From Tribal Division to Welcoming Inclusion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives by Maxine K. Anderson, Routledge, Abingdon and
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Book Review From Tribal Division to Welcoming Inclusion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives by Maxine K. Anderson, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019, 97 pp.
Once upon a time, psychoanalysts not only presumed that they had their finger on the pulse of humanity’s deepest thoughts and subliminal impulses but that they, indeed, had little to learn from sociologists, anthropologists and other psychological thinkers who had yet not metabolized the Master’s theories. Other thinkers similarly trying to understand how it is that aware human creatures become enmeshed in internal and external conflict were most often ignored. If these others failed to accept the Freudian metatheory of the sexual etiology of neuroses, they were labeled neurotic, resistant or ignorant of the new discoveries. A few, including Ferenczi (1924, p. 69), recommended a humble skepticism in our formulations. Speaking of the clinical situation, Ferenczi (1924) opined: The difference between this [interpreting] and ordinary suggestion simply consists in this, that we do not deem the interpretations we offer to be irrefutable utterances, but regard their validity to be dependent on whether they can be verified by material brought forward from memory or by means of repetition of earlier situations (p. 69). However, Ferenczi and much of his work were often discounted. There were, as a result of mainstream parochialism, unintended consequences. This exclusionary system, in seeing itself as the one and only truth and one that would permit new information to arise only from the couch, yielded ongoing internecine conflict within the resulting community of competing orthodoxies. I won’t review all the many schisms that have arisen in this Century of Psychoanalysis and that continue to this day. Suffice it to say that such a unitary theory — homologous to the ritualistic religions that Freud depreciated in his writings — canonically yielded generations of such schisms with each faction considering itself the only true descendant of the Prophet. Even today, with the newest contributions to Psychoanalysis, it would be more accurate to point to competing relational turns, even if we allow for the growing handful of psychoanalytic institutes where multiple models live together in pluralistic harmony. Maxine Anderson has a broadly different approach. Working from Timothy Snyder’s 2017 models for authoritarianism, Anderson (pp. 75–76) elucidates the methods by which ‘‘an individual capitalizing on the fear within a populace can take on the role of an increasingly authoritarian figure, who convinces himself and others
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that he alone can make things better.’’ She marries this thinking to Cash’s 1941 and Hochschild’s 2016 analyses of how even poor White Southerners could maintain the illusion (both before and after the U.S. Civil War) that they were benefitting from White Supremacy (pp. 13–27). Speaking, for instance, about what might appear paradoxical to an outsider, namely that Southern poor Whites might welcome big industry pollution, Anderson (p. 19) dem
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