Democratic conservatism and attributes Byrd’s racial views to direct economic competition with Black workers. The author is sharply critical of Byrd’s record on race and of his conduct in the Senate, and proposes that Byrd seeks deference and recognition, tracing this to his background and lack of formal education. The author contends that Byrd’s attacks on Bush respond to personal affronts and share a psychological source with his Klan involvement. Yet the author agrees with Byrd’s argument that the war was illegal and is strongly critical of Bush’s carrier appearance, drawing unfavorable historical comparisons. The author concludes that Byrd’s denunciation may be worth tolerating his faults and may have shamed the president somewhat.

9/11, American values, Audie Murphy, Bush administration, Davy Crockett, Jessica Lynch, Korean War, mythologizing, psychobiography, Sgt. York, trauma, Vietnam War, violence against women

In this article, the author considers the public construction of Pfc. Jessica Lynch during the 2003 Iraq War. He opens by observing that American wars have traditionally produced heroes, such as Davy Crockett, Sgt. York, and Audie Murphy, who reinforce national mythology, and that the Korean and Vietnam wars did not, and he suggests the post-9/11 War on Terrorism likewise lacked a human face. He recounts the April 3 Washington Post report of Lynch fighting until out of ammunition, her appearance on the covers of Newsweek and People, and the contrary account in a May 18 BBC documentary, which described an accidental crash, no gunshot or stab wounds, kind treatment by Iraqi medical staff, and a rescue filmed after her captors had left. He notes that the U.S. Government stayed silent and that Lynch was reported as having no memory of events. The author speculates that she functions as a fantasy figure created by males for males, comparable to female video-game warriors, and suggests this may involve gender transgression and anxieties over castration. He connects this to reports of violence against women at West Point and the Air Force Academy and reads the rescue as a reparative fantasy that redistributes heroism among men. He concludes that the episode typifies warfare in the new millennium and that what happened to Lynch, and to Iraq, remains unknown.

book review, international relations, Israel on the Couch: The Psychology of the Peace Process, Ofer Grosbard, peace process, psychoanalysis, psychohistory

This book review of Ofer Grosbard’s Israel on the Couch: The Psychology of the Peace Process (State University of New York Press, 2003) considers a psychoanalytic study of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The reviewer opens with sadness, writing ten days into the 2003 Iraq war, and doubts that awareness of leaders’ inner conflicts or of societies’ mutual hatred will change anything. The reviewer reports that Grosbard, an Israeli-born clinical psychologist whose politics moved from right to left during his own psychotherapy, sees Israel as a nation in transition from its religious past toward secularism, comparable to an adolescent seeking identity. The review describes his extended parallels between national and individual development. These include Israel’s founding as an endangered infancy, a characterization of Israel in clinical terms, the United Nations as a therapy group, and American and European attitudes toward Israel as contrasting parental styles. It also covers his psychoanalytic readings of Jewish and Christian religious history, Freud’s account of anti-Semitism as projection, and national anthems, along with his proposal to revise Israel’s anthem. The reviewer regards the four-page postscript highly. It applies Mahler’s separation-individuation to Israeli-Palestinian relations and proposes that the two peoples are too merged for separation to occur. The reviewer concludes by noting Grosbard’s aim of advancing the peace process by urging Israelis to understand Palestinian and Arab positions and pain, and hopes readers will attempt this.

book review, group identity, Islamic community, Muhammed ibn Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim, Muhammad and the Rise of Islam: The Creation of Group Identity, New York University School of Medicine, psychobiography, psychohistory, Subhash C. Inamdar

This review assesses Subhash C. Inamdar’s Muhammad and the Rise of Islam: The Creation of Group Identity (2001), which joins a psychobiography of Muhammad to a group psychohistory of the early Islamic community, or umma. The reviewer describes its four parts: two on psychological, psychoanalytic, and sociological perspectives on group formation, and two on pre-Islamic Arabia and the rise of Islam. Drawing on Erikson and Freud, Inamdar links Muhammad’s drive to forge a new group identity to being orphaned early, his dependence on extended family, and the support of his wife Khadija. The book proposes three principles of group formation: linking members’ identities to the group’s, meeting needs for well-being, safety, and justice through social institutions, and combining identification with a leader and with fellow members. Inamdar attributes Islam’s spread and durability to Muhammad’s intuitive adherence to these principles, citing the umma, the conversion of tribal raids into jihad, almsgiving, and the pact between Helpers and Emigrants in Medina. The reviewer judges the book informative and suggestive, finds the theoretical chapters useful to teachers and researchers and the final two parts engaging, and suggests general readers might have been better served had the social science been woven into the narrative. He notes Inamdar’s view that Islam’s message of reconciliation speaks to a world facing mutual destruction, and recalls Islam’s Golden Age of scientific inquiry.

