The Journal of psychohistory最新文献

In the psychohistory of the antebellum South, the extent of child abuse in slaveholder families is important for understanding how members of the southern elite were reared and the extent to which they were infected with the toxic residue of their elders’ passions and rages. It is argued that the Old South was a developing region, rather than an already developed one. Consequently, the rate of child abuse that is characteristic of contemporary postindustrial societies is not the proper paradigm for conceptualizing the abuse rate in slaveholder families. It is proposed instead that the rate of child abuse in contemporary developing societies is a better fit for estimating abuse in the antebellum South. Societal and familial variables impinging on the abuse of slaveholder children—corporal punishment, alcohol consumption, hyper-masculinity, a traumatogenic culture of violence, wife abuse, maternal ambivalence and neglect, miscegenation and incest are discussed, as is the likelihood of maltreatment by slaves. Using a study of child abuse across 28 nations, tentative rates of abuse are proposed.

The development of John Woolman’s views on slavery plays an important evidentiary role in Philip Kitcher’s recent book, The ethical project (Kitcher 2011). In this work Kitcher takes what he calls a “pragmatic naturalist” approach to ethics and claims that the discovery of ethical truth plays no role in the emergence of ethical progress. To support his view, he argues that Woolman’s contribution was not due to his discovery of an ethical truth about slavery, not previously known, but due to his sensitivity to slavery and his influence on others, which contributed to collective progressive change in moral norms involving slavery. While not disputing Kitcher’s ethical theory, I argue that personal discoveries of a moral psychological nature made by Woolman served both as insights and motivations for his contribution. Thus, even if there are no such things as independent ethical truths that can be discovered by individuals, a fully naturalistic approach to ethical progress requires that we make room not only for group-level progressive evolution of norms, but also for individual discoveries of a moral psychological nature that can sometimes cause an individual to play a significant initiating role in progressive ethical transitions that occur at a group level.

John F. Kennedy, Jr., (1960-1999) was one of the most recognizable figures of the 2nd half of the 20th century. He died tragically in an airplane he was piloting on route to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts to attend the wedding of his cousin, Rory Kennedy. Though much has been written about the life of J.F.K., Jr., this article represents the first psychobiographical portrait of the iconic personality. Employing a multi-theoretical approach to psychobiography, this profile integrates psychodynamic theory (James 1902/1982, Winnicott 1965), psychosocial development theory (Erikson 1950, 1980), and a modern theory of emerging adulthood (Arnett 2004) to develop a deep psychological portrait of the beloved son of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. J.F.K., Jr.’s life is traced along the four developmental periods of infancy and childhood, high school and college, emerging adulthood, and young adulthood. Psychobiography often focuses on unsolved mysteries in the lives of historic figures, and this profile of J.F.K., Jr., explores his search for his unique identity, whether he would have entered political life, and the likely future of his life with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy had they lived.

Despite declining infant-mortality rates and a cottage industry of publications devoted to improving parenting/childcare, birthrates in the U.S. and Western Europe continue to fall. But the present inquiry is directed less to the disappearance of actual children than to that more fragile and contested state of childhood. Changes in the spaces reserved for childhood might be compared to the erosion of Arctic ice due to climate change. In both, human factors play a contentious role. The examples cited below will show how children are susceptible not just to parental influences but also to other adults in the community and especially now to unprecedented cultural changes. How these transformations impact the evolution of parenting modes laid out by Lloyd deMause will be assessed in due course.

The 18th and 19th centuries were beset with new religious movements in the United States: Shakers, Latter Day Saints, Millerites, and Seventh Day Adventists to name a few. One group, Christian Science, held radically different views than their counterparts and their origins lay in the most unlikely of places, a perpetually ill and poor woman from New Hampshire. Much has been said about Mary Baker Eddy: some say that she was a prophet, others that she was a fraud. Herein no such judgments are made. This study seeks to look into the life of Mary Baker Eddy from a psychological lens in the hopes that insight can be gained into the founding of the First Church of Jesus Christ Scientist and perhaps to allay the binary of Mrs. Eddy as either prophet or fanatic.

During Reconstruction, which is often called the most progressive period in American history, African Americans made great strides. By 1868 African American men constituted a majority of registered voters in South Carolina and Mississippi, and by 1870 eighty-five percent of Mississippi's black jurors could read and write. However, Reconstruction was followed by approximately one hundred years of Jim Crow laws, lynching, disenfranchisement, sharecropping, unequal educational resources, terrorism, racial caricatures, and convict leasing. The Civil Rights Revolution finally ended that period of despair, but the era of mass incarceration can be understood as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. This article attempts to understand the persistence of racism in the United States from slavery's end until the present.

Examining the inner workings of the slaveholder family, including slave caretakers, this article probes the psychodynamics of slaveholder development to assess the extent of child abuse in the Old South. Childcare was haphazard and premised on paternal absence, maternal ambivalence, and the exigencies of slave surrogacy. Corporal punishment, sanctified by southern religion, was the rule. The likelihood of slave negligence and retaliatory attacks against slaveholder children are addressed. Childrearing practices such as swaddling, aunt adoption, and maternal incest are considered, as well as the possible usage of a West African cleansing ritual. The article classifies planter families within the Ambivalent Mode of parent-child relations and suggests the restaging of childhood trauma as the underlying dynamic in the march to civil war.