The Church's Civil War

Abstract

A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks. We positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples' dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, “It is all right—believe it or not—to be people.”

Who can believe it?¹     

Civil commitment laws in nineteenth-century New York

The roots of nineteenth-century American civil commitment law lay in English common law, in particular poor law, with its mixed motives of helping lunatics and of protecting the community from them. As state institutions assumed an increasingly large share of the burden of restraint in the 1840s and 1850s, such confinement decisions became subject to greater public scrutiny. This can be seen particularly clearly in New York State, which in 1842 passed a law requiring that two physicians examine each alleged lunatic and report their findings to a judge who then made the final commitment decision. After the Civil War, a number of legal decisions limited the state's power to initiate civil commitments to cases of clear social danger, though families were not so confined. An 1874 statute further tightened procedural guidelines for civil commitments. A State Commissioner in Lunacy was appointed to oversee the internal workings of lunatic asylums. Yet such legal “reforms” failed to slow the increasing tendency of both families and communities to use such institutions as long-term holding places for the socially marginal or threatening.     

Towards A Psychoanalytic Understanding Of War

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - Inspired by the Horneyan concept of a morality of evolution and applying the psychoanalytic method, I researched a body of scientific literature to...     

The Paradox of Terrorism in Civil War

A great deal of violence in civil wars is informed by the logic of terrorism: violence tends to be used by political actors against civilians in order to shape their political behavior. I focus on indiscriminate violence in the context of civil war: this is a type of violence that selects its victims on the basis of their membership in some group and irrespective of their individual actions. Extensive empirical evidence suggests that indiscriminate violence in civil war is informed by the logic of terrorism. I argue that under certain conditions, that tend to be quite common, such violence is counter productive. I specify these conditions and address the following paradox: why do we sometimes observe instances of indiscriminate violence evenunder conditions that make this strategy counterproductive? I review four possible reasons: truncated data, ignorance, cost, and institutional constraints. I argue that indiscriminate violence emerges because it is much cheaper than its main alternative – selective violence. It is more likely under a steep imbalance of power between the competing actors, and where and when resources and information are low; however, most political actors eventually switch to selective violence. Thus, given a balance of power between competing actors, indiscriminate violence is more likely at early rather than late stages of the conflict. Overall, the paper suggests that even extreme forms of violence are used strategically.     

The New York Experience

SUMMARY

In response to changes in health care delivery, a coalition of therapists in New York City mounted a campaign to network with peers on the local, state and national level to exchange information and resources. The Mental Health Task Force explored new models of practice such as psychiatric home care, developed alliances with consumers and monitored regulatory agencies and legislation.     

Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice,by Henry Markman,Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022, 264 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives,by Neil Altman,Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2021, 80 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Psychoanalytic training today.

Psychoanalytic education in the United States faces multiple challenges as we enter the last decade of this century. (1) Changing interest and career path patterns for psychiatrists have resulted in fewer medical applications for psychoanalytic training. (2) Increased opportunities for full psychoanalytic training of nonphysicians have resulted in increased applications from highly skilled clinicians who often have more clinical experience than their medical colleagues. (3) Increased enrollment of women candidates has required rethinking of progression requirements, in light of their combined careers as professionals and mothers. (4) Independent institutes not accredited by the American Psychoanalytic Association compete for applicants while maintaining training standards that require less time and immersion in psychoanalytic theory and practice. (5) Economic factors increasingly influence the desirability of prolonged psychoanalytic training and the availability of suitable analysands for control analyses. (6) Evolution of theory and practice and the emergence of "new schools" of psychoanalytic thought have rendered the previous psychoanalytic landscape dominated by drive theory and ego psychology more multifaceted and less uniform. The American Psychoanalytic Association and its institutes attempt to understand these changing patterns and take them into consideration in the design and implementation of psychoanalytic training programs. Only one aspect of this complex situation will be described in this work, the current state of psychoanalytic training in the 28 institutes accredited by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Although the data available at this time leave unanswered many important questions about the philosophies that organize the content and emphases of the curriculum in different institutes, much has been learned about the overall structure of psychoanalytic training programs.