Christianity, Clio’s Psyche, Islamic fundamentalists, Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Osama bin Laden, prejudice, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, racism, religion, war

This response article replies to Nancy Kobrin’s “Psychoanalytic Explorations of the New Moors: Converts for Jihad” (Clio’s Psyche, March 2003), taking up her references to medieval and early modern Spanish history. The author agrees with her observation that Osama bin Laden and many Arabs favor full-blooded Arabs over converts to Islam, but maintains that Spanish history does not support her generalizations and that her analysis relies partly on statements by bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists about Iberia. The author contends that the Muslims’ expulsion from Castile in 1492, the basis of the so-called Al Andalus Syndrome, was not a crucial loss, since Islamic civilization was already declining through internal struggles. The article recounts the 711 conquest under Musa and Tariq, Arab–Berber conflict, the intellectual flourishing of Muslim Spain and translation at Toledo, the Berber-led revolt after about 1000, and the division into small states. It attributes the ruin of Muslim Spain’s achievements to North African Muslim forces rather than to Christians. The author compares 1492 with 1924, the abolition of the Caliphate, arguing that emphasis on these dates lets fundamentalists avoid responsibility for the collapse of Muslim civilizations. The author concludes that those civilizations flourished in secular states open to Greco-Roman, Hindu, and Chinese ideas, and that fundamentalists destroyed them.

Christianity, Clio’s Psyche, Islam, J. Lee Shneidman, military expulsion, psychohistory, religion, response article, war

In this response article, the author replies to Lee J. Shneidman’s comments on the author’s earlier essay about Spanish history, and disputes his reading of it. The author maintains that the essay does not claim Christians destroyed the glory of Muslim Spain. The claim, the author says, is that Muslims experienced, and continue to experience, their military defeat and expulsion as though Christians had destroyed it. The author uses the word destroyed in a Kleinian sense of feeling annihilated to the point of losing one’s identity. In support, the author cites Paul Fregosi’s account of Boabdil’s last look at Granada and Akbar S. Ahmed’s concept of the Al Andalus Syndrome, which is tied to an inability to mourn the lost land and a fixation on reconquering it. The author also cites Bernard Lewis and Malise Ruthven on a doctrine of irredentism, and characterizes the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as reactions to defeat. The author contends that this outlook belongs to Islam generally and not only to Islamists, that 1492 looms large for the ummah in all its diversity, and that a passage in Robert Baer’s Sleeping with the Devil refers to Arabs and the ummah as well as to Osama bin Laden and fundamentalists.

9/11, bias, Clio’s Psyche, Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Islam, pathology, prejudice, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, religion

This response article replies to Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin’s “Psychoanalytic Explorations of the New Moors: Converts for Jihad,” published in Clio’s Psyche in March 2003, and is sharply critical of it. The author summarizes Kobrin’s argument that a dangerous subset of converts to Islam, the “New Moors,” is identified with by most Muslims through shared shame and humiliation. Kobrin attributes that shame to unresolved mourning for the loss of Andalus and to imitative behavior. The author contends that psychological writing which pathologizes those linked to the September 11 attacks is open to bias and lacks credibility unless its writer also examines comparable behavior in his or her own group or nation. He faults the article for not mentioning the Inquisition and Christian forced conversions, or the conduct of U.S. air and naval forces in Iraq, when it discusses coerced conversion and Osama bin Laden. He maintains that such writing borders on hate speech and that its authors bear some responsibility if it supports military action. He argues that the U.S. response in Afghanistan and Iraq shows the dynamic of unresolved mourning that Kobrin ascribes to Muslims. He draws partly on his earlier “Emotions and Ideology.”

Christianity, David Lotto, Islam, psychohistory, religious criticism

In this response article, the author replies to David Lotto’s “Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Other as Rationalization of Vengeance,” which criticized the author’s earlier essay on Islam. The author disputes Lotto’s view that an unflattering assessment of Islam is for that reason false, and rejects his position that a valid view requires equal criticism of Christianity, the Christian West, and the United States. The author maintains that criticisms of either religion should be judged by the facts and the cogency of the argument, not by balance. The author contends that evenhandedness can give an illusion of balance at the expense of accuracy, and treats Lotto’s personal feelings as relevant only to how they bear on the facts. In support, the author points to Salman Rushdie and Ibn Warraq, both raised as Muslims, whom the author describes as regarding Islamism as inseparable from Islam.