Since I've spent my entire life studying Hitler, Nazism and the Final Solution (or the Holocaust as some people call it), I'm sometimes asked if any of my relatives were involved in this experience. Well, my father is from Newark, New Jersey (same place where my beloved Leslie Fiedler grew up), and my mother from McKeesport, PA. Barely Jewish, I was a baseball player from New Jersey (my analysts once said I was so American).
One of my first scholarly publications is described below--published in THE PSYCHOANALYTIC REVIEW, reviewed in THE PSYCHOANALYTIC QUARTERLY). My topic was the relationship between UNCONSCIOUS PHANTASY and the creation of social institutions. This paper on COURTLY LOVE posed the question: How did this phenomenon come into being--out of nowhere--in the midst of a Christian culture?
Why is ANY social institution created? And why does each social institution assume a specific structure or form. A cultural form that persists must serve some profound psychological function.
This is the fundamental question: WHY DOES ANY CULTURE FORM COME INTO BEING and persist?
"Culture" is not an explanation, just a description: how to EXPLAIN THE EXISTENCE of specific cultural forms: this is the essential anthropological and sociological question.
And the explanation requires PSYCHOANALYSIS. This was the beginning of a field I call "the psychoanalysis of culture" or "the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture."
Best regards,
Richard K.
PS: I've never used the term "psychohistory" once in any of my writings. That group tried to recruit me--to bring me into their domain--for 40 years, offering KEYNOTE SPEECHES, lead articles in their publications, free advertising in their journals, etc.
For forty years, I would get a telephone call or letter or email from someone in that organization at least once a year (often twice a year).
They couldn't believe that I wouldn't want to "join them." They were "the only game in town" for many years, so I did read their publications avidly. But I sensed a lack of integrity. So, for better or worse, I was "on my own, a complete unknown" for many, many, many years. Not so easy. But there is a lot one can perceive and understand when one is observing from a place "outside of the symbolic order."
(1968). Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 37:471
Courtly love as a very real medieval social institution is described in the Treatise on Love by Andreas Capellanus in which the French Court life of the late twelfth century is depicted. The author shows how Freud, in referring to a special type of object choice made by certain men, described exactly the same conditions necessary to these men as were present in the social reality portrayed by Capellanus: the woman must belong to another man, and jealousy must be present to inflame the sexual passion of the male rescuer. The author points out that courtly love is useful despite its overidealization of the lady and masochistic submission by the man. It prevents less desirable solutions to the Oedipal problem, such as attitudes that women are dangerous or degraded, leading to homosexuality or sadomasochistic asceticism. Courtly love permitted men to fall in love without shame.