You ask:

What is it about recognizing the power of the affective and unconscious realms of human experience that leads otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people to work so hard to diminish their significance? Why is it necessary to transform a psychologically informed explanatory model of politics into a caricature in order to challenge it?

You have, I think, put your finger on another taboo - and that is mental illness, together with the stigma of mental illness. This is an underlying, though not conscious, context of your questions.

In addition, whenever strong feelings are repressed, one thing for sure is that you lose track of where they may resurface. Scary stuff!

In my view tolerance of uncertainty is a hallmark of psychological maturity. And this bears on many of the issues being debated in these posts. If one is insecure, one seeks to reduce uncertainty. That can happen in the political realm, the realm of religion, and so many others. A desire for certainty, if blocked, could lead to the caricature you mention. The need to see things as black and white. Whether they are things you oppose or things you choose.

I have a professional interest in these things and find it fascinating how my work and training as a therapist intersects what goes on in society and politics.

Well thank-you for bringing up an obvious truth. I have noted that many people on the far left (i.e. to my left) tend to be angry. They express their anger through politics but it seems evident that the anger is part of their personality. I think this is one of the major reasons there is so much hostility to psychoanalysis on the left. These are people who would have to deal with an internal cause, not an external one which is very difficult to do.

What makes it difficult to apply this type of analysis to politics is that most if not all people are guided by their unconscious mind and probably a majority carry self delusions that are obvious to others. I am convinced that the only rational way to understand the war lust that is dominant in American politics is as a psychopathology.

You are quite correct to focus on such traits as homophobia, male fear of their feminine side and the desire to drive hummers as pathologies as they are the most obvious.

The issue is not whether emotion affects behavior --political or otherwise. The issue is whether 9/11 brought forth a response in the body politic (male body politic?) which can be traced to an old American myth whether or not that myth is rooted in hypermasculinity or femiphobia (we could, I suppose, add rootedness in male sexual panic, too).

A response to an event is only identifiable if it leads to a subsequent change in behavior. For me, the only unbiased proof of change in behavior on the political level is the outcome of voting.

So --- did white males change their voting behavior after 9/11?

From James Joyner:

In 2004, according to New York Times exit polls, Democrat Kerry won 38 percent of the total white male vote, confirming a familiar pattern. Kerry’s share was basically the same that every Democratic presidential candidate has received since Michael Dukakis. In the four elections between 1988 and 2000, in fact, using New York Times exit poll results, the Democratic nominee won 36 percent, 37 percent, 38 percent and 36 percent, respectively, of votes cast by white men.

Where's the 9/11 effect?

This is a good point Ellen, but I'm not sure its telling against the Faludi/Ducat line of argument. Changes in the outlook of white male voters might not produce changes in their voting patterns, if the character of Democratic candidates changes along with the voters. John Kerry was the first combat veteran to be nominated by the Democrats since, I believe, George McGovern. Much was made of Kerry's purple hearts, his having killed people, etc. So it is at least worth considering that a preference for more "masculine" leadership was manifested not by more Republican votes, but by a more "masculine" Democratic candidate.

"Where's the 9/11 effect?"  In the minds of Cheney, Bush, Rummy, etc. who were too dumb to know what to do but they knew they had the weapons to destroy stuff.

I see you have met my mother-in-law.

The beauty of all this is how much of the knee-jerk panic reaction at this book club stems from exactly the same anxieties detailed here. A handful of stalwarts here will flip out if a feminist says the sky is blue, they are so deeply threatened by the symbolic threat represented by feminist women. What they fail to understand is the more they flail, the less they shore up their supposed masculine toughness in the eyes of others. Men who are so easily provoked by female power and authority end up looking, well, easily threatened and weak.

Thanks for the feed back to my ruminations -- they are helpfull.

Would you say that the field of mathematics, in which long, painful uncertainties are resolved through an order of operations, is a discipline pursued by insecure persons because it seeks to simplify?

It is likely that your own statement of profession is a way of reducing uncertainty. You have a niche by which to judge the world. It is something you can cite and use to deal with the complicated world and it helps you, given your own personal attributes, make a living. That reduces your uncertainty of providence for you and yours.

The view that tolerating uncertainty is the psychologically mature standard finds counter-examples enough to balance it where chaos reducing simplification solves problems in the most economic, life-saving and ethical way compared to alternatives that tolerate uncertainty for too long. If you are one of the casualties of that tolerance, then it is not benign or economic. If you enjoy academic detachment in the matter, you can tolerate all kinds of uncertainty.

In other words, because the Neocons grasped for power using 9-11 to justify an overbroad mandate for intervention, isn't improved by neolibs concluding that the American male is mentally deranged with cartoon machismo and that's why we're in this mess. Oversimplifying matters through the target fixation of a single discipline isn't going to help matters any more than target fixating throught the barrel of a rifle at every problem.

Speaking of unconscious thoughts, beliefs, and desires. I think the trend is to move away from the Cartesian view that the mind is defined by the conscious so that unconscious thoughts, beliefs, and desires are ruled out by definition.

It seems that in the philosophy of mind, if we maintain the Cartesian view, it is quite likely that we will never understand the mind at all. On the other hand, if we allow for unconscious mental processes there is hope.

For one, take belief, desire, and thought. Descartes maintained an individual could not be wrong about what they thought they believed, desired , or thought. Yet if we assume that what a person believes can be determined by their dispositions to behave in certain ways, it is common for people to actually be wrong about what they believe. For example it is not at all clear that Senator Craig does not sincerely believe that "he is not and never was a homosexual". The same can be said about unconscious racism, sexism, etc. It is how people behave that shows what they believe and what people believe they believe is often inconsistent with their behavior.

I can understand Matt's yearning for simple rational explanations that avoid these murky regions of the human soul. But if you are seeking truth, you need to sometimes go where you don't like to go. At 17, I was pretty much averse to introspection. Now I live by it.

Except there's problems with your theory as to why people don;t appreciate Ducat and Faludi.

1) The hostility to psychoanalysis is pretty universal, with only relatively a marginal more acceptance on the left.

2) Also, your theory presumes that since people are generally hostile to psychoanalysis, that they're affraid to face the truth about themselves, which also presumes psychoanalysis has truth to offer.

3) A more elegant explanation is that people don't appreciate most psychoanalysis or the theory of Ducat and Faludi, is becasue they simply don't find them particularly valuable.

4) But books on the origins of religion, inner workings of the brain, evolutionary psychology, game theory, etc are regularly cited here by people who find them valuable, even their uncomfortable truths, and still find Faludi and Ducat's theory lacking.

This has been one of the worst discussions I've ever seen on TPMCafe, on almost all sides. What a train wreck.

A good rule of thumb for authors in Book Clubs: respond to the posts you find most interesting, not to the ones you find most infuriating.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

There's bloviating about Freud and plagues and bringing light to the masses. Then some gesticulation about inevitability which is a straw man as inevitability wasn't the main point, but probability, and whether Bush taking office in 2000 actually resulted from an emerging "hypermasculine" zeitgeist, or whether the SCOTUS had something to do with it.

Then Ducat rambles a bit about irrational behavior, unconscious thought, and groupthink under external duress. None of which is original, nor in question. Just a smoke screen.

And this was particularly hilarious:

And, those males who did hold these beliefs were more likely than liberal men to score high on measures of gender role conflict, homophobia, and fear of femininity in men.

Fantastic. Ducat has discovered conservatives and reactionaries, a previously unobserved and unknown people.

So basically his theory gets down to saying America became more reactionary due to an attack and manipulation by conservatives and hawks seeking to exploit it. Thanks Ducat for bringing us this wholly original insight, this plague of enlightenment that was so hard to face. :rolleyes:

The cause of the match lighting is the will of the person lighting it (which may have numerous antecedents), not the physical conditions that allow it to ignite. Where an event requires a human agent, one can't speak of physical conditions as causes unless they can clearly be shown to have motivated the actor, as when an alcoholic takes a drink when he spies a whiskey bottle on the shelf.

Dryness of the match, roughness of the surface and the presence of oxygen aren't causes at all, unless we can imagine a person who chances upon a dry match and thinks, "Hah, that match is so dry it's begging to be lit." Personally, I find this farfetched.

"So, on what evidence would you make a claim that engaging in self-critical reflection on our subconscious gendered political narratives is likely to lead to more effective political strategies in the future?"

Did Ducat make this claim? Maybe. But his main point seems to be that it's a mistake for the left to continue to rely on voter rationality in formulating their campaign strategies. There's no question Republicans have been successful because thay have incorporated this basic bit of knowledge and combined it with a 'keep it simple' precept when it comes to campaign imagery and sloganeering.

You're right that it's possible to analyze political behavior to death, as Faludi and
to some extent Ducat do, but the fact that people's political behavior, especially on a national scale, is ruled by emotions, images, and subconscious processes is the key element here.

Harrumphing about the tawdry outspoken woman doesn't really do much to support your contention that there's no panicked reaction going on here.

After a careful reading of your first post to Ducat, I saw that you said that mental illness was the context of Ducat's questions you quoted. Then you eliptically referred to Matt Zeitlin's 'caricature' of Ducat's unscientific overstatements as a possible sign of psychological immaturity because you ID'd same as certainty-seeking behavior. Never mind that you didn't bother to vet the soundness of Ducat's representations from his "data" or go into the soundness of Zeitlin's arguments.

Maybe the best way to communicate to you how your could-be ratification of Ducat's cyber diagnosis of Zeitlin's unconcious sits with me is to parody your 5-point response:

1. Psychotherapy is based on assumptions and principles. If only the real world were so simple! Depending on where one starts in psychotherapy, you can arrive at many different "worlds" that we can only envision and never see. I can derive no mathematic explanations related to psychotherapy or psychotherapists. This seems a mullet-head to me.

2. In my work, I have no way of predicting what a person might do or say, but I need to be ready to respond, no matter what. Your assertion that my rational point about your professional premise is a personal attack seems to be a sign of defensiveness, which is a sure sign of a male passive-aggressive anger and insecurity complex with which you must struggle mightily.

3. My view of what is enlightened is very similar to what immature psychotherapists strive for but do not reach because they cannot make up their minds whether they are psychotherapists or Buddhists. On one hand, they're disturbed by the dislocations and distorted, outdated findings from their own professional method, yet on the other, they need to be able to have a method for sale or they won't make a living anymore. Since they cannot tolerate the uncertainty of actually becoming a Buddhist monk, they choose a hybrid situation that they can control because neither Buddhist monks or psychotherapists can really tell them what-for without scratching their heads about the other ID carried by their sort-of disciple. Meanwhile, the Bodi-Freudis are so unique, that only they can issue authoritative statements about their hybrid fief in all directions, being the gatekeepers of the new fad. And somehow, having derived all of this about you without ever having met you but just having read a few of your comments, I'm willing to generalize these observations over your profession. How many must there be? Tens of thousands of you?

4. I wrote to Mr. Ducat above that mental illness was the context of his questions and that was what the "caricature" he referred to represented, specifically the mental disorder of psychologically immature intolerance of uncertainty. My response built on Mr. Ducat's assertions in a way that ratified them in the main, yet despite that, I deny I implied a disorder of the hypermasculine American male personality in Zeitlin's post.

5. "Honestly your post leaves me laughing. Good luck!" (Passive-Aggressive-ese for, "$%^&-you and die in pain.")

Parody over... 

Thanks for your words of healing wisdom.

Derange \De*range"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Deranged; p. pr. &
   vb. n. Deranging.] [F. d['e]ranger; pref. d['e]- = d['e]s-
   (L. dis) + ranger to range. See Range, and cf.
   Disarrange, Disrank.]
   1. To put out of place, order, or rank; to disturb the proper
      arrangement or order of; to throw into disorder,
      confusion, or embarrassment; to disorder; to disarrange;
      as, to derange the plans of a commander, or the affairs of
      a nation.

   2. To disturb in action or function, as a part or organ, or
      the whole of a machine or organism.

            A sudden fall deranges some of our internal parts.
                                                  --Blair.

   3. To disturb in the orderly or normal action of the
      intellect; to render insane.

It appears from here that Ducat and yourself deranged the laudable fields of sociology and psychology in order to craft a psuedo-scientific political weapon on this blog. You're entitled to your opinion, but you hawked it as quasi-professional for political purposes. About that, you're right. I'm angry.

I don't make the above parodies because I 'diagnose' you hold those exaggerated, parodied views, but I do forward them to communicate to you how Ducat's and your own psuedo-professional politicizing easily cuts the other way.

IMHO, psychoanalysis for the purpose of making disabling political arguments or propaganda campaigns is exactly the abuse of a therapeutic discipline to serve an ideology. I'm not comfortable with that detached abuse of psychotherapy towards those who are not even worked-up as patients yet quasi-diagnosed. Tie your professional opinion to it, and there's a slightly different angle than just another political opinion. Didn't you write:

"A desire for certainty, if blocked, could lead to the caricature you mention. The need to see things as black and white. Whether they are things you oppose or things you choose.

I have a professional interest in these things and find it fascinating how my work and training as a therapist intersects what goes on in society and politics."

Well, what has just gone on in society and politics via Ducat's and your comments, could be, if blocked, a sign that you all need to see things with sociological and psychotherapeutic certainty...which impliedly abuses the "stigma of mental illness" to passively-aggressively put down our young, impetuous Mr. Zeitlin.

That's all just my opinion to which I'm entitled. It could be wrong. But you could find others elsewhere.

No. Reductionist explanations of causation such as yours elucidate little. I didn't say the only causes are human causes. I said where there is a human agent, as in your example, it's spurious to include the physical elements of the event as part of the chain of causation. The presence of oxygen didn't "cause" the match to light any more than gravity "causes" a basketball to go through the hoop.

And as for matches igniting spontaneously in high temperatures, your example didn't talk about high temps but about a match being struck on a rough surface. When was the last time you saw a match light itself?

No. Reductionist explanations of causation such as yours elucidate little. I didn't say the only causes are human causes. I said where there is a human agent, as in your example, it's spurious to include the physical elements of the event as part of the chain of causation. The presence of oxygen didn't "cause" the match to light any more than gravity "causes" a basketball to go through the hoop.

That's just it. You are simply stuck in your psychologism about causes. Of course the rough surface is a contributing cause to the match's lighting. Of course the oxygen in the air interact with the phosphorus to form the oxide. Of course the chemical reaction that produces the oxide requires what is called a heat of reaction and that heat of reaction is achieved by friction. Let me try to put it another way. Was the person’s striking the match a sufficient condition for the match to light? no.. As explained above if the match was struck in the absence of oxygen it would NOT have lit.

As I said before that in that particular instance the striking of the match was the precipitating cause because "if the match had not been struck it would not have lit". But note the following "if the match had been struck but there was not sufficient oxygen, or the match was wet, etc.. the match would also not have lit.

So we can establish that striking the match is not a sufficient condition for the match lighting. When the match was struck oxygen had to interact with the phosphorus and cause the combustion. The friction against the rough surface had to produce enough heat to initiate the combustion...etc...
Neither is striking a match a necessary condition for the match to light. One can well imagine a situations in which the match ignites without being struck by a person.

It might be psychologically counterintuitive, but it is the nature of causation.

Btw objects do not cause anything. Events under a certain description do, although some philosophers have other candidates.

What is it about recognizing the power of the affective and unconscious realms of human experience that leads otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people to work so hard to diminish its significance? Why is it necessary to transform a psychologically informed explanatory model of politics into a caricature in order to challenge it?

Psychology threatens people's metaphysical notions of free will. Psychological experiments involve manipulating people, observing the results, and calculating how unlikely it was that the results occurred by accident or bias.

Regardless of the outcome, experiments prove people more predictable and manipulable than they care to admit. Predictably, this makes people defensive.

You are completely confused. You equate "necessary condition" with "cause." A necessary condition, such as the presence of oxygen, cannot cause any event that, like the striking of a match, requires a human agent.

When was the last time you saw a match jump out of a box and light itself? Or get struck by lightning. You don't provide an example of a match igniting itself because it is so improbable as to be absurd.

How about subconscious (Freudian) instead of unconscious (Bushian)?

It's unlikely yet possible that Republican political consultants took seriously the results of a study done showing that when politics, or religion, were the subjects under discussion all brain activity in the group participating took place on the non-reasoning side of the brain. The rational or reasoning side showed no activity.

Seems expedient to design and conduct political campaigns keeping in mind that your content is headed for the non-reasoning side of human brains. You must rouse the emotions, evoke images and let the subconscious processess roll.

You might be on to something, Tlees2, although I tend to think of bush as non-conscious. But here's two reads that I thought were very provocative: one was Ursula Le Guinn's She Unnames Them. Very short, but as testimony to her great narrative skill I could imagine, if even for a split second, what it would mean to live in a world where things didn't have names. Brilliant. The second was a little longer, about 90 pages: 45 pages of text and the rest footnotes. It's Edgar Wind's Art and Anarchy, by which Wind reams Jungian psychology and its impact on Western Art practice. As if the archetype The treasure hard to attain was all Pollack was about - I'm sure his psychoanalyst encouraged him to become his mythical self.

Neoboho

Er, just a minute, Howard.  It was Dick Cheney who said recently "...and the people of Peru deserve better leadership [than Hugo Chavez].  Geodementia Praecox?

Neoboho