The Journal of psychohistory最新文献

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Bréde et de Montesquieu (1689-1755), the French philosopher who had such an enormous impact on the American constitution through his theory of the separation of powers, had an unusually sympathetic view of suicide. Indeed, he is the only major thinker in Western history to have produced a sustained argument against St. Thomas Aquinas' enormously influential views on this subject. Yet few scholars have attempted to analyze this argument, and none to explain why it was so important to him to make it. This paper demonstrates that Montesquieu's support for suicide in desperate circumstances is inextricably associated with the love of liberty for which he is justly celebrated, having the potential to radically transform the way we look at suicide and suicidal ideation today.

Henry Morgenthau (1856-1946) distinguished himself as the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 1913-1916, and as the chairman of the League of Nations Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC) for Greece, 1923-24. I describe aspects of his early life that shaped the man he became, his accomplishments in these two posts, and his feelings about himself over time. At the end I briefly describe his attitude toward a possible Jewish state in Palestine.

The inquisitions in Spain and Portugual were state organs, rather than church-run enterprises; their purpose to modernize disparate jurisdictions during the final stages of Reconquista (return of Moorish areas to Christian administration) to ensure security and loyalty. So many Jews converted (under duress or willingly for strategic reasons) and inter-married with middle-class and aristocratic families, that their sincerity and loyalty was suspected, This meant going beyond traditional monitoring of ritual acts and social behaviour; there was a need to look below the surface, to interpret ambiguity, and to break codes of duplicity. Inquisitors developed techniques of a form of psychoanalysis before the discoveries of Freud: methods of questioning to bring out repressed beliefs and motivations, unriddling equivocational performance and speech-acts, and integrating fragments of information from family members, business associates and neighbours collected over many years. Torture, more threatened than actual, and lengthy incarceration punctuated by periods of exile and re-arrest after years quiet, provoked desperate confessions and specious denunciations, all of which had to be subject to intense scrutiny and analysis. The assumption was modern: a person's self was no longer equivalent to their words and actions; instead, a deep dark and traumatized inner self to be revealed.

"Psychohistory and Slavery: Preliminary Issues," begins an examination of slavery in the antebellum South. The paper suggests that how slavery and the group-fantasy of white male supremacy were perpetuated among slaveholders is a question of fundamental importance for psychohistorians. The family and childrearing are the focus of attention. Given the ferocity of slavery, it is argued that the psychological and emotional consequences of this barbarism were not limited to the slaves themselves, but had significant impact on the slaveholders as well-their parenting, their children, and their children's parenting of the next generation. In each generation the trauma of slavery was injected into slaveholder children and became a fundamental component of elite Southern personality.

This article argues that the era of mass incarceration can be understood as a new tactic in the history of American racism. Slavery was ended by the Civil War, but after Reconstruction, the gains of the former slaves were eroded by Jim Crow (a rigid pattern of racial segregation), lynching, disenfranchisement, sharecropping, tenantry, unequal educational resources, terrorism, and convict leasing. The Civil Rights Movement struck down legal barriers, but we have chosen to deal with the problems of poverty and race not so differently than we have in the past. The modern version of convict leasing, is mass incarceration. This article documents the dramatic change in American drug policy beginning with Reagan's October, 1982 announcement of the War on Drugs, the subsequent 274 percent growth in the prison and jail populations, and the devastating and disproportionate effect on inner city African Americans. Just as the Jim Crow laws were a reaction to the freeing of the slaves after the Civil War, mass incarceration can be understood as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement.

Understanding Osama bin Laden's personal history illuminates his motivation, inner conflicts, decisions and behaviors. His relationships with his mother, father, country and religion set the stage for his conflicted choices as an adolescent and then as an adult. Although only a cursory psychological profile is possible based on public domain information, the profile constructed here could be useful in setting future foreign policy. Perhaps the crucial mistake in U.S. foreign policy was abandoning bin Laden as an asset when Russian forces were expelled from Afghanistan in 1989: this act by the U.S. set the stage for the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.

This has been called the Age of Empathy; empathy is seen as the glue that holds society together, the capacity without which humans would not have evolved. It is the ability to accurately perceive others internal states and to have affective responses to them. Empathy is most likely to emerge with those with whom we are familiar, those that are an 'us'. Universally, humans divide 'us' and 'them.' Those in the out-group are treated with disdain, and sometimes with lethal actions. In human history and psychology, trends often move in opposite directions. Empathy has a limited domain, and is accompanied by hostility to 'outsiders'.