Volume 19 Number 3December 2012

Aurora massacre, domestic terrorism, emotional maturity, The Ethnic Imperative, gender roles, group fantasy, gun control, James Holmes, mass killings, negative identity, psychohistory, psychology, violence

In this article, part of the special issue on terrorism, the author interprets the July 20, 2012 shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in which 12 people were killed and dozens wounded, as part of a sequence of American mass shootings. The sequence includes Columbine (1999), Virginia Tech (2007), Fort Hood (2009), and the August 2012 Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Working from police and news reports, and acknowledging how little is known of the accused gunman’s inner life, the author applies Erik Erikson’s concept of negative identity and Rudolph Binion’s concept of traumatic reliving. The author proposes that American gun culture is bound up with narratives of westward expansion and with male identification with the aggressor. The author also proposes that the accused gunman’s identification with the Joker of the Batman stories expresses a negative identity that American audiences may share unconsciously. The author further contends that the shootings enact the rage of men affected by changing gender roles and by corporate layoffs since the mid-1980s, repeating psychologically the injuries of the workplace. The author disputes the view that such shootings are isolated acts by lone gunmen, warns that conditions for further violence persist, and, citing Peter Petschauer, points to public noise and neglected shared space as subtler forms of violence. The author concludes that this analysis may make sense of the killings and of the fit between individual and group that is a core concern of psychohistory.

childhood trauma, domestic terrorism, Gabby Giffords, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, mass shootings, Milwaukee Sikh temple shooting, neo-Nazis, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, psychology, violence, Wade Michael Page

This article interprets the August 5, 2012 shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin by Wade Michael Page from press accounts, Anti-Defamation League reports, and Reid Melroy’s profile of mass killers. The authors place the attack beside the 2012 Colorado theater shooting by James Holmes and the 2011 Tucson shooting by Jared Loughner. They contend that each perpetrator has a distinct psychological history and that only Page’s attack fits a definition of terrorism as violence for a political objective. They compare Page with Anders Breivik, characterizing both as white supremacists who targeted people regarded as outsiders. The authors follow Page’s life from his mother’s death and his father’s absence in adolescence through Army service at Fort Bragg, where they report a white supremacist subculture, to his 1998 general discharge and his place in skinhead music and activist circles. They attribute the attack to accumulated financial, occupational, and personal losses and to a sense of victimization that Melroy identifies as common among mass killers, and they characterize it as a suicide mission. They conclude that Page, immersed in a subculture of bigotry, victimization, and violence, turned his sense of failure into rage directed at the Sikhs.

Aminat Kurbanova, Caucasus, ethnic conflict, Maria Khorosheva, murder-suicide, Muslim ideology, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, terrorism, violence, women suicide bombers

This article examines women’s suicide attacks in the North Caucasus, taking as its starting point the August 2012 attack in the Dagestani village of Chirkei and a report of 46 women who carried out 26 attacks in Russian territories over twelve years, chiefly in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Moscow. The author disputes the view that these women act mainly to avenge husbands killed by Russian forces, noting that few of those involved were widows and that some were teenagers or professionally established. The author draws on interviews from Polygon of Satan about the Soviet and post-Soviet crisis, and on Weston’s and Volkan’s work on societal crisis, chosen trauma, and externalization of aggression. The author contends that violence became the norm after 1991, that ethnic elites played on fears and historical myths, and that ethnic wars followed, displacing almost two million of the Caucasus’s 25 million people. The author is sharply critical of these elites and of Salafist and Jihadist ideologues, whom the author accuses of exploiting the resulting anxiety and helplessness. The author maintains that these teachers offer women community and a sense of everlasting life in a permanent jihad for a caliphate, rather than independence or social justice. The author concludes with hope in Caucasian women’s human rights activism and civic organizations, which the author sees as contributing to democratic transformation.

American culture, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, Bill Bishop, cultural divide, educational divide, gun culture, idealization, media influence, political divide, psychohistory, violence, warfare

In this article, part of the special issue on the psychology of violence and the uses of enemies (Part II, The Basis of Violence), the author sets out a concern about the divide in the United States between its idealized image and the conduct of some Americans. The author contends that this divide obstructs understanding of violent outbursts by a few people and of their traumatic consequences. The author observes the idealized image in television, film, magazines, advertising, and websites, and contrasts it with news coverage of violence. Examples assembled in support include minor illegalities such as underage drinking, marijuana use, and texting while driving. Others are business practices such as mass dismissals, the use of contract labor to avoid benefits, and the conduct of American bankers before the financial crisis. The author also points to violent vocabulary in political discourse and to war metaphors for policy on drugs and poverty. Further examples are violent media and games, permissive gun culture, and a 2010 American homicide rate compared with that of Western Europe. The author maintains that nearly continuous war in Iraq and Afghanistan has desensitized Americans to violence, and recounts a relative’s view of war as an illness. The author concludes that social pressure to tolerate illegal and violent behavior is so strong that people without a stable conscience or who are less well adjusted cannot resist it, and that society can neither hide from violence nor restrain them.

arts, capitalism, cultural differences, isolation, psychobiography, psychohistory, psychology, sociocultural ideals, violence

In this article, the author, writing from personal experience, sets out a concern about American national character and culture, contrasting it with what he observed on recent trips to Northern Italy and Seoul. He contends that Americans are aggressive, competitive, and lacking in refinement, and he draws on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to attribute this to a constitutional equality that produces a compulsive need to display worth and to conspicuous consumption. He recounts his years as a newspaper columnist reviewing sports and the arts, noting the gap in attendance and pay between American baseball and a visiting Chinese dance company. He proposes that the United States is essentially a masculine nation that neglects aesthetic life, which he says softens aggression, in Freud’s term destrudo. He attributes American anger to lost community, isolation, and an unacknowledged depression that he links to obesity, drug use, and chronic fatigue, citing Edward Shorter’s From the Mind into the Body. He maintains that President Obama did not address national discontent, and he recalls President Carter’s “Malaise Speech” and the consultation with Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism. He concludes that American opportunity coexists with a shadow side, counts himself among those addicted to work and consumption, and suggests Korean jeong and Italian leisure as correctives.

ethnic difference, European Union (EU), Greek politics, ideology, neo-Nazis, political violence, psychohistory, psychology, violence

This article, part of the special issue “The Psychology of Violence and the Uses of Enemies” (Part II: The Basis of Violence), considers political violence in Greece since the EU-imposed austerity measures of 2010. The author assembles examples: news reports of a Golden Dawn member’s on-air assault on two women politicians during Good Morning Greece, stabbings of undocumented immigrants in and around Athens, a government sweep of illegal immigrants, an Olympic athlete’s removal from the team over a tweet, and a newspaper column on tolerance. The author reports a rise in violence directed at those perceived as responsible for the country’s suffering, and at immigrants. The author contends that the violence of groups such as Golden Dawn, which the author characterizes as neo-Nazi, is not confined to a detached fringe. Instead, it expresses the despair, frustration, conspiratorial thinking, and xenophobia of the wider society under economic stress. The author also attributes Greek intolerance in part to a strong nationalism that the author traces to Ottoman rule and the nineteenth-century Great Idea. Questioning typologies that divide violence into self-inflicted, interpersonal, and collective, the author proposes that the television assault reflects gender roles and paternalism in Greek society rather than a straightforward political motive. The author concludes that violence is best approached historically and social-psychologically. Categorization may help with immediate occasions such as crowd control, but deeper causes lie in cultural patterns that resist prediction and legislation.

anger, discrimination, diversity, Kazak, psychobiography, psychohistory, sociocultural differences, Uighur, violence, Western China

This article, in the special issue on the psychology of violence and the uses of enemies, draws on a geographer’s repeated stays in Xinjiang, western China, including a year of dissertation fieldwork in Urumqi, to discuss anger, discrimination, and violence between Uighurs and Han. The author reports observations of pervasive security guards, petty theft, and mutual blame between the two groups. The author also describes job discrimination, bureaucratic bias, and pressure on Uighur and other minority languages and cultures under assimilationist state policy and the official harmonious society slogan. The author is critical of these policies and notes that the state casts minorities as needing guidance toward modernity. The author attributes the July 2009 Urumqi riots, in which more than 200 people died, to accumulated resentment, set off by a false rumor arising from a factory brawl in Guangzhou. The author then applies Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), reading the riots as revenge violence. The author notes Pinker’s point that revenge is more violent where the rule of law is weak, and that China ranks low on that measure. The author contrasts the state’s assimilationism with Elias’s civilizing process. The author concludes that Pinker’s argument could inform efforts to reduce ethnic violence but does not explain Urumqi’s petty crime, which suggests limits to applying the book outside Western contexts.

combat veterans, media influence, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychohistory, psychology, violence, war games, war trauma

This article, part of the special issue on the psychology of violence and the uses of enemies, considers violence committed by American combat veterans after they return home. The authors open by contending that American society is unusually violent and that the media and society reinforce each other’s violence. They invoke the psychoanalytic concepts of splitting and projection to ask what becomes of the need for an enemy when a veteran comes home. They maintain that war is violence not confined to the combat zone, that soldiers trained to kill cannot switch that training off, and that assigning servicemen to torture damages those who carry it out. They are sharply critical of war and of U.S. military practice, including the treatment of soldiers who break down in combat. They attribute veterans’ later child abuse, family violence, and aggression to PTSD and to compulsive repetition of trauma. They cite a 2008 New York Times list of 121 veterans charged with homicide, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, a Vietnam-era acquittal by reason of mental disease, and Sophocles’ Ajax. They report defense arguments that combat adaptations turn maladaptive at home, describe state veterans’ courts, and contrast the purification practices some cultures use for returning warriors. They outline Edward Tick’s non-conventional treatments from War and the Soul. They conclude that brutality required of soldiers abroad may return to the homeland.

Anders Breivik, domestic terrorism, gender differences, James Holmes, psychohistory, psychology, psychosis, Timothy McVeigh, violence, Wade Michael Page

In this article, the author, a psychiatrist, considers mass killings by lone individuals in the special issue on the psychology of violence and the uses of enemies. The cases are Anders Breivik in Norway in July 2011, James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012, and Wade Michael Page at a Sikh temple in August 2012. He reports that these men were socially isolated and had a prolonged incapacity for close relationships. By his own count, women committed only five of 200 notorious killing sprees in the last half-century. He distinguishes such acts from organized genocide, which he says calls for historians, political scientists, and psychohistorians rather than psychiatrists. Drawing on two case histories from his own practice, he proposes that sudden loss of control may be manipulation, psychotic rage, or both. He identifies long-term drug and alcohol use and loss of reality testing as contributing factors. He describes the perpetrators in clinical terms and suggests that Freud’s death instinct and Jung’s shadow have conceptual relevance. He concludes that neither psychiatry nor brain science explains such behavior and that it cannot be reliably predicted or prevented. He notes that refusal of medication and the difficulty of institutionalization limit intervention. He mentions New York Times columnist David Brooks’s call for prevention through strengthening relationships and judges continual psychotherapy for everyone impractical.

domestic terrorism, “going berserk”, Hasan Nidal, homicide, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychohistory, substance dependence, United States military, veterans

In this article, the author considers sudden killings of civilians and fellow service members by U.S. military personnel, which have made the phrase going berserk a familiar media term. The author sketches the Norse Berserkers and the possible role of muscarine, notes the classification of going berserk in DSM-IV as a culture-bound syndrome synonymous with amok, and describes incidents including the 2009 shooting of 13 people at a Texas military base by Captain Hasan Nidal, the 2012 shooting of 16 Afghan civilians by Sergeant Robert Bales, and the 1968 My Lai massacre led by Lieutenant William Calley. The author also cites New York Times counts of killings by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The author disputes the common attribution of such acts to war stress and post-traumatic stress disorder, questioning what PTSD research has yielded. The author instead points to alcohol and earlier brain injury in the Bales case, ideology and an impending deployment in the Nidal case, and, for Calley, speculates about a denial of inner emptiness. The author concludes that soldiers going berserk reflects a complex condition without a single cause, unrelated to any major psychiatric category, and proposes that ancient Greek myth and drama (Achilles, Cleomedes, Ajax, Heracles) offer fuller understanding.

armed conflict, childhood dependency, childrearing, cruelty, human psychology, psychohistory, vulnerable populations, wartime violence

In this article, the author contends that humans are both a nurturing and a killing species, and that caregiving and violence are integral to human nature and to the human situation. The author points to prolonged childhood dependency, omnivorous hunting, and a group/other distinction found across cultures. The piece is part of the special issue section on veterans bringing home the violence of war. It cites scholars including Keith Oatley, David Livingstone Smith, Joanna Bourke, Francis Fukuyama, John Keegan, and Jonathan Shay, and quotes a World War II veteran’s account of atrocities against prisoners, civilians, and enemy dead. Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, is presented as an instance of both heroism and lasting trauma, with reference to Charles Whiting’s biography American Hero. The author proposes that the closeness among soldiers resembles the attachment between mother and infant, so that the death of a unit member can give rise to rage and vengeance. The author also observes that in modern war, leaders removed from combat may order killings of civilians. The author concludes that humanity has depended on killing and is left both triumphant and haunted by it.

childhood trauma, community responses, media influence, psychohistory, psychology, terrorism, violence, vulnerable populations

In this article, the authors take up the psychological effects of terrorism on children, as part of the special issue “The Psychology of Violence and the Uses of Enemies” (Part IV, “Some Reasons for Optimism”). They report research on children affected by attacks in Beslan, Itamar, Toulouse, and Sderot, and on the media exposure of American children during 9/11 and of children in Gaza during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. They contend that children’s post-traumatic symptoms vary under comparable exposure according to their subjective perception and emotional response. They attribute this variation to prior experiences of security and stability, to parental influence, and to the models for coping that teachers, media, and the wider community provide. The authors contrast Beslan, where they report survivors heard accusations against the Russian authorities and were given therapy that involved exploding balloons, with Israel. There they describe a culture of “interpreting terror” for children, drawing on the 2006 Ministry of Education guidance, an interview with an elementary school teacher, and a bereaved father’s public statement after the 2011 Itamar killings. They propose that children cope best when adults show composure, answer questions directly, and convey that normal life will resume. They call for further research.

