C. Fred Alford

It is widely asserted that Donald Trump is a cult leader, or that his followers are cultists.  He's not, and they are not.  Trump is an extremely clever politician, adept at manipulating nativism, racism, and rage.  He gives voice to what is already out there.  To treat Trump as a cult leader risks mystifying the appeal of authoritarian leaders.

Epigenetics: of mice and men and women A fairly simple explanation of the possibility of the transgenerational transmission of trauma with reference to ACE (adverse childhood experience).

The epigenetic scaffold It used to be thought that the chemical scaffold that surrounded the DNA double-helix was unimportant. Today scientists recognize its importance. This scaffold is called the epigenome (epi from the Greek for above), and is composed of proteins and other chemicals. The scaffold chemically tells a gene whether to turn on or off. A gene that is turned off is like no gene at all. Experience in the world effects the epigenome, which means that the experience of trauma, or more accurately susceptibility to trauma, can be genetically transmitted in the same way other traits, such as hair color, are genetically transmitted.

The knowledge of God in history is not known through the study of history.  It is grasped inwardly, by repentance and the shattering of the self.  Niebuhr is referring to the type of knowledge often characterized in terms of revelation or faith.
What happens when history mocks that faith?  The Holocaust, Hiroshima, Rwanda, almost 200 million dead in the twentieth century through war and "politically motivated carnage."  (Brzezinski, p. 17)  Some, surely, accepted the shattering of the self as a religious experience, but most were simply shattered, slaughtered, and abandoned to history.
I'm going to take a hint from a very different thinker, Theodor Adorno, a German Jewish intellectual who fled Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.  Adorno was one of the founders of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

This essay stems from my difficulties in teaching the natural law to undergraduate and graduate students.    Most texts argue along the following lines:
natural law is not about human nature as it is, but about human nature at its best . . . . . . [60,000 words] . . . . . . And so, you see that abortion and homosexuality are against natural law. 

It is as if the point of natural law is to justify the author's convictions.  There are better ways to think about natural law, the first point being that the natural law does not exist to win arguments--about anything.

The current interest in trauma theory has influenced psychoanalysis, so much so that for many people it seems that psychoanalysis is a branch of trauma theory.  While this goes too far, it is worthwhile to revisit psychoanalysis in terms of trauma theory.  One result is to make some psychoanalysts more relevant, such as Bion and Mitchell, and others less so, such as Melanie Klein, for whom the external environment was never so important.
The interest in trauma theory is not just a fad.  It stems from an increase in trauma, and an increase in its diagnosis.  Many of the therapies practiced by Veterans Affairs are useless or harmful, and one of the main contributions of psychoanalysis is to explain why this is so.  It's not just a matter of time and money, but these are important

Some argue that Holocaust survivors unconsciously wanted to kill their children.  This is a version of the internalization of the aggressor thesis, in which parents have unconsciously identified with the Nazi aggressor, and it is this that is internalized by their  children.  I think this thesis is wrong, and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of trauma.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity is frequently misunderstood as something like the death of God.  In fact, it comes closer to Emmanuel Levinas' view that we experience God in the presence of the suffering of the other person.

As the definition of PTSD has changed over the years, it became more inclusive.  DSM 4 removed the stipulation that the traumatic event be “outside the range of usual human experience.”  In my opinion, DSM 5 has made more of a hash of the category. As far as I can tell, the diagnosis of PTSD would include learning that a close friend was almost involved in a fatal automobile accident (but wasn’t), but would not include learning that a close relative died of a sudden heart attack at 40.  Narrations about near death events experienced by friends and relatives count only if they were the result of an accident. The reason for this odd outcome is that PTSD is the only category in the DSM that is defined by the stressor, it's cause.  In many respects PTSD has been an extraordinarily fruitful diagnosis.  It connected the politics of the Vietnam War with the suffering of hundreds of thousands of veterans.  And yet I think PTSD has come to an intellectual dead-end.  That does not mean we should abandon the diagnosis.  Many diagnosed with PTSD feel justified in their suffering.  It does mean we should rethink its status.

The great mystery of human life is not suffering but affliction
It is not surprising that the innocent are killed, tortured, and displaced, put in concentration camps or prison cells.  For there are always enough servants of might to do this work.  Surprising is that affliction has the power to seize the souls of the innocent.  "He who is branded by affliction will only keep half his soul."
Our senses attach to affliction all the contempt, all the revulsion, all the hatred which our reason attaches to crime . . . Everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it . . . . Thought is constrained by an instinct of self-preservation to fly from the sight of affliction, and this instinct is infinitely more essential to our being than the instinct to avoid physical death. (Affliction, pp. 443, 457)
It is, I believe, the proper task of politics to counteract this contempt, consoling and comforting the afflicted with justice, as well as the necessities of life.  Both are the political version of love.  Nothing is more important than that in everyday life.

There are always people like Trump around.  The more difficult and puzzling question is under what circumstances do citizens make people like Trump their leaders?  When they themselves find it impossible to live up to a high ego ideal, such as being a good mother or father, supporting and protecting one's family, and able to set their own children on the path to maturity.  When that all becomes too difficult, almost unimaginable, often for real material reasons, then the second best choice is to choose someone who has succeeded by mocking these ideals.
The ego and its ideal will have their reunion, for that is what makes life meaningful.  What we should worry about is not so much that people like Trump exist, but about the social developments that make him a plausible leader.  Ultimately these are seen in the lowering of expectations for oneself, one's family, and one's nation.  "Make America great again" is not, as it turns out, about living up to a higher ideal, but choosing a lower one.  We become great by redefining greatness down.  Redefined down, in this case, means pretend, bluster, and magical thinking replace seriousness, hard work, and reality testing.

from http://godblog.org Emmanuel Levinas says we can't talk to God, only each other Emmanuel Levinas is popular among philosophers because "he introduces God into the scene without making so much ontological noise," as Ryan Urbano puts it (p 75). In other words, Levinas lets us talk about God without talking about God. It's true, but it's not because he is shy about using the G —word. For Levinas, God is experienced in the ethical encounter with the other. Religion is Levinas' term for this ethical relationship. When we care for others in words and deeds, we come as close as we can to God. For Levinas, there is no direct relationship with the Divine. The Divine can only be accessed through the human other to whom the self is infinitely responsible. (Urbano, p 51) We know God when we act ethically toward another person. We do not keep God alive by trying to prove his existence, a waste of time. Everything I can ever know about God is experienced in caring for others. No theology, and a face with no face Levinas is not fond of theology. Theology is too abstract and metaphysical, as though it could grasp God by an act of thought. We can never know God, but only his presence in the face of the other, who asks all I have to give and more. Through giving we make religion live.

Review of History Beyond Trauma and The Shell and the Kernel. 

History Beyond Trauma, by Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, has been well-received for over ten years.  I could hardly find a negative review.  But, in my view the book provides no evidence at all for its most fundamental claim: that historical and social trauma is the origin of madness (pp xxii-xxiii).

A little background on the origins of the category of moral injury may be helpful. Currently the term is used only about experiences faced by soldiers.  I think it applies equally as well to the lives of many civilians.  It's advantage is that it reveals the political power behind private suffering.

Emmanuel Levinas writes a fair amount about trauma.  If one takes trauma theory seriously, it seems as if he sometimes idealizes trauma.  For Levinