Jeffrey Prager

Presenting the past : psychoanalysis and the sociology of misremembering

Ms A and the problem of misremembering memorys context memory, culture, and the self trauma and the memory wars toward an intersubjective science of memory.

Self reflection(s): Subjectivity and racial subordination in the contemporary African‐American writer

Abstract Shelby Steeles The Content of our Character, and John Widemans Philadelphia Fire are contrasted for what they reveal about the two authors’ confrontation with self‐expression and self‐definition in a society that denies African‐American individuality. I argue that Steeles and Widemans distinctive solutions to personal expression as demonstrated in these works constitute the discursive boundaries, the poles between which black male subjectivity oscillates in this racialist society. To explicate these particular positions, I draw on psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, masculinity, and subjectivity. Thomas Manns Death in Venice is invoked to articulate, albeit in a different society and context, the subjective crisis of the intellectual, the linkage between ones inner world and outer society, and the relation between personal identity and national self‐understanding. While Steele opts for an isolated, transcendent individualism, Wideman embraces a conception of self inextricably connected t...

Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey through War and Peace

Vamik Volkan’s career as a psychoanalyst has been an extraordinary one. Promoting peace, mediation and reconciliation around the world, he has been an important figure in helping various interested parties identify unconscious obstacles to conflict resolution, even among those whose hatred has sometimes spanned centuries. He has worked with heads of sovereign states and important national commissions to design strategies to reduce conflict and to disrupt the transmission of trauma across generations. He has also been engaged in political efforts to bring psychoanalytic insights to better achieve forgiveness by those victimized, apologies from those who have inflicted harm, and reconciliation between enemies. To these ends, he has not only worked extensively in the United States where he practices but also in Palestine and Israel, Turkey, Croatia, Senegal, Bosnia, Kuwait, Malaysia, to name only some, to make possible and facilitate dialogue between various warring groups. Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey through War and Peace is Dr. Volkan’s personal chronicle of many of these encounters. He also recounts the many lessons learned as a result of these interventions. He offers insights on how psychological factors influence intraand international relations and how knowledge about them can make important contributions to more peaceful coexistence. Dr. Volkan’s book, along with his many previously published books and articles, documents ways in which the gap that currently exists between psychoanalysis in the consulting room and the knowledge it offers for positive social change might be effectively bridged. His publications, too, reveal how sustained his effort has been over the years to translate psychoanalysis, a science of subjectivity and the therapeutic dyad, into one useful for social and political interventions in conflict situations. It is what Dr. Volkan refers to as “political psychology in practice.” Enemies on the Couch is very rich in detail and full of many personal anecdotes, all told and referenced to make these larger points. And the book provides ample evidence for gains achieved when familiar sites of political conflict are perceived through these psychological lenses. In particular, Professor Volkan emphasizes the powerful irrational role that “large-group identity” holds over individuals around the world, whether in Israel and Palestine, Georgia and South Ossetia, or in Croatia Book Review 503

Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians and Psychiatry in France, 1914–1940

Anarchy as Order is the third in a series of related books by Mohammed Bamyeh. Framed most broadly, Anarchy as Order explores that myriad of issues and contestations associated with moving from a society based on ‘‘an imposed order’’ to a society premised on ‘‘an unimposed order.’’ Substantively, this is an elaboration of the theoretical scaffolding Bamyeh began building in these earlier works. This is an essential consideration for the reader at times, because rather than a sustained, conventional engagement with the contemporary anarchist literature, Bamyeh elects in this book to expand further upon notions that were either introduced or at least hinted at in his previous works. (For instance, there are only three or four references to anarchist works published since 1993, while eight of the author’s works are cited.) This can be a fruitful approach that deepens one’s analysis and understanding of the author’s interpretation of anarchy as an unimposed order, but it also places certain obligations on the reader to consider a range of concepts in the broader context of debates that Bamyeh has explored more fully elsewhere. The principle merits of this work concern the author’s serious and considered effort to engage the profoundly difficult task of imagining a society based on unimposed order, while we remain necessarily locked within the analytical and conceptual limitations that reflect our everyday experiences with a society based on imposed order. In this regard, Bamyeh’s challenge is two-fold. First he must develop a language to describe such a society and second he must provide a plausible explanation of possible transitions to such a society. He takes on both of these to varying degrees of success. Where he falters, however, this is primarily a consequence of the inherent conceptual difficulty of presenting and analyzing any vision of a society that remains yet-in-formation. To describe a society based on unimposed order, Bamyeh deploys two basic strategies. First, by way of illustration, he cites cases of anarchy that arise historically (and spontaneously) within the fabric of a society based on imposed order. In the selection and description of cases there is a strong existentialist influence that shapes Bamyeh’s account. Somewhat problematically, however, this existentialist framework is never explicitly detailed and, thus, must be understood as having been earlier introduced in Of Death and Dominion. In fact, the existentialist premises of Bamyeh’s work are essential to understanding his notion of self-development that drives an individual’s pursuit and realization of freedom through the occasional and ongoing creation of anarchist spaces and the continual reorganization of social institutions that follows from this. For Bamyeh, this notion of self-development appears to be an almost exclusively organic process that follows from what it means to be an individual in mass society—regardless of the specific details of that mass society. The second strategy of Bamyeh is to describe a society based on unimposed order by providing a type of counter description of such a society via a series of contrasts with societies based on imposed order. Recognizing the inherent difficulties of presenting a transparent vision of a society whose premises for being remain in a yet-to-be realized set of social conditions and conceptual categories, Bamyeh leads the reader through a detailed account of various conceptual categories of social organization derived from a society based on imposed order and provides an alternative understanding of these same categories as they might be experienced in a society based on unimposed order. These conceptual categories include civil society, the common good, self-will, commitment, and freedom. As a general strategy this strikes me as a plausible and

Book reviews : Roy L. Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 270 pp.,

of these is the leader, charismatic and absolute. Events in Nazi Germany proceeded in a fairy-tale scenario leading to the eventual takeover of the entire nation: the common hope for a Brave New World, a Utopia, and eventually, the plan for world domination. The processes provide a blue-print for establishing and maintaining such fraternalism: full control of schools, curricula, subject matter, and teachers; the mobilization of labor; and the creation of women’s groups. One cannot help but contrast such effectively carried out methodology with the heavy-handed, even clumsy efforts of a Stalin or a Mao.