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A revelatory slip of the tongue

Linda A.W. Brakel provides us with an amusing illustration of the dynamic (i.e., psychologically meaningful) unconscious (as one of the three principal assumptions of psychoanalysis):

“Take a very common sort of slip of the tongue I experienced. I was in the backyard calling my husband whom I saw to be occupied with some yard activity. He did not respond, a fact that did not surprise me as much as the realization that I was using our dog’s name to call him, not my husband’s. I laughed. Now, the names Art and Jet are not dissimilar—and that was a physical cause of the slip; but why would I (a neurologically intact person) confuse my husband’s name with that of our dog’s? This slip of the tongue seems neither psychologically lawful nor determined until we posit a dynamic unconscious cause of this commonplace psychological event. My husband, whom I love, seemed to me as unresponsive as our dog, a canine whom I also love. I was unconsciously angry with him; and unconsciously, but ambivalently, I insulted him—you are no better than our (wonderful, albeit very disobedient) dog. As with this simple example, the assumption of interceding unconscious processes and contents allows psychological determinism [i.e., cause and effect: presumably, therefore, ‘all psychological events—even those that look incoherent—have at least as one of their causes, a psychological cause’] and continuity [psychic continuity takes for granted ‘that all of any agent’s psychological events … are regular/lawful in a particular psychological way for that agent; namely that every psychological event can be understood as psychologically meaningful to that individual’] to be evident generally,* even in those psychological events (such as neurotic symptoms, dream elements, delusions, and hallucinations) seemingly inconsistent to the point of frank bizarreness.” — From the introduction to Brakel’s book, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the A-Rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009)

* “The fundamental postulates of psychoanalysis as a general scientific theory of mind consist of three assumptions—psychic continuity, psychic determinism, a dynamic unconscious; one methodological tool—free association; and one corollary—that primary [‘a-rational thought’] as well as secondary process mentation [exemplified by the presumption or norm of rationality, rule following, and logic in general] exists.”

In psychoanalytic theory and praxis (i.e. psychoanalysis) a “slip of the tongue” is an example of “parapraxis” (lit. faulty action, also called failed action or lapsus: lapse, slip, error), as is, say, going to the wrong address or making a wrong statement. These fall under the category of those acts (be it of memory, speech, or action) that one “is normally able to perform successfully,” thus they do not consist of all failures of memory, speech, or action. Freud explained how forgetting, slips of the tongue and bundled actions were often not merely mistakes or accidents “but determined and meaningful acts due to unconscious desires, motives, and conflicts.” As Laplanche and Pontalis explain, “Freud showed that parapraxes, like symptoms, are compromise-formations resulting from the antagonism between the subject’s conscious intentions and what he has repressed.” According to Ralph E. Roughton, these parapraxes “may be as fruitful for insight as is the analysis of more serious symptoms. Such symptomatic acts usually convey a discrete message about a specific conflict, and they often rather easily yield a hidden message.” As we saw in the passage from Brakel above, parapraxes provide one example of the principle of psychic determinism and, like symptom formations generally, intertwine drive, defense, and adaptation.

The commodification of “mindfulness”

From “The Problem of Mindfulness” by Sahanika Ratnayakeis for Aeon:

“In claiming to offer a multipurpose, multi-user remedy for all occasions, mindfulness oversimplifies the difficult business of understanding oneself. It fits oh-so-neatly into a culture of techno-fixes, easy answers and self-hacks, where we can all just tinker with the contents of our heads to solve problems, instead of probing why we’re so dissatisfied with our lives in the first place. As I found with my own experience, though, it’s not enough to simply watch one’s thoughts and feelings. To understand why mindfulness is uniquely unsuited for the project of real self-understanding, we need to probe the suppressed assumptions about the self that are embedded in its foundations. [….]

With the no-self doctrine [P. anatta/S. anātman], we relinquish not only more familiar understandings of the self, but also the idea that mental phenomena such as thoughts and feelings are our own. In doing so, we make it harder to understand why we think and feel the way we do, and to tell a broader story about ourselves and our lives. The desire for self-understanding tends to be tied up with the belief that there is something to be understood – not necessarily in terms of some metaphysical substrate, but a more commonplace, persisting entity, such as one’s character or personality. We don’t tend to think that thoughts and feelings are disconnected, transitory events that just happen to occur in our minds. Rather, we see them as belonging to us because they are reflective of us in some way. People who worry that they are neurotic, for example, will probably do so based on their repeated feelings of insecurity and anxiety, and their tendency towards nitpicking. They will recognise these feelings as flowing from the fact that they might have a particular personality or character trait.”

The entire article is here.

Comment:

There is much to think about in this article and I agree in the main with its argument. However, I think the discussion of “no-self” [P. anatta/S. anātman] doctrine is palpably weak insofar as it applies more to superficial understandings of same and not the more psychologically and philosophically elaborate or sophisticated accounts within Buddhist traditions (our author acknowledges that, although raised as a Buddhist, ‘like many “cultural Catholics,” [her] involvement was often superficial’). In part, this means viewing the doctrine of no-self in light of what, why, and how this notion arose in opposition to prevailing Indic ideas with regard to the “self” or “soul” within “orthodox” Hindu traditions and philosophical schools. One result of this includes a corresponding awareness and appreciation of the fact that the doctrine does not endorse or encourage an abandonment of or diminution in personal responsibility (for our thoughts, feelings, actions, etc.) but rather, and not unlike psychoanalysis, a temporary suspension of an egoistic orientation and moral framing and judgment by way of facilitating a dispassionate and analytic approach to mental phenomena (and this involves notions of cause and effect that are intrinsic to attributions of responsibility). As the Dalai Lama and others have explained, conventional notions of self and person(hood) have their place and are well established in experience, but the doctrine in question here is inextricably connected to other metaphysical ideas having to do with such notions as “dependent arising” and the “emptiness of inherent existence,” and it is in this larger framework that the notion of no-self must be examined. So by way of just one example, consider the following from Rupert Gethin’s introduction to anatta in his book, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 1998):

“The monk Nāgasena put it as follows to King Milinda. Suppose that someone should steal mangoes from another man’s trees; if he were to claim in his defence that the mangoes he stole were not the mangoes the other man planted, we would point out that the mangoes he stole nevertheless arose in dependence upon the mangoes that were previously planted. Similarly, I cannot, by appeal to the teaching of no self, claim that it was not I who robbed the bank yesterday but some other person who no longer exists, since the teaching of no self states quite categorically that the ‘I’ who exists today only exists by virtue of its dependence upon the ‘I’ that existed yesterday; there is a definite causal connection.” [This is only one way to defend conventional notions of the ‘ownership’ of (or responsibility for) our thoughts, feelings, etc. from a Buddhist perspective.] One might also look at the transcript of a talk at Harvard University some years ago by the [fourteenth] Dalai Lama [‘His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso] on “self and selflessness” published in Kindness, Clarity, and Insight (translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by Elizabeth Napper) (Snow Lion Publications, 1984): 157-167.

I also believe it is true (and I am not alone in this) that many people in our society do, in fact, have a hard time concentrating, holding a thought or focusing, thinking clearly, devoting sufficient attention to a topic or problem, in short, they are easily distracted and their minds appear to flit about like a fish on dry land (an image from the Dhammapada). There are those who are of course thankful exceptions to this generalization, although from time to time none of us is immune from experiencing such “distracted” states of consciousness.* And simplistic nostrums and New Age bromides that “fit[ ] oh-so-neatly into a culture of techno-fixes, easy answers and self-hacks” still leave far too many susceptible to the latest fad. In so far as we’ve identified a genuine problem on this score, new technologies, be it the smartphone or social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram, may contribute to or exacerbate the disquieting mental phenomena that “mind-training” and meditation are meant to address as an intrinsic part of a larger regimen of “spiritual exercises” and indispensable sundry traditional philosophical, religious, and psychological therapies of self-examination, “self-discovery,” insight, and human fulfillment or eudaimonia.

Perhaps the closest relevant analogy to what troubles Ratnayakeis is the comparable commodification and common reduction of Yoga philosophy and psychology to āsana(s), that is, bodily poses and physical exercises from “the East.” As I wrote in an introductory post on Yoga almost a decade ago: Patañjali’s Yoga system is one of the six āstika (orthodox) darśanas, hence it is a distinct philosophical school and a spiritual praxis, as elaborated in his Yoga Sūtra (3rd to 4th century CE). This Sūtra is usually read together with its indispensable commentary, Vyāsa’s Bhāsya, and is often referred to as the “Eight-Limbed Yoga” (astānga-yoga), only one limb of which, the third and “outer member” (āsana), is found in contemporary “YMCA” and “classified ads” yoga (there are all-too-few exceptions to this generalization).

* Its converse, namely prosoche or “attention,” defined as continuous vigilance and presence of the mind (a notion, incidentally, that calls to mind certain Buddhist spiritual techniques), was extremely important in the life of Suzanne Necker (Suzanne Curchod, b. 1737 – 6 May 1794), one of the more remarkable salonnières of the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters. Dena Goodman writes that Madame Necker’s “seriousness, and that of the salon whose discourse she shaped is revealed most clearly in the concern she displayed in all things for paying attention. The word attention dominates the five-volumes of her journals published after her death by her husband. One must pay attention, she reminded herself repeatedly, not get distracted. Her purpose in life was not to distract men from their serious business but rather to discipline herself and her guests so that that business might be carried out. Her concern was to concentrate her own attention and to focus that of the philosophes (her guests); her intent was to be a serious contributor to the social and intellectual project of Enlightenment through the shaping of its discourse in her salon.”

[A rough first draft of this post appeared on FB, and I am grateful to Ruchira Paul and Elatia Harris for commenting, thereby provoking me to think more about topics broached in the article.]

Senate Democrats Should Condemn Mitch McConnell

House Democrats are not exclusively involved in oversight; they have passed numerous important bills. Those bills, among other things, involve health care guarantees, gun control, election security, employee protections, and gender equity. For the most part (election security is a recent exception) the media does not give these bills the attention they deserve. And you know what happens to these bills. They die in Mitch McConnell's office. The Democrats need the media to pay attention. It is political folly for the Democrats to allow the public to be left with the impression that all they are doing is embarrassing Trump.

Here is one idea to draw media coverage. Chuck Schumer should hold a press conference. In that conference he should read a statement signed by as many Senate Democrats as possible. The statement should condemn Mitch McConnell, and the statement should list the important bills McConnell has refused to bring to the Senate floor. The media will not ignore that.

Mueller and Entertainment

Yes, Mueller was halting and inarticulate, but the facts of criminality, Mafia-style tactics, greed, and selling out the country were clearly presented to the American people. It is a shame people need to be entertained to wake up. The basket of deplorables is strikingly large.

Hamas and the Right of the Palestinian People to Self-Determination

The simplistic binaries that frame conversations of Palestinian armed struggle evoke the condescension expressed by colonial overloads toward the resistance of indigenous peoples. ‘Palestinians have a culture of hate,’ commentators blast on American TV screens. ‘They are a people who celebrate death.’ These familiar accusations, quick to roll off tongues, are both highly effective at framing public discourse and insulting as racist epithets. On the other end of the spectrum, I recalled conversations with Europeans and Palestinians who critiqued my reference to Palestinian armed struggle as ‘violence.’ They saw this framing as a form of condemnation [as if Liberal Capitalist Democracies never resort to such violence!], casting armed struggle in a negative light [like the French and American Revolutions?!]. Support of the rifle, they argued, was not only comprehensible and dignified, but necessary. It was the only way to secure Palestinian rights against a murderous and unrelenting occupation.  [….]

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright. This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. [….] Understanding Hamas is key to ending the denial of Palestinians their rights after nearly a century of struggle for self-determination. It is also a prerequisite to halting the cycles of violence that are intermittently unleashed on the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. [….]

More than two million Palestinians now live in the Gaza Strip [some 1.4 million are Palestinian  refugees]. That makes it an urban population larger than most American cities. But the human dimension, so visceral to anyone who walks the streets of any city in the strip, is almost an afterthought, if a thought at all, to many who think of the place. The image of Gaza as a terrorist haven has been all-consuming. As has its image as a war-torn pile of rubble, sterile and devoid of live. The collective punishment of millions has become permissible, comprehensible, and legitimate. Destroying schools and targeting UN shelters, as Israel did in 2014, are military tactics that have been justified as essential for Israel to defend itself against terror. The killing of more than five hundred children during that same operation for many becomes little more than an unfortunate necessity. [….]

There is no doubt that Hamas carries out terror-inducing activities within Israel and the Palestinian territories. The movement itself, through its various publications, explains how it seeks to create terror to pressure the Israeli government to end its occupation of Palestinian land. Hamas’s actions fit into the definition of terrorism used by the U.S. Department of State, which notes that ‘terrorism is premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents.’ While Hamas itself admits that it has used such tactics, it vehemently rejects being designated a terrorist organization. The logic underpinning this seeming contradiction is the absence of a single definition about what constitutes terrorism. The term is malleable and subjective [although I would argue that it need not be], and more importantly, has been used as a tool of war. The definition put forward by the U.S. State Department has consistently and cynically been manipulated to justify illegal and morally reprehensible military measures, in this case by Israel. Furthermore, while the label of ‘terrorism’ under this definition can be applied to Hamas, it fails to account for the terror cause by Israel’s relentless military regime over the Palestinians.

It is exceedingly difficult to engage in a discussion on terrorism, which is precisely why it is a powerful device to undermine any legitimacy that organizations such as Hamas may have. Like all definitions of terrorism, the one put forward by the U.S. State Department is highly contested. Why is terrorism limited to subnational groups or clandestine agents if states are the biggest perpetrators of organized violence against civilians? How does one discriminate violence aimed solely at terrorizing civilians and legitimate armed resistance aimed at securing internationally sanctioned rights that invariably end up killing civilians? How are civilians defined in a world where the notions of war and peace are increasingly very difficult to ascertain, and where the form of warfare has outgrown the very laws that define it?

Classifying Hamas as a terrorist organization has justified sweeping military action against Palestinians, depoliticizing and dehumanizing their struggle. It has also prevented the possibility of viewing Palestinian armed resistance as a form of self-defense within the context of war. [….] While international law has made exceptions for viewing Israeli military operations in Gaza through the lens of a security paradigm, security for Palestinians against consistent Israeli aggression appears to be absent. In thinking of the morality of the morality of Palestinian armed struggle, the knowledge that violence has animated numerous anticolonial liberation trajectories somehow dissipates. The historical context in which Hamas operates, and which has given rise to Hamas as an armed resistance movement in the first place, is overlooked. [….] While self-sacrifice in the context of national armies and the defense of one’s homeland is celebrated the world over, indeed is the foundation of nationalism, Palestinian self-sacrifice is studied as a perplexing anomaly. [….] The worldview of Palestinian resistance fighters is that they are engage in a justified war against a violent and illegal occupation that terrorizes them and their family members. Their adoption of armed struggle, in this particular context, draws on its own legal, political, and theological justifications governing the laws of war and its conduct. Without justifying this resort to violence, one has to see and understand it from center of gravity that is rooted in the Palestinian territories, not in the West. — From the Preface to Tareq Baconi’s Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018)

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At The Faculty Lounge, ‌Professor Alexander Tsesis of Loyola University, Chicago, School of Law (Raymond & Mary Simon Chair in Constitutional Law and Professor of Law), made the following comment to a blog post by Professor Steve Lubet at The Faculty Lounge about individuals and groups who fail to sufficiently (intentionally or not) clarify the distinction between Jews (and thus Judaism) and Zionists (and thus Zionism):

“This is beautifully written, Steve. As a further example of your point, Hamas’s genocidal calls for the annihilation of Jews is also often misrepresented in the media as a fight against Zionists. But Hamas is too honest in its genocidal intentions to let their efforts be whitewashed, keeping its religious calls to kill all Jews in its Charter despite the many efforts of outsiders to have it altered (Article VII, etc.). Hamas is very clear in the Introduction about whom it regards to be its enemies: ‘Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.’”[slightly edited for concision and clarity]

Here is my—now edited and expanded—response to this comment at the blog alongside further information about Hamas that is typically missing from mass media treatments in the US, let alone national political discourse, be it from our representatives in Washington, D.C. or government  officials of any sort expected to have some knowledge and expertise in foreign affairs related to the Middle East:

Any assiduous or minimally diligent and fairly dispassionate student of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in general and Hamas in particular should arrive at the conclusion that Hamas, for most of its existence, and speaking for the organization (or institution) as a whole (in other words, a few actors have proven to be exceptions), has not acted in conformity, nor seriously attempted to comply with its (largely morally and politically odious) Charter. Moreover, Hamas does not view it as providing a politically relevant program of action or strategic guidance of any sort (and there is a paucity of evidence to the contrary). This has been meticulously and continually documented over the years in the work of the foremost scholarly experts on this subject.

It’s well known that Hamas has resorted to acts of terrorism in its defense of Palestinians and its struggle for collective self-determination on their behalf. But to look at Hamas as a terrorist organization simpliciter strikes me as singularly unhelpful and unduly reductionist. Why? Because much of what Hamas does as a political organization and religious and social movement falls well outside the scope of terrorism, or even violence for that matter, one conspicuous reason it has been able to garner widespread social and electoral support. To say so does not amount to an endorsement of terrorist acts, let alone an attempt at justification, but it does aid us in our understanding and explanation of Hamas in this grossly asymmetrical political conflict. This brings us to consideration of possible reasons to account for why Hamas has resorted to acts of terrorism when it otherwise exhibits rationality as a collective actor, at least from the vantage points provided by political science and sociology. Given the striking asymmetrical nature of the conflict with the state of Israel, and the early use of such acts in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it’s quite understandable why some members of Hamas thought it necessary to employ this kind of political violence: it proved successful in the past in bringing attention to the Palestinian cause and did not preclude the PLO’s eventual official recognition as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” although of course the PLO itself would come to formally “reject violence and terrorism” as central to its struggle for Palestinian liberation and self-determination.

Keeping acts of terrorism in historical and political perspective enables one to sympathize with Hamas while at the same time appreciating what might be done to prompt Hamas to forswear resort to such tactics, which is not equivalent to refusing to use violence as a justified means of individual and collective self-defense (as in the Just War tradition or as similarly sanctioned within Islamic legal traditions under the rubric of ‘jihad’). To characterize Hamas as “a violent, fanatical, backwards, illiberal, anti-Semitic terrorist organization” (as was done by a law professor commenting at the Opinio Juris blog several years ago) amounts to a dismissal of Hamas in the terms of a reductionist Manichaean moralism and black and white thinking so as to preclude an appreciation of the sundry reasons Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere accord the group democratic legitimacy and political support. Moreover, it blinds us to the possibility, enhanced by recent historical precedents, that an Islamist or jihadist political organization might very well transform itself by way of “de-radicalization” that is at the same time more likely to commit to democratic principles, processes, and methods. Such Manichaean moralist rhetoric contributes to a political and cultural climate conducive to “dehumanization of the Other,” and thus Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai can proclaim without compunction: “We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages.” It renders the public within Israel and its supporters and sympathizers abroad more ideologically receptive to pronouncements like the recent one from Gilad Sharon (son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) in The Jerusalem Post: “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza.” Consider by way of further illustration this story from Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council:

“In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: ‘It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.’ The remark, which likened killing hundreds of men, women and children – many of them noncombatants – with trimming the grass, was greeted with a light tittering around the room, which was filled with some of Washington’s most elite, highly educated and well-paid Middle East experts. Not a single one objected to the panelist’s black humor.”

Again, nothing said should preclude us from affirming a categorical moral, political, and legal rejection of terrorist acts (properly defined of course), yet it should enable us to see why focusing exclusively on such acts inhibits our ability to contribute to the conditions that will enable Hamas to see the futility and folly of terrorism. Dismissals and condemnations come all too easy when unaccompanied by any meaningful acts by powerful outside parties to help alter the dynamics of the conflict in way that would put Hamas and other Palestinian groups on equal footing with the state of Israel so as to help create the propitious conditions of a meaningful negotiated resolution to the conflict, one that minimally entails full and formal recognition of the collective rights of self-determination for the Palestinians.

Hamas has abided by a number of ceasefires, both declared and de facto. And how did Israel, the U.S. and even the European states respond? How did these parties respond to Hamas’ considerable investment in democratic principles and procedures? And so forth and so on. As recent historical narratives will attest, most acts of political terrorism are clearly acts of desperation of one kind another for one reason or another, thus when otherwise rational collective political actors resort to same it’s possible if not probable that changing socio-political conditions can move these actors to abandon at least these forms of violence and rely on more conventional means of resolving political conflict.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the use of terrorist tactics needs to be viewed in a historical and conflictual context in which the Israeli state is notorious for flagrant and repeated violations of international humanitarian, criminal, and human rights law, including the prohibitions of colonialism and apartheid, through its unremitting reliance on “preemptive violence” and “targeted killings,” the habitual resort to “collective punishments” (since 1967), especially in Gaza, the “forcible transfer” of civilians from their homes, systematic violations of the prohibition against the destruction and appropriation of property of Palestinians (designated by international law as ‘protected persons’) and widespread human rights violations. Israel has for some time now been inexorably moving toward annexation of the West Bank, in conjunction with its ongoing expansion of Jewish settlements—in egregious contravention of international law—since 1967 in the Occupied Territories.

Alexander Acosta, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Wall Street Journal

On Saturday the Wall Street Journal complained that Alexander Acosta had been drummed out of the Labor Department based on unsubstantiated charges about the deal he approved for Jeffrey Epstein. The Journal expressed dismay about the alleged injustice of the pressure placed on Acosta and expressed concern that President Trump would now have more difficulty in finding people willing to work in the White House.

In fact, as the Washington Post reported, some of the prosecutors in Acosta’s office supported the deal (though not the lead prosecutor) which makes the existence of corruption by Epstein less clear (or more widespread than previously thought).

But several other things are clear. First, when substantial and credible evidence exists that an accused is a serial pedophile, and the accused receives a sweetheart deal, it is natural that sustained criticism would inevitably follow (that it has taken so long is shocking). Second, the deal not only was extremely lenient with respect to Epstein, but it also inexplicably provided that co-conspirators would not be prosecuted. Third, efforts to find willing witnesses were not fully followed up. Fourth, the deal was contrary to clear federal law for failure to notify the victims. The failure of the Journal to mention the third and fourth points in its editorial is an instance of journalistic malpractice. If the Journal wants to be regarded as a respectable conservative voice, it would be well advised not to ignore the strongest and most obvious arguments against its position.

 

New Age nonsense and the “spiritual dimension”

Westerners are today shy of admitting how often magic trumps logic in their thinking. But the trauma of war lays bare essential human truths. Public discourse during the Great War – in books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, letters, manifestos and almanacs – was merely the visible expression of fear, anxiety, horror, rage and grief. After 1918 magic was no longer just an emanation from the cosmos, but something inside the self, closer to the unconscious and subconscious states around which psychology and psychiatry would build new ways of understanding how people survive. — From the conclusion to Malcolm Gaskill’s review, “Ministry of Apparitions,” of Owen Davies’ book, A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith during the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2019), in the London Review of Books, Vol. 41 No. 13, 4 July 2019.

For an entertaining critique of New Age magical thinking and affectations, the episode “Quickie Nirvana” from The Rockford Files provides sufficient material to mull over, especially for those of us who lived through this period in the 1970s. I should note that, unlike some cultural critics, I do not equate New Age stuff with the countercultural currents that surfaced in the mid-1950s with the Beats and continued into the 1960s with hippies and others (e.g., some of the New Left), even if New Age solipsism and narcissism appeared at the margins of these movements. See, for example, Keith Melville, Communes in the Counter Culture: Origins, Theories, Styles of Life (Morrow Quill, 1972), and Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse University Press, 1999).

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The following snippet is from a recent Los Angeles Times article by Jessica Roy, “How millennials replaced religion with astrology and crystals.” It prompted a few thoughts from yours truly, some of which our regular readers may have come across in slightly different form in prior posts over the years.

“I love myself.

I am beautiful.

It was an unseasonably chilly night for June in Los Angeles. About three dozen people, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, were spending their Friday evening lying on yoga mats on the back patio of a shop a few blocks from Hollywood Forever Cemetery and the Paramount Pictures lot. Attendees had been invited to bring whatever they needed to make the space cozy: Blankets. Pillows. Crystals.

I am powerful.

Ana Lilia was leading them in affirmations, closing out a 90-minute breath-work session celebrating the summer solstice.

