Ruptures In The American Psyche

Author : Michael J Diamond
Publisher : Phoenix Publishing House
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2022-04-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781800131293

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Ruptures in the American Psyche by Michael J Diamond Pdf

This book describes Trumpism: the strong allegiance to former President Donald Trump that is in evidence among a sizable portion of the US population. How did Trump come to be elected in 2016, and who supported him during his presidential tenure - and why? How is it that he continues to hold cult-like status, exerting a strong influence not only on many individuals but also on numerous elected officials, despite his defeat in 2020? Why does his character continue to be an object of fascination even among anti-Trumpists, and why will Trumpism continue to play a major role in the American sociopolitical landscape even now he has left the presidential stage? Michael J. Diamond ponders these questions through the lenses of American history and culture, political theory, social phenomena, group dynamics, and psychoanalysis. In exploring the relationship between large-group regression, cultism, destructive populism, delusional thinking, conspiratorial beliefs, authoritarianism, and leadership characterised by narcissism and paranoia, psychoanalytic ideas pertaining to group dynamics, malignant regression, and leadership are brought into play. Prominent psychoanalytic thinkers who have addressed these topics and whose work usefully contributes to the discussion include Bion, Freud, Fromm, Bollas, Kernberg, Lifton, Rosenfeld, and Volkan, as well as Bleger, Jaques, and several more recent Kleinian/Bionian-influenced analysts. Most important, the book makes use of these understandings to reestablish a sufficiently containing frame that strengthens the body politics' nonpathological elements in order to come to grips with these disturbing factors. Whatever their political beliefs, psychoanalysts in the US and worldwide will find much to think about in reading this book's application of their discipline to today's sociopolitical environment. In addition, the book's insights extend beyond arguments targeting a strictly psychoanalytic audience in order to reach social and political thinkers, as well as activists, who are deeply concerned about dangers threatening the very foundations of democracy in the US and worldwide. And finally, the thoughtful lay person will appreciate the accessibility to all these fields that the book provides, and will come away with a much deeper understanding of just what motivates us to take a stand for or against a given political figure. In short, conceptual tools are provided that lead to greater understanding as well as effective strategies and tactics for containment of destructive forces - largely unconscious ones - that imperil our society.

Author : Michael J Diamond
Publisher : Phoenix Publishing House
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2022-04-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781800131286

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Ruptures in the American Psyche by Michael J Diamond Pdf

This book describes Trumpism: the strong allegiance to former President Donald Trump that is in evidence among a sizable portion of the US population. How did Trump come to be elected in 2016, and who supported him during his presidential tenure - and why? How is it that he continues to hold cult-like status, exerting a strong influence not only on many individuals but also on numerous elected officials, despite his defeat in 2020? Why does his character continue to be an object of fascination even among anti-Trumpists, and why will Trumpism continue to play a major role in the American sociopolitical landscape even now he has left the presidential stage? Michael J. Diamond ponders these questions through the lenses of American history and culture, political theory, social phenomena, group dynamics, and psychoanalysis. In exploring the relationship between large-group regression, cultism, destructive populism, delusional thinking, conspiratorial beliefs, authoritarianism, and leadership characterised by narcissism and paranoia, psychoanalytic ideas pertaining to group dynamics, malignant regression, and leadership are brought into play. Prominent psychoanalytic thinkers who have addressed these topics and whose work usefully contributes to the discussion include Bion, Freud, Fromm, Bollas, Kernberg, Lifton, Rosenfeld, and Volkan, as well as Bleger, Jaques, and several more recent Kleinian/Bionian-influenced analysts. Most important, the book makes use of these understandings to reestablish a sufficiently containing frame that strengthens the body politics' nonpathological elements in order to come to grips with these disturbing factors. Whatever their political beliefs, psychoanalysts in the US and worldwide will find much to think about in reading this book's application of their discipline to today's sociopolitical environment. In addition, the book's insights extend beyond arguments targeting a strictly psychoanalytic audience in order to reach social and political thinkers, as well as activists, who are deeply concerned about dangers threatening the very foundations of democracy in the US and worldwide. And finally, the thoughtful lay person will appreciate the accessibility to all these fields that the book provides, and will come away with a much deeper understanding of just what motivates us to take a stand for or against a given political figure. In short, conceptual tools are provided that lead to greater understanding as well as effective strategies and tactics for containment of destructive forces - largely unconscious ones - that imperil our society.

Author : David A. J. Richards
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2023-10-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781000965438

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Revolution and Constitutionalism in Britain and the U.S. by David A. J. Richards Pdf

In Revolution and Constitutionalism in Britain and the U.S.: Burke and Madison and Their Contemporary Legacies, David A. J. Richards offers an investigative comparison of two central figures in late eighteenth-century constitutionalism, Edmund Burke and James Madison, at a time when two great constitutional experiments were in play: the Constitution of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the U.S. Constitution of 1787. Richards assesses how much, as liberal Lockean constitutionalists, Burke and Madison shared and yet differed regarding violent revolution, offering three pathbreaking and original contributions about Burke’s importance. First, the book defends Burke as a central figure in the development and understanding of liberal constitutionalism; second, it explores the psychology that led to his liberal voice, including Burke’s own long-term loving relationship to another man; and third, it shows how Burke’s understanding of the political psychology of the violence of “political religions” is an enduring contribution to understanding fascist threats to political liberalism from the eighteenth-century onwards, including the contemporary constitutional crises in the U.S. and U.K. deriving from populist movements. Mixing thorough research with personal experiences, this book will be an invaluable resource to scholars of political science and theory, constitutional law, history, political psychology, and LGBTQ+ issues.

Author : Richard L. Abel
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2024-03-26
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781040003800

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How Autocrats Seek Power by Richard L. Abel Pdf

Chronicling and analyzing resistance to the threat that autocracy poses to American liberal democracy, this book provides the definitive account of the rise of Trump’s populist support in 2016, and his failed efforts to nullify the result of the 2020 election. This book is about the threat of autocracy, which antedated Donald Trump and will persist after he leaves the stage. Autocracy negates both liberalism—which includes the protection of fundamental rights, the rule of law, separation of powers, and respect for specialist expertise—and democracy—which requires that the state be responsible to an electorate composed of all eligible voters—by concentrating unconstrained power in a single individual. Anticipating defeat in the 2016 election, Trump attacked suggestions that he had sought, or even benefited from, Russian assistance despite the evidence, and he made repeated claims of election fraud. In 2020, fearful that his mishandling of the pandemic had alienated voters, he intensified the allegations of fraud, demanding recounts, pressuring state legislatures and state election officials, advancing bizarre conspiracy theories, and finally, calling for a massive demonstration, urging protesters to march to the Capitol to pressure Congress, promising to accompany them. But as this book documents, Trump’s efforts to nullify the result of the 2020 election failed. As the courts rejected his numerous challenges, state election officials loyally performed their statutory duties, the Justice Department found no evidence of fraud, and politicians from all sides certified Biden’s victory, this book traces the many, and varied, forms of the defense of liberal democracy located within both the state and civil society, including law (judges, government lawyers, and private practitioners), the media, NGOs, science (and other forms of expertise), and civil servants (in federal, state, and local government). Evaluating their efficacy, the book maintains, is vital if—as history has repeatedly taught us—the price of liberal democracy, like that of liberty itself, is eternal vigilance. This definitive account and analysis of Trumpism and the resistance to it will appeal to scholars, students, and others with interests in politics, populism, and the rule of law and, more specifically, to those concerned with resisting the threat that autocracy poses to liberal democracy.

Author : Fred Busch,Natacha Delgado
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2023-07-14
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781000914788

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The Ego and the Id by Fred Busch,Natacha Delgado Pdf

The Ego and the Id: 100 Years Later revisits Freud’s classic 1923 essay, which developed key psychoanalytic concepts and presented a radical revision of his earlier theory. International contributors explore the themes of this remarkable work from their own perspective, with novel and surprising results. There are mysteries uncovered, questions raised about the validity of Freud’s perspective, problems in psychoanalytic technique based on those clinging to Freud’s earlier model of the curative process in psychoanalysis, cybernetics as a way of evaluating Freud’s model, and many other gems. With contributors highlighting the significance of the essay and offering critiques based upon new understanding gathered over the last century, The Ego and the Id: 100 Years Later offers a fresh, international perspective on this classic paper. This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training and of great interest to scholars of psychoanalytic studies.

Author : Kyle Wolfe
Publisher : Fulton Books, Inc.
Page : 25 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2021-10-15
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781637105856

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American Psyche by Kyle Wolfe Pdf

American Psyche's central theme of dominance and return to the tribal roots of human nature is especially relevant with prison culture but is also present in the workplace, romantic relationships, and during everyday interactions. The problem outlined in this piece is that Eurocentric thinking is the root cause of many of the world's problems. Americans stuck in the vicious ego-cycle described in American Psyche are not just suffering but attempting to solve problems of their own creation with the very logic that created them.

Author : Robert Samuels
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2024-06-03
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783031612275

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Culture Wars, Universities, and the Political Unconscious by Robert Samuels Pdf

Author : Fred Busch
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2023-03-15
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781000834574

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Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads by Fred Busch Pdf

In this clear and thoughtful book, an international group of distinguished authors explore the central issues and future directions facing psychoanalytic theory and practice. The book explores four main questions in the development of psychoanalysis: what psychoanalysis is as an endeavour now and what it may be in the future; the effect of social issues on psychoanalysis and of psychoanalysis on social issues, such as race and gender; the importance of psychoanalytic institutes on shaping future psychoanalytic theory and practice; and the likely major issues that will be shaping psychoanalysis in years to come. Including contributions from within every school of psychoanalytic thought, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and all who are curious about the future directions of the profession.

Author : Ethan Watters
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2010-01-12
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1416587195

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Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters Pdf

It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves. For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. Crazy Like Us documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases. In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug. But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.

Author : François Debrix,Cynthia Weber
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0816640742

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Rituals of Mediation by François Debrix,Cynthia Weber Pdf

A timely consideration of the meaning of transnational cultural interactions today. In an era of increasing globalization, the cultural and the international have borders as permeable as most nations'--and an understanding of one requires making sense of the other. Foregrounding the role of mediation--understood here as a site of representation, transformation, and pluralization--the authors engage two specific questions: How might we make theoretical and practical sense of transnational cultural interactions? And how are we to understand the ways in which the sites of mediation represent, transform, and remediate internationals? Accordingly, the authors consider international issues like security, development, political activism, and the war against terrorism through the lens of cultural practices such as traveling through airports, exhibiting art and photography, logging on to the Internet, and spinning news stories.

Author : Michael Veal
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2013-08-15
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780819574428

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Dub by Michael Veal Pdf

Winner of the ARSC’s Award for Best Research (History) in Folk, Ethnic, or World Music (2008) When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee “Scratch” Perry began crafting “dub” music in the early 1970s, they were initiating a musical revolution that continues to have worldwide influence. Dub is a sub-genre of Jamaican reggae that flourished during reggae’s “golden age” of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Dub involves remixing existing recordings—electronically improvising sound effects and altering vocal tracks—to create its unique sound. Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub’s development and offering the first thorough analysis of the music itself, author Michael Veal examines dub’s social significance in Jamaican culture. He further explores the “dub revolution” that has crossed musical and cultural boundaries for over thirty years, influencing a wide variety of musical genres around the globe. Ebook Edition Note: Seven of the 25 illustrations have been redacted.

Author : Davis Walter
Publisher : Pluto Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2006-02-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 074532469X

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Death's Dream Kingdom by Davis Walter Pdf

Why is fear a dominant emotion in contemporary society? Why are politicians using words like 'terror', 'evil' and 'fundamentalism', and what effect is it having on public consciousness? Answering these questions, Walter A. Davis taps into the cultural psyche to explore the link between ideology and emotional and psychological manipulation. Starting with the three topics that have preoccupied social discourse since 9-11 -- terror, evil and fundamentalism -- he shows that the Bush administration has been hugely successful in controlling and developing a new political climate through the creation of an almost hypnotic mass consciousness. Davis's findings take us to the heart of the ideological paralysis of the Left, while offering an innovative approach to understanding contemporary history. Davis fuses a psychoanalytic and philosophical framework to explain the relation between culture and political events, from the sado-masochist hysteria of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ' to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison; and from the genocidal use of depleted uranium in Iraq to the apocalyptic language driving the Christian Right's assault on basic human rights. He exposes the motives and belief-systems of this new American psyche and shows how it sustains the Bush administration's agenda. Illuminating how psychological needs govern political action, Davis reveals why the relationship between politics and public consciousness has massive implications for all of us beyond America's borders.

Author : Alfred Bendixen
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 708 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2014-11-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781118917480

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A Companion to the American Novel by Alfred Bendixen Pdf

Featuring 37 essays by distinguished literary scholars, A Companion to the American Novel provides a comprehensive single-volume treatment of the development of the novel in the United States from the late 18th century to the present day. Represents the most comprehensive single-volume introduction to this popular literary form currently available Features 37 contributions from a wide range of distinguished literary scholars Includes essays on topics and genres, historical overviews, and key individual works, including The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Beloved, and many more.

Author : Christopher Christian,Michael J. Diamond
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2018-05-08
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780429907906

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The Second Century of Psychoanalysis by Christopher Christian,Michael J. Diamond Pdf

This book explores the internal and external boundaries of psychoanalysis. It examines the interrelationships between various psychoanalytic theoretical and clinical perspectives as well as between psychoanalysis and other disciplines.

Author : David S. Jones
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2014-09-01
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781421415758

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Broken Hearts by David S. Jones Pdf

Based on extensive reviews of medical literature and archives, this historical perspective on medical decision making and risk highlights personal, professional, and community outcomes.