Aurora massacre, “Now is the Time” project, pervasive enemies, psychohistory, “prismatic effect”, violence, youth groups

In this article, part of the special issue on the psychology of violence and the uses of enemies (Part IV, “Some Reasons for Optimism”), the author responds to the July 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado by considering youth violence and ways of overcoming what she calls pervasive enemies. She draws on the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé’s advocacy of creative expression for transformation of the self. Her evidence consists of youth initiatives in Chicago (the “Now is the Time” theater and library project) and Toronto (the Youth Action Plan, the Youth Challenge Fund, and York University’s NOISE project), news reports, and her experience teaching high school and university students. The author contends that society must recognize violence as having reached crisis proportions. She characterizes schools as places where bullying leaves students fearful, and she identifies peer groups, gangs, violent video games, music, and television as influences on youth. She cautions that anti-social behavior cannot be predicted from playing video games. She proposes a model she terms the prismatic effect, in which interaction with others refracts and transforms the self, and she maintains that creative expression and role-play foster empathy and reduce self-focus. She concludes that community centers should train youth volunteers as role models in arts, sports, and jobs, and that such bridging efforts can integrate young people into productive communities.

emotional responses, generosity, Hurricane Sandy, natural disasters, psychobiography, psychohistory, violence

In this article, the author recounts his experience of Hurricane Sandy in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, where nearly the whole town lost electricity for nine days, and reports what he observed of people’s behavior during the crisis. Citing The Star Ledger on the 2.7 million New Jersey residents who lost power, he describes the cold, the darkness, and the loss of security, and notes strained faces, brief eye contact, volatile emotions, and runs on camping supplies. He reports conversations about who was suffering most and some guilt among those whose power was restored quickly. He describes generosity from a supermarket, the mayor, college staff, volunteers, and emergency workers. He also reports anger, fear, and self-protective impulses. He saw selfishness only in television news stories, not in his own community, but he senses anger beneath the surface, for example in aggressive driving. He characterizes media attention to gasoline shortages as producing a self-fulfilling prophecy of long lines, which he describes as orderly. The author concludes that people mostly responded in a civilized manner. He expresses pride in his neighbors, community, and college, and cautions that societal breakdown remains possible under severe stress.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, contemporary violence, debate, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, Robert Jay Lifton, sociocultural norms, Steven Pinker

In this article, the author considers the debate between Steven Pinker and Robert Jay Lifton over whether the present is more or less violent than earlier periods. The debate followed Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, a January 2012 exchange in the New York Times, and an invitation from the Social Research Center for Public Scholarship at The New School. The author outlines Pinker’s thesis that violence has declined, which he explains through a pacification process in which the state monopolizes legitimate force. The author questions that explanation, noting that fewer than a quarter of Pinker’s 21 worst atrocities predate the modern nation state, and faults Pinker’s reluctance to consider neurobiological explanations. The author proposes that epigenetic change, illustrated by reported shifts in male corpus callosum size alongside changing socialization of masculinity, may help explain reduced interpersonal violence. Citing David Gill’s definition of structural violence and estimates of U.S. deaths attributable to lack of health care access, the author contends that systemic violence is missing from Pinker’s model. The author reports Lifton’s emphasis on nuclear weapons, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and technological psychological numbing. The author maintains that the two positions are less opposed than they appear, and that both neglect the reciprocal influence of individual psychological development and social systems. The author concludes that declining interpersonal violence is welcome but that Lifton’s warnings about systemic and technological violence deserve continued attention.

apocalyptic danger, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, democracy, fear, group psychology, optimism, psychohistory, Steven Pinker, violence, Western civilization

In this article from the special-issue section on reasons for optimism, the author, a historian, disputes the belief that earlier eras were less violent than the present. Citing Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the author maintains that individuals are safer now than ever before. Drawing on personal observation, the author contends that media images of violence, ancestral vigilance, and a wish to locate danger outside the self sustain a sense of insecurity, and observes that suicides far exceed homicides and that counterterrorism spending outpaces highway safety spending. The author attributes the long-term decline of practices such as slavery, torture, witch burning, and public executions to self-control, rationality, human rights, empathy, and the spread of democracy, and proposes a generational cycle of sons going to war to match their fathers. The author asks whether a shift from shame to guilt contributes to the decline, finds some merit in the idea, and, citing Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, notes that guilt can also serve violence. Discussing the public exchange between Lifton and Pinker in New York City, the author is admiring of both and finds their positions difficult to reconcile. The author concludes that civilization has become less violent but unevenly, that regression as under the Nazis remains possible, and that unrealistic fear weakens society.

American politics, Barack Obama, false self, political polarization, psychohistory, U.S. presidential election

In this article, the author recounts attending Barack Obama’s January 2009 inauguration and contends that two forces combined to produce an era of aggressive language directed at him. The first is organized Republican congressional opposition, which she reports was planned in meetings in December 2008 and on inauguration day under Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell. The second is grassroots opposition in the Tea Party movement, which she describes as corporate-funded and compares to its silence on deficits under George W. Bush. She lists labels applied to Obama, including fascist, socialist, communist, and neo-Nazi. Drawing on Donald Winnicott’s true and false self as a metaphor, she proposes that such labels create a projected false Obama that threatens to smother the authentic self in public consciousness, and she attributes the projection to racism and racial stereotype in American society. She reads Clint Eastwood’s empty-chair address as an interaction with that projected figure. She describes Obama’s non-confrontational responses to Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst, questions about his citizenship, Arizona State University’s withholding of an honorary degree, and the Arizona governor’s gesture. She suggests this restraint may have carried costs, including in the first 2012 presidential debate, and concludes that many people hear the president as the false figure and treat him in ways that invite its emergence.

American politics, David Horowitz, political polarization, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory, Rush Limbaugh

In this article, the author offers a psychohistorical commentary on political polarization and rancor in the United States, beginning from the congressional gridlock over the fiscal crisis. It compares the present with earlier periods of intense division: the Hamilton–Jefferson conflict in the early Republic, the antebellum and Civil War years, the reaction to the New Deal, and the 1960s split between Middle America and the New Left. Following Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein’s account in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the author maintains that current polarization is asymmetrical, driven by a new conservative right, and points to opposition to Barack Obama as a reason to ask about its psychological dimension. The author proposes that polarization grows with two conditions: periods of social, economic, and political transition that leave many people insecure, and a large population with untreated emotional distress, citing Harold Lasswell and Theodor Adorno and colleagues. As illustrations, the piece recounts the early lives of radio host Rush Limbaugh and writer David Horowitz from their own books and other published accounts, relating each man’s ideological commitments to his relationship with his father and his sense of self. The author is critical of the role such figures play in public life, concluding that their influence works against constructive resolution of the nation’s political problems, and suggests the same dynamic may apply on the far left.

Ayn Rand, conservative ideology, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, interview, Jennifer Burn, Paul Ryan, Peter Petschauer, psychobiography, psychohistory

This interview with the historian Jennifer Burns, conducted by Paul H. Elovitz with Peter Petschauer’s assistance, centers on her book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009) and on Ayn Rand’s place in American conservatism. Burns describes Rand as a source of ideological inspiration for conservatives since The Fountainhead (1943), providing a moral defense of laissez-faire capitalism. On Paul Ryan, she reports that he follows Rand on economics, limited government, and the contrast between individualism and collectivism, but differs from her on social conservatism, religion, defense policy, and Medicare. She maintains that most Republicans use Rand selectively, that conservatism is a coalition rather than a consistent philosophy united by opposition to liberalism, and that “socialism” now serves as an all-purpose insult. She discusses Tea Party use of John Galt imagery with reference to Theda Skocpol’s study, and traces a conservative parallel academy to William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951). Burns attributes Rand’s suspicion of state authority to her Russian upbringing and the Bolshevik seizure of her family’s business, which she connects to the plot of Atlas Shrugged. She also addresses Zamyatin’s possible influence on Anthem, Nietzsche, Hollywood, and the troubling encounter in The Fountainhead. Elovitz proposes that anti-government sentiment reflects counter-dependency, and Burns agrees that discomfort with dependency contributes. She explains that she avoided psychological terminology in the biography and is hesitant to link Jewish background to political commitment.

American democracy, Ayn Rand, Bolsheviks, childhood history, defense mechanisms, denial, political ideals, psychohistory, resistance, Soviet Russia

In this article, the author offers reflections on Ayn Rand’s relationship to her early life, contending that her insistence that she created herself without a past is a defensive maneuver, which the author describes in psychoanalytic vocabulary as denial and resistance. The author recounts her origins as Alisa Rosenbaum in a prosperous Jewish family in St. Petersburg, the family’s loss of its store and house after the Revolution, and its move to Odessa, where Bolshevik soldiers took its property. The author maintains that this experience is central to understanding her admiration for successful businessmen and her view of society and government, which the author sees as closer to Imperial and early Soviet Russia than to American democracy. The author also speculates that the name Rand echoes the German phrase am Rand leben and that Ayn, Hebrew for eye, suggests a view of society from its border. The piece concludes by placing Rand among Russian women who come to the United States to change their identities and appear without a past.

Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, Jennifer Burns, Koch brothers, psychobiography, psychohistory, psychology, Soviet Russia

In this article, the author, writing as a psychobiographer, reflects on why Alisa Rosenbaum reinvented herself as Ayn Rand. He draws on Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, which he says avoids Rand’s psychology but supplies material for it. He raises questions about her solitary childhood, her family, her departure for the United States in 1925, and her years as a Hollywood screenwriter. He proposes that her novels and her objectivist philosophy, including Atlas Shrugged, grew out of her experience of the Russian Revolution and War Communism. He wonders whether Soviet attitudes toward marriage and religion influenced her later life. He also describes her strained relations with followers, family, libertarians, and conservative figures, and recalls his own earlier enjoyment of her books as a fantasy of complete individualism. He contends that the conservative intellectual infrastructure, funded by the Koch brothers and others, turned fantasy into reality. He maintains that admirers such as Paul Ryan largely repudiate her ideas once they hold or approach office.

Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, childhood, The Flight of Ikaros, Gabriele Munter, gender differences, Harper Lee, Kevin Andrews, male-female collaboration, Nancy Cummings, psychohistory, To Kill a Mockingbird, Truman Capote, Wassily Kandinsky

In this article, the author, who keeps a file on creative male-female collaborations, sets out a new case and asks whether collaborating creators share parallels in their early lives. The author names three earlier cases: Truman Capote and Harper Lee, associated with To Kill a Mockingbird; Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel; and Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter. The new interest is Kevin Andrews and Nancy Cummings, who collaborated on The Flight of Ikaros (1959), Andrews’s travel book about rural Greece during the Greek Civil War. Drawing on Roger Jinkinson’s American Ikaros: The Search for Kevin Andrews (2010), the piece recounts that both grew up uncertain of their paternity. Cummings, daughter of E. E. Cummings, learned at 27 that Scofield Thayer was not her father. Andrews was told by his mother, after combat service in Italy in World War II, that he was not the son of Roy Chapman Andrews. The piece also recounts their marriage, their move to Greece, Andrews’s Greek citizenship in 1975, and Cummings’s departure for England in 1968 amid his opposition to the Greek dictatorship. The author characterizes the similarity of their identity issues as striking, wonders whether comparable issues appear among the other collaborators, and invites readers of Clio’s Psyche to send relevant information or insights.

At the Dawn of Tyranny, conscience, Eli Sagan, The Lust to Annihilate: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Ancient Greek Culture, modernity psychosis, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum, self-destruction, Sigmund Freud, social theory, superego, Toronto Psychoanalytic Society

This meeting report summarizes presentations by Eli Sagan and the author, Donald L. Carveth, given on September 12, 2012, under the sponsorship of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and the Psychohistory Forum. It describes Sagan’s psychoanalytic theory of social evolution as set out in Freud, Women and Morality, Cannibalism, and Citizens and Cannibals. The report presents Sagan’s distinction between conscience, rooted in early identification with the nurturer and in depressive-position concern for others, and the superego, rooted in identification with the aggressor and in internalized culture. It reports his revision of the Freudian Oedipal account, in which healthy resolution rests on sublimation rather than renunciation. It outlines his sequence of cultural forms, from cannibalism through head-hunting, human sacrifice, and slavery to modern domination and the extension of rights. It also covers his view that advances in conscience provoke anxiety and regression, which he calls modernity psychosis, illustrated by Robespierre, Stalinism, and Nazism. He attributes American stalling after the Great Society to fear of success rather than to ideology. Carveth notes a difference from Sagan: he favors eliminating the superego in favor of conscience, whereas Sagan favors modifying it. He concludes that Sagan has advanced a psychoanalytic sociology of the kind Freud envisaged.

book review, emotional engagement, Ladder of Words, Mad, Crazy Love: Love Poems and Mad Songs, Merle Molofsky, poetry, psychoanalysis, psychohistory

This review essay considers two 2011 poetry collections from Poets Union Press by Merle Molofsky, a New York City poet, playwright, editor, and psychoanalyst: Ladder of Words and Mad, Crazy Love: Love Poems and Mad Songs. Writing as a psychohistorian, psychoanalytic anthropologist, and poet, the reviewer uses the books to explore how poetry and psychohistory intersect. He suggests that writing and reading poetry might be added to psychohistorical research methods, and he maintains that good poetry gives access to one’s own inner life, the unconscious, and the inner worlds of others. He proposes three intersections. The first is the psychohistory of poetry, in which a poem is studied for the themes, fantasies, and defenses of an era or culture, as in Rudolph Binion’s work on traumatic reliving. The second is the poetry of psychohistory, in which the scholar’s own poetry serves description, interpretation, and theory-building, comparable to Laurel Richardson’s ethnographic poetry. The third is poetry as preparation, likened to a pianist’s exercises. He judges that Molofsky’s books can be read in all three ways. He describes the poems as emotionally demanding and unromanticized, and he suggests they could be mined for what they illuminate about eroticism, the body, relationships, and the Vietnam War. He recommends them to readers of contemporary poetry and to psychohistorians.

100 Years of the IPA: The Centenary History of the International Psychoanalytical Association 1910-2010: Evolution and Change, book review, International Psychoanalytical Association (IPhA), Peter Loewenberg, psychoanalysis, psychohistory

This review of 100 Years of the IPA: The Centenary History of the International Psychoanalytical Association 1910-2010: Evolution and Change, edited by Peter Loewenberg and Nellie L. Thompson (International Psychoanalytical Association, 2011), describes a centenary volume marking the association’s founding at the Nuremberg Congress in 1910. The reviewer reports that 56 contributors from 41 countries wrote chapters arranged by region (Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and Oceania), with further chapters on training standards, new societies, and summaries by the last six presidents. The reviewer judges the book frank rather than dry or self-congratulatory and reads it as an account of the institutionalization of a social movement, with group processes within societies, between societies and the association, and within the association itself. The reviewer proposes that psychoanalysis and totalitarianism are incompatible, pointing to the effects of World War II and the Holocaust and to Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and suggests China as a further case for psychohistorians. The review also discusses personal conflict, including Anna Freud’s disputes with Melanie Klein and with Leo Rangell. It recommends the book to readers interested in psychoanalytic history and social movements, and as a reference for psychohistorical work.

book review, emotional development, intra-psychic, Oedipal struggles, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory, Richard Wagner, Tom Artin, The Wagner Complex: Genesis and Meaning of The Ring

This book review considers Tom Artin’s The Wagner Complex: Genesis and Meaning of The Ring (Free Scholar Press, 2012), which the reviewer presents as a Freudian counterpart to Robert Donington’s mid-twentieth-century Jungian reading of Wotan’s psychic journey. Artin reads the Ring cycle as a depiction of failed pre-Oedipal and Oedipal struggles to fuse with the mother and to separate from her. The reviewer describes three interacting tracks: a close reading of the libretto, often returning to the original German; an argument that the classical psychoanalytic account of development is embedded in the text, drawing on Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, and Ernest Jones rather than Erik Erikson or Heinz Kohut; and an effort to link both to Wagner’s own personality through his relations with his mother, sisters, and dual father images. The reviewer adds reflections on the Gesamtkunstwerk, Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 Bayreuth staging, and Wagner’s megalomania, and characterizes the later use of the total artwork in Nazi Germany as a historical misfortune. The reviewer judges the book highly persuasive in its detail, while noting that non-Freudian readers may remain wary, and reports that Artin appears pessimistic about redemption in the cycle.

black community, Black Panther Party, black psyche, book review, Civil Rights Movement, major depression, Malcolm X, manic reparation, Martin Luther King, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, Restoring the Mind of Black America, traumatic losses

This book review considers Eddie Taylor’s Restoring the Mind of Black America (2011), a study of the psychohistorical experience of the African American community after the Civil Rights Movement. The reviewer reports that Taylor uses Melanie Klein’s concepts and object relations theory to account for what he describes as the decline of that community. Taylor attributes this decline to unmourned trauma after the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and the dissolution of the Black Panther Party. He argues that the community alternated between mutual projections that disparaged blackness and a defense of manic reparation, which he links to substance abuse and community violence. The review outlines the book’s four parts: theoretical framework, the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders, interviews with community activists, some of whom voice disillusionment with present black leadership, and a vision of healing. Taylor proposes that healing lies in addressing the fear beneath anger turned against the self, in mourning, in strengthening black churches, in psychotherapy, and in community action in the movement’s legacy. The reviewer judges that Taylor meets the challenge he sets and finds the book valuable. The reviewer adds reflections from a Brooklyn childhood in the 1940s and early 1950s and from Passover observance, contending that Americans of all backgrounds must recognize the lingering trauma of African American history. The review closes with lines from Duane Stephenson’s “Ghetto Pain” and Langston Hughes’s “Harlem.”

Clio’s Psyche, International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA), Joseph Dowling, memorial, My Journey, Psychoanalysis and History: Problems and Applications, psychobiography, psychohistory

This memorial tribute commemorates Joseph A. Dowling III (1926–2011), Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Lehigh University, an active member of the International Psychohistorical Association and a member of the editorial board of Clio’s Psyche from its founding in 1994. The author recounts his birth and childhood in Clydebank, Scotland, his wartime evacuation in 1940 and permanent move to the United States, his army service, and his degrees from Lincoln Memorial University and New York University. The tribute outlines his specialty in American studies and nineteenth-century American history, his teaching at Lehigh from 1957 to 1994, his departmental and professional service, and his teaching awards, including two awards now named for him. It lists his psychohistorical articles, “Psychoanalysis and History: Problems and Applications” (Psychoanalytic Review, 1972) and “Millennialism and Psychology” (1977), and notes his 1988 Fulbright year in Leuven, the study abroad program he founded there, and his unpublished autobiography, My Journey. It also recalls him as sociable, a lifelong atheist, and a socialist, and it reports a celebration of his life held in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in January 2012.

Arab Muslim culture, Clio’s Psyche, memorial, mother-infant bond, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum, radical Islam, Sander Breiner

In this memorial tribute, the author remembers Sander J. Breiner (1925–2012), a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and contributor to the Psychohistory Forum, whom she calls her mentor. She recounts encountering his essay “Some Interesting Child Rearing Practices in the Arab Moslem World” in Historical and Psychological Inquiry and his book Slaughter of the Innocents, and then corresponding with him while developing her work on suicide terrorism, which appeared in Clio’s Psyche and grew into The Banality of Suicide Terrorism. She reports that his writings on the mother-infant bond were critical to her argument linking suicide terrorism to the devalued female in Arab Muslim shame/honor culture, and she states that neuroscience now supports that argument. She notes his U.S. Army service in World War II, including the Battle of the Bulge, and his encouragement that she teach military and law enforcement audiences. She attributes her exclusion from a Human Terrain Team to anti-Semitism and says he described a comparable experience in the army. She summarizes his view, expressed in an email, that maternal well-being shapes early brain development and that a traumatized mother may transmit psychological abandonment to her children. He concluded that moderate Muslims must lead in opposing suicide terrorism and in raising the value of females. She closes by crediting him with teaching those around him how to say goodbye, by contacting each patient, colleague, and friend before his death. Throughout, she is admiring of him personally and professionally.

memorial, psychobiography, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum, Sander Breiner, Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse through The Ages and Today

This memorial tribute marks the death on August 28, 2012, at age 87, of Sander Breiner, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Founding Member of the Psychohistory Forum. The author recounts a telephone call from Breiner eleven days earlier and describes his written responses to Forum work-in-progress presentations. The tribute lists his published subjects: aging, death and dying, health care, the Holocaust, and punishment. It also names his book Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse through The Ages and Today. The author characterizes him as meeting fourteen years of cancer and other ill health with practical adjustments, courage, humor, and optimism. It argues that psychoanalytic teachers matter to medical students because doctors’ sensitivity to patients’ feelings is curative. It gives his birth in Fiume in 1925, his Chicago upbringing, medical and psychoanalytic training, and wartime U.S. Army service, and closes with condolences to his family.

Genocide, War, and Human Survival, memorial, Michael Flynn, psychohistory, Psychohistory Review, Trauma and Self, The Year 2000: Essays on the End

This memorial tribute by Paul H. Elovitz marks the death of psychologist and psychotherapist Michael Flynn (1962–2012) on September 25, 2012, at age 49, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The author outlines Flynn’s professional roles: professor of psychology at York College in Manhattan, Associate Director of the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College, and psychotherapist in private practice. The tribute lists his co-authored or co-edited books, The Year 2000: Essays on the End (1997), Trauma and Self (1997), and Genocide, War, and Human Survival (1996), and notes his editing of a volume of the Psychohistory Review. It characterizes Flynn as known for his humor and for being extremely well-read, and it closes by noting his surviving family.

Holocaust survivors, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans Neither Victims nor Executioners?, intergenerational transmission of trauma, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, letter to the editor, The Nazi Doctors, parent-child relationships, psychohistory, Robert Jay Lifton

In this letter to the editor, the author recounts her professional and personal relationship with the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, beginning in 1976. She describes co-leading awareness groups for children of Holocaust survivors at Boston University, which colleagues compared to the rap groups Lifton helped lead for Vietnam veterans, and her later contacts with him: helping him reach survivors willing to give testimony for his research on Nazi doctors, meeting him and Betty J. Lifton in Jerusalem in 1978, and visiting them socially over the years. She reports that in 1984 she and Judith Kestenberg started a monthly New York group modeled on the veterans’ groups, which grew into an international network of child survivors and a Hidden Child Foundation. She recounts that Lifton joined her doctoral committee after the death of Stanley Milgram and advised her on handling a large dataset in her study of rescuers of Jews. She lists interviewing practices she attributes to him, including interviewing each person at least twice and leading interviewees to the moment of the decision to rescue rather than asking about motivation. The letter closes with the author’s admiration for Lifton’s commitment to his students and to using his profession to warn of the danger of global destruction, and she names him her mentor, colleague, and friend.

bereavement, clinical psychology, letter to the editor, Moon landing, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Neil Armstrong, parental loss, psychohistory, trauma

In this letter to the editor, the author, a clinical psychologist whose scholarship concerns the relationship of loss to achievement, offers a perspective on the astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930–2012), the first person to walk on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission of 1969. The author notes that Armstrong lost both parents late in life, at age 59, describes this as a late loss profile associated with little creative pursuit, and maintains that loss nonetheless contributed to his accomplishment. The letter recounts the death of Armstrong’s young daughter and reports, citing his first wife’s recollection, that he afterward became absorbed in the space program and withdrawn from his family. The author proposes that Armstrong’s bereavement took the form of a mission, that he distanced himself from his wife and family, and that this led to their divorce in 1994 and his remarriage soon after. The author reads the name Tranquility Base as expressing his goal rather than a response to a frightening flight, and interprets his guilt as relating to the marriage rather than to public acclaim. The letter closes by describing Armstrong as ending his life happily and expressing appreciation for his efforts.

aggression, childhood dependency, group dynamics, human psyche, leadership, letter to the editor, psychohistory, psychology, sociology, violence

In this letter to the editor, the author, a sociologist, rejects the assertion that humans are hardwired for aggression or violence. He contends that the military’s extensive investment in training young men to hate and kill indicates such behavior is not innate. Drawing on his experience teaching an introductory course, he stresses the importance of the primary group and the unusually long period of human dependence on others after birth. He reports his own observation that small face-to-face groups, such as families, neighborhoods, and island villages, survive through mutual respect and cooperation. He maintains that when groups grow large enough to need specialized functions, coordination, and regulation, the leaders who emerge tend to be driven by ambition, greed, and self-importance, and that those of lesser ambition are then drawn into the resulting dynamic. The letter closes with the statement that in war everyone loses.

human kindness, Hurricane Sandy, letter to the editor, natural disasters, psychobiography, psychohistory

In this letter to the editor, the author writes from her own experience about hurricanes, recalling her childhood in Puerto Rico and her New Jersey family’s ten days without electricity after Hurricane Sandy. She recalls fond childhood memories of storms spent with family and credits her parents for handling those events with grace and love. She then recounts her preparations for Sandy and the first days of the outage, which the family met with excitement and time together while remaining anxious about conditions elsewhere. She reports that her husband’s work in the aftermath brought him into contact with devastation and looting, and that home became a sanctuary for him. She recounts the family’s search for a generator as temperatures dropped, and the help, invitations, and calls of concern they received from friends and others. She observes that human reactions to disaster range from care and compassion to violence, denial, or selfishness, and describes an awareness in her own experience of tension between the life instinct and the death instinct. She concludes that being human is not easy but is inspiring when people do it well.