I am a bright light.

I am ready to be seen.

Most days, Lilia works with individual clients. In the evenings, she teaches classes or puts on events, such as the solstice gathering. She first got into breath-work four years ago and started taking classes to become a teacher six months later. If you’ve never done it before, it’s a mix of breathing exercises and guided meditations meant to relax you and help connect with your thoughts — a cross between the last 10 minutes of a yoga class [such classes are often simply āsana(s) or ‘posture(s),’ which is but one small and preliminary part of Patañjali’s Yoga as elaborated in his Yoga Sūtra (3rd to 4th century CE; usually read in conjunction with its indispensable commentary, Vyāsa’s Bhāsya); it is also known as the ‘Eight-Limbed Yoga,’ although most of these ‘limbs’ are often missing from classes on yoga in this country] and a therapy session that takes place entirely in your head.

She’s one of a growing number of young people — largely millennials, though the trend extends to younger Gen Xers, now cresting 40, and down to Gen Z, the oldest of whom are freshly minted college grads — who have turned away from traditional organized religion and are embracing more spiritual beliefs and practices like tarot, astrology, meditation, energy healing and crystals. And no, they don’t particularly care if you think it’s ‘woo-woo’ or weird. Most millennials claim to not take any of it too seriously themselves. They dabble, they find what they like, they take what works for them and leave the rest. Evoking consternation from buttoned-up outsiders is far from a drawback — it’s a fringe benefit. ‘I know this work is weird,’ Lilia said of her breath-work practice. ‘But it makes me feel better and that’s why I keep doing it.’ [emphasis added]

The cause behind the spiritual shift is a combination of factors. In more than a dozen interviews for this story with people ranging in age from 18 to their early 40s, a common theme emerged: They were raised with one set of religious beliefs — Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist — but as they became adults, they felt that faith didn’t completely represent who they were or what they believed. Millennials increasingly identify as “nones” when asked about their religious affiliation, according to a 2017 Pew survey: They are atheist or agnostic, or say they are ‘spiritual but not religious.’

But yes-or-no survey questions don’t tell the whole story, says Diane Winston, the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. Just about every society throughout human history has developed traditions and practices. That’s not a coincidence, she said: ‘People are inherently religious or spiritual.’” [….]

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Most of this strikes me as the latest iteration of New Age nonsense (exacerbated by wholesale commodification). I sympathize with those who are genuinely in search of something spiritually meaningful in their lives or who cannot make sense of their anxieties and suffering (and find the New Age variation on instant gratification as providing some relief or escape), yet there’s far more truth and wisdom found in many of the traditional religions of their parents and ancestors than in astrology, tarot, “energy healing,” and crystals (although we might find evidence of self-fulfilling prophecy and the placebo effect at work here). Religious worldviews are what people make of them and we need not give up our critical faculties or dispositional skepticism in the religious or spiritual quest or life. In examining traditional religions, people often, as we say, see what they want to see. Moreover, and relatedly, we should also keep in mind the Scholastic dictum (translated from Latin): “whatever is received, is received according to the capacity of the recipient,” a capacity more often than not decisively shaped by such psychological phenomena as willful ignorance, self-deception, denial, and wishful thinking. This provides us with at least two reasons why even among avowed religious adherents we find widespread neglect of what John Cottingham defines as the “spiritual dimension,”¹ incarnate, for instance, in therapies of desire, in self-examination, meditation, the technique of prosoche, and sundry “spiritual exercises,” all of which are capable of transforming character (metanoia, a change of heart, or a transformation of self) so as to render us more loving, more compassionate, more forgiving, more understanding, more virtuous, perhaps even a bit wise; at the very least, less egocentric or self-centered. This “spiritual dimension” can be found in one way or another and in varying degrees outside traditional religions as well: in some philosophical worldviews, the arts, and even, I would argue—provided it is properly understood and practiced—psychoanalysis.

The common thread here entails a commitment to what Cottingham terms, the “primacy of praxis” (which, as a thesis, ‘is … perfectly susceptible to being examined and supported by philosophical argument’), meaning it dialectically transcends orthodoxy: correct belief, dogma, doctrine, or creed, all of which is subject to error, fallibility and revision given that it is the product of human hearts and minds, however divinely inspired.² This is how and why we can make sense of the following admonition from Hilary Putnam: “’Is our own way of life right or wrong?’ is a silly question, although it isn’t silly to ask if this or that particular feature of our way of life is right or wrong, and ‘Is our view of the world right or wrong?’ is a silly question, although it isn’t silly to ask if this or that particular belief is right or wrong.” Put differently, our religious and nonreligious worldviews and traditions provide us, among other things, with a personal and collective orientation or “way of life” (including, at the very least, a moral compass and ethics) that contributes to our cultural—personal and collective—sense of identity. This way of life is grounded in grand narratives, shaped in part by myths that serve to make connections between the cosmos, our natural world (including nonhuman animals) and possibly non-natural world(s) (possible and ‘spiritual’ worlds, for instance), and history. These narratives speak to such questions as the meaning of life and death and the meaning or logic of rituals, symbols, and the more modest mythic stories (for both children and their charges) we’ve inherited from cultural traditions. As part of the overarching worldviews, such narratives express and articulate the fundamental values of our respective communities so as to affirm their most important values perhaps even an “ultimate value.”

Finally, and however pivotal to our sense of identity and existential bearings, such (structural) worldviews are invariably modified in myriad ways at the level of the individual person, providing for a unique construal or interpretation that may or may not cohere with other values, beliefs, and practices of any particular individual in our time and place. This idiosyncratic—in a non-pejorative sense—worldview in the life an individual person is what we will call a “lifeworld,” which by definition does not perfectly coincide with the normative (dogmatic, creedal, systematic, etc.) pictures of worldviews painted by those with religious or intellectual authority, in other words, the “official” worldview of any particular religion or philosophy, in which case the lifeworld reveals a worldview now comparatively crude, radically simplified, ideological in essence, or perhaps even fairly sophisticated, psychologically and philosophically speaking.³ At bottom, however, we should have at least prima facie or presumptive evidence suggesting that the individual and the corresponding groups he or she belongs to, publicly subscribe to these worldviews and thus are bound to sincerely endeavor to live in accordance with the ethical and spiritual strictures, values, and purposes that distinguish these qua worldviews, at least some of which partially overlap with other worldviews (of course even those without any worldview adherence or semblance of a lifeworld, in so far as they’ve reached the age of reason and are of sound mind and body, are no less morally and legally responsible and accountable agents).

The remainder of Putnam’s remark has the following implications: we can, indeed should strive to make rational or reasonable and ethical assessments of particular beliefs or practices within our worldviews, as Martha C. Nussbaum did in Sex and Social Justice (1999) and both Mohandas K. Gandhi and a B.R. Ambedkar did in their respectively unique if not inimitable ways with regard to several well-known but morally odious beliefs and practices within Hinduism. Such properly motivated evaluations and critiques can be made from vantage points both within and outside of worldviews (presumably members of the latter class have taken the trouble to deeply acquaint themselves with the worldview in question). A fundamental assumption here should be the belief that no worldview, religious or not, should countenance in theory or practice the violation of basic moral principles and ethical values and precepts (of course precisely what those are or might be is in an open yet no less urgent question, although conceptions of human dignity, human rights instruments, as well as criminal law provide us with some guidance here). One by-product or spillover effect of this critical enterprise, it is hoped, will be the “de-tribalization” of Westerners (Ninian Smart), including, and once and for all, the relinquishing imperialist and post-imperialist dreams and designs or simply global political and economic domination.

With regard to another facet of this critical obligation or task, we might assess, for example, the potential or capacity of a particular worldview to rationally, ethically, and creatively respond to various conspicuous issues and problems in our contemporary (and future) world: be it nationalism; uneven or unfettered technological development; public health and general welfare; various kinds of violence; ecological deterioration and devastation; the respect for basic human rights: civil, political, economic, social and cultural; the commodification of values; global distributive justice; the awakening and exercise of functions and capacities believed essential to human flourishing or eudaimonia, and so forth and so on. This serves to remind us that, at bottom, our traditions and worldviews are the repositories of our normative conceptions of the Good or the good life, and only a clear and deep understanding of such conceptions will enable us to find the necessary evaluative ethical and spiritual criteria essential to critically assessing elements with these worldviews (and ideologies derived therefrom) in the interests of our shared humanity or individual and collective welfare, well-being, and human happiness, fulfillment or flourishing.

Again, our worldviews, and by extension our lifeworlds, are (or should) not in the first instance be about defensive apologias, self-sufficient dogmas, hermetic doctrines, or orthodoxy, but about ways of life: orthopraxis, thus they are first and foremost about “ways of life” in the widest if not deepest sense (particularly insofar as they involve questions of personal and group forms of identity that acknowledge our common humanity, questions that provide ‘answers’ or frameworks for answering basic questions of existential meaning), with richly normative consequences for personal and collective conduct.

1. See John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005). See too John Haldane’s essay, “On the very idea of spiritual values” in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 47) (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Jonardon Ganeri and Clare Carlisle, eds., Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

2. Here is perhaps another reason for the primacy of praxis: insofar as dogma, creeds, and theologies presuppose or assume a metaphysics, these are unavoidably perspectival and relative, at any rate, it impossible for us to determine if any one such picture is absolutely true, that is, true to the exclusion of the truth(s) of other such pictures: “To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate ‘true’ metaphysical descriptions of the world does not … necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this ‘real’ or ‘true’ world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. We need not accept a very different solution, such as that offered by Kant—that there is a world in which there exists the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but that we can never directly know this world. Indian classical philosophy, since it is always connected with religion, must and does believe with complete assurance in the possibility of human beings actually attaining to a perfect knowledge of Reality—a ‘scientia intuitiva’ that leads to the Divine or the Absolute Truth. [I think the previous sentence needs qualification, if only because of Lokāyata/Cārvāka, although perhaps Professor Iyer would exclude from the class of ‘Indian classical philosophy.’] The conceptual frameworks we build in the realm of rational thought are not useless just because they cannot describe Ultimate Reality. Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.” Nandini Iyer, “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in Knut A. Jacobsen, ed., Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson (Brill: 2005): 123.

3. Compare the following from my late teacher and friend, Ninian Smart: “Do we, when it comes to the crunch, really have a systematic worldview? We have an amalgam of beliefs, which we may publicly characterize in a certain way. I may say that I am an Episcopalian, but how much of my real worldview [what I term here a ‘lifeworld’] corresponds to the more or less ‘official’ worldview which tells me nothing directly about cricket, being Scottish, having a certain scepticism about nationalism, thinking there is life on other worlds, shelving the problem of evil, or other matters. Our values and beliefs are more like a collage than a Canaletto [cf. Lévi-Strauss’s use of the term ‘bricolage’]. They do not even have consistency of perspective.”

Russia and Citizens United

 

Barbara McQuade, former U.S. Attorney and now University of Michigan Law Professor, recently remarked that the reason foreigners (whether in the case of individuals, governments, or corporations) cannot make contributions to candidates in American elections is that they are likely to have their own country’s interest in mind rather than that of the U.S.  Of course, some countries have an interest in outing Donald Trump and many of us think that would be in the interests of the United States. But precluding their intervention makes sense because they are not members of the body politic.

It is worth observing that the same arguments apply to business corporations. As C. Edwin Baker argued, business corporations are obligated to seek profits without regard to the public interest. Moreover, these corporations are not members of the body politic. Long standing campaign finance law recognized this until the Supreme Court stepped into outer darkness with its Citizens United decision.

Do you recall when Justice Alito shook his head no during President Obama’s State of the Union Message? Obama had criticized the Citizens United decision observing in part that it would permit foreign corporations to intervene in American elections.

In fact, Alito was right. Citizens United does not permit such intervention. Incredibly, however, it leaves the question open. Hopefully, the Court will not take one more step into the darkness.

 

More musings on miscellaneous topics

“‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ is a patriotic American march written and composed by John Philip Sousa, widely considered to be his magnum opus. By a 1987 act of the U.S. Congress, it is the official National March of the United States of America.”

Having for the first time read the lyrics to this American march song (which, it seems, are not well known), I could not help but be struck by the tones of nationalistic and militarist triumphalism, the sort of stuff that encourages dangerous phantasies, wishful thinking, and illusions (not the least of which are incarnate in the Military-Industrial Complex or ‘Pentagon of Power’ and an unsustainable defense budget that trumps domestic needs or public welfare and well-being, i.e., the common good), both individual and collective. It meshes well with Trump’s pathological narcissism (‘narcissistic personality disorder’¹), political paranoia, xenophobic nationalism, and megalomania, and is aptly symbolized by the core character of Trump’s 4th of July celebration: tanks² on the ground and fighter jets in the air. It is one with the perpetuation of “bread and circuses” ideology that has assumed an entirely novel dimension when manipulated by a dictator-loving, plutocratic president, racist, and reality-television celebrity whose past is littered with sexual assault and rape claims, draft dodging, and unethical and illegal business practices (that have of course harmed multiple parties, including and especially, workers), and yet is the recipient of ritual blessings by and the enthusiastic support of conservative evangelical Christians (who apparently have failed to read Jesus’s Gospel teachings; or if they have read them, are afflicted with obdurate self-deception, denial, and cognitive dissonance).

1. Please see the essay on this at my Academia page. Here is a taste: “… [W]e should not be surprised by Trump’s habitual rhetorical reliance in public speeches upon crude, hyperbolic, and often child-like adjectives and metaphors (with corresponding child-like or homologous and associationist thinking: mistaking bigness for greatness; the quantitative valuation of virtually everything; connecting competition, success and size; the attraction of novelty; a thirst for sensationalism; an overweening sense of privilege and superiority rooted in a fascination with sheer power if not megalomania, and so forth and so on), the harm of which is exacerbated by mendacious Manichean propaganda within an overarching framework of narcissistic nationalism.”
2. The subject of tanks happens to be part and parcel of the irrational defense budget cited above: “For years, the army has tried to convince Congress to stop buying new ones. They are expensive to build, maintain, exercise, and train troops to use. The army already has more than six thousand of them—far more than it needs for any conceivable future combat.” From Jessica T. Matthews’ important and urgent piece, “America’s Indefensible Defense Budget,” New York Review of Books, July 18, 2019 issue.

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This is extracted from my comments at a FB friend’s post on Jesus and Jewish Law:

First, please see Matthew 5:17-20. As Anna Wierzbicka writes, “[t]he relationship between Jesus and the [Jewish] Law is one of the most hotly and extensively debated issues in the literature on Jesus’s teaching.”* One problem that arises here of course is that Christians tend to look at Jesus as if he himself was, so to speak, a Christian! But it was only after his death that some Jewish followers decided that conspicuous Jewish ritual and legal obligations distinctive of Jewish identity were deemed no longer obligatory, something Jesus himself, as far as we can ascertain, did not do. It appears clear that Jesus was an observant Jew, we might say a “Jew +” in the sense that he was “adding” his unique perspective on Jewish teachings (there was, after all, different Jewish sects at the time, although Jesus seems to have made a point of not identifying with anyone one group in particular). He did declare that “not everything in the Mosaic Law corresponded in all respects to God’s will.” However, and I suspect more importantly, as Wierzbicka also writes, “Jesus’ question was no so much whether Moses and the Prophets had communicated God’s message ‘correctly’ but whether the people to whom they spoke had come to know fully what God had to say (through the Scriptures); and to this question his answer appeared to be ‘no, not necessarily, not always.’” In short, Jesus reaffirmed the Torah’s moral and ethical message, while in some respects enhancing and even revising its requirements.

In addition, Jesus did something quite radical: he claimed to embody a unique religious authority heretofore the prerogative and privilege of Moses (and to some degree other prophets) related to an apocalyptic or apocalyptic type message regarding God’s activity and promise.

Cf. too what Joseph Dan writes in Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics (University of Washington Press, 1986)  about the distinction between halakhah and aggadah in Judaism, with our understanding of Jesus’s teaching perhaps best seen in the light of the latter:

“The halakhah, being a legal system, strives to present the required minimum necessary for the accomplishment of a certain commandment, so that the individual performing it will be certain that he has conformed to the religious and social standards that the Jewish faith imposes on him. The Talmud, therefore, points out what is the minimum height of a sukkah (tabernacle), or the minimum amount to be donated to charity. The aggadah, on the other hand, is concerned with the maximum religious and ethical achievement that an individual can attain; it points out tasks and needs without limit, which enable the believer, if he so chooses, to advance toward perfection, both in the human and the devotional-religious fields. The usual reference to ethics in ancient and medieval literature is ‘lifnim mi-shurat ha-din,’ ‘beyond what the law requires.’ The halakhah defines the obligatory minimum; ethics, and the aggadah, describe the unending road toward perfection.”

* What Did Jesus Mean? (Oxford University Press, 2001)

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Toward a psychoanalytic (of both Freudian and Kleinian provenance) accounting of the carnivorous appetite?

“The aim of oral eroticism is the first pleasurable autoerotic stimulation of the erogenous zone and later the incorporation of objects [e.g., in the adult: kissing, smoking, eating habits…]. Animal crackers, loved by children, are significant remnants of early cannibalistic fantasies [and the grandmother says to her young charge; ‘I love you so much I could just eat you up!’].” — Otto Fenichel

This is but a taste of a much larger discussion but it still provides sufficient food for thought, in this case, posed as a question: Does the extent to which the adult’s diet is carnivorous provide us remnant evidence of early incorporation phantasies (actual animals, no longer ‘animal crackers’) that are eventually acted out? One book I read some time ago, while not explicitly addressing this question or appealing in any way to psychoanalytic theory or philosophy, nevertheless contains, I believe, sufficient material for beginning to address the topic (and others closely related to it): Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Continuum Publishing, 1992). At the other end of the moral and political spectrum, so too the arguments and views expressed by Roger Scruton in Animal Rights and Wrongs (Metro Books, in association with Demos, 3rd ed., 2000), bearing in mind he claims, with regard to eating meat, that “the only obvious guide in this area is piety which, because it is shaped by [especially religious] tradition, provides no final court of appeal.” Scruton, “[h]aving opted for the Western [i.e., ‘Judeo-Hellenic’] approach, states forthrightly (if not revealingly), “I find myself driven by my love of animals to favour eating them” (the gist of the argument: ‘it is not just permissible, but positively right, to eat those animals whose comforts depend upon our doing so’).

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It is irritating, no, appalling (perhaps even infuriating) to hear a CNN journalist refer to Bernie Sanders’s principled fundraising practices as consistent with his “brand.” The widespread analogical and metaphorical extension of this this term outside the commercial world is one of the more lamentable developments in public discourse.

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There are symbols … and there are symbols

The distinction between “symbolic thinking” in psychoanalytic psychology and “thinking or reasoning with symbols” in philosophy, in particular, formal logic, is the difference between primary process or pre-logical and often non- or pre-verbal thinking and secondary process or rational, specifically, logical thinking. The symbols in the former instance are often based on relations of similarity or analogy, usually vague, associative, and idiosyncratic (with a history). On occasion they are indecipherable. They are of course unconscious in origin (although they may be brought, as it were, to awareness) and linked to drives, affects or emotions, and our earliest experiences as infants and thus indissolubly tied to what we call “magical” thinking. The symbols employed in the latter case are conscious in construction, possessing a strict representational correspondence to processes, functions, signs, and rules (grammatical, mathematical, semiotic, logical, etc.) to facilitate highly abstract and usually deductive reasoning as but one dimension of rational thinking in general.

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An online K-12 educational curriculum is not identical, as advertised, to a “public education at home.” If you believe otherwise, it’s likely you have not devoted sufficient time to studying education and pedagogy as they relate to democratic theory and praxis (e.g., John Dewey, Jonathan Kozol, Robert E. Goodin, Nel Noddings, Diane Ravitch, among others).

Otto Fenichel (1897-1946): remarkable psychoanalyst and committed Marxist

It is well attested, in the words of Leo Rangell’s introduction to Otto M. Fenichel’s The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996, first published in 1945),* that [a]fter Freud’s death, it was Fenichel, in effect, who collated the Freudian scientific oeuvre for the psychoanalysts of the time.” His works served as “teaching aids” for training analysts and provided “the psychoanalytic world a general theory that would be comprehensive for psychopathology and embrace normal behavior as well [as Erich Fromm and more recently Adam Phillips remind us, just what constitutes ‘normal’ mental health and behavior has not often been directly, let alone coherently or sufficiently, addressed both within and outside psychoanalytic circles].” Fenichel was an “integrator and systematizer,” a “clinician-theoretician” whose “erudition and scholarship were prodigious; his perceptions, incisive; his presentation, lively; his method, objective and fair.”                 

By contrast, Harold Bloom characterized Fenichel as the “grim encyclopaedist of the Freudian psychodynamics,” and it “was precisely the encyclopedic aspect of his work which aroused the criticism of Lacan,” who compared Fenichel’s work to “an enumeration of the ‘main sewer’ type,” arguing “for a distinction between a catalogue of past interpretations, and the actual job of finding the mutative interpretation within the actual session” [this criticism is a classic straw man, and shows Lacan did not read Fenichal’s work with the care it deserves]. [Lacan] also criticised Fenichel’s use of organic stages of development in his writing.”

The following from George Markari’s history of psychoanalysis introduces us to the character and political beliefs and values of Fenichel, which he viewed closely allied to or integrated with his clinical and theoretical work, even if he did not systematically spell out the details of a possibly holistic Marxist-psychoanalytic worldview:

“Fenichel had always been an organized, a consensus builder who brought people together, and his commitment to Marxism was strong. In his steadfastness, Fenichel insisted on [Wilhelm] Reich’s right to publish his paper critiquing the death drive and was rewarded with the loss of his job as editor of the Zeitschrift. Freud’s autocratic reaction made it easy for Fenichel to take the high ground and appear dignified. In addition, he had many allies who held his encyclopedic knowledge and prodigious work in high esteem. After the Nazis took over Germany, Fenichel fled to Oslo; from there he pulled together his epistolary community of Marxist analysts. He had become convinced that all of Europe would be swept into fascism, and like it or not, the future for psychoanalysis was in America. For Fenichel [as it was for Freud], this was another kind of disaster, for he believed that the state of psychoanalytic knowledge in the United States was abysmal. In exile, Fenichel tried to preserve the field he loved from the twin perils of Nazi fascists and American know-nothings.”

Based on my acquaintance with Fenichel’s life and work to date, I’m inclined to dismiss the aforementioned comments of Bloom and Lacan as unfair when not wrong.

From the brief Wikipedia entry on Fenichel:

“Otto Fenichel (2 December 1897 in Vienna – 22 January 1946 in Los Angeles) was a psychoanalyst of the so-called ‘second generation.’ [He] started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already as a very young man, when still in school, he was attracted by the circle of psychoanalysts around Freud. During the years 1915 and 1919, he attended lectures by Freud, and as early as 1920, at the age of 23, he became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

In 1922 Fenichel moved to Berlin. During his Berlin time, until 1934, he was a member of a group of Socialist and/or Marxist psychoanalysts (with Siegfried Bernfeld, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Ernst Simmel, Frances Deri and others). After his emigration – 1934 to Oslo, 1935 to Prague, 1938 to Los Angeles – he organized the contact between the worldwide scattered Marxist psychoanalysts by means of top secret ‘Rundbriefe,’ i.e. circular letters. Those Rundbriefe, which became publicly known only in 1998, can be counted among the most important documents pertaining to the problematic history of psychoanalysis between 1934 and 1945, especially in regard to the problem of the expulsion of Wilhelm Reich from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934. In Los Angeles, Fenichel joined existing psychoanalytic circles and later helped found the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. His training analysands in Los Angeles included Ralph Greenson.”

Perhaps Fenichel’s foremost blind spot was his failure to objectively appreciate and evaluate the work of Melanie Klein.

For an introduction to Fenichel’s life and work, please see Russell Jacoby’s The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians (University of Chicago Press, 1986) and Elizabeth Ann Danto’s Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005). See too the indexed references to Fenichel in George Makari’s Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (Harper 2008).

* As Fenichel himself notes, this book should be read in conjunction with his earlier work, Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique (The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1941). See also, Otto Fenichel (Hanna Fenichel and David Rapaport, eds.) The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel: First Series (W.W. Norton & Co., 1953), and Otto Fenichel (Hanna Fenichel and David Rapaport, eds.) The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel: Second Series (W.W. Norton & Co., 1954).

Related Bibliographies

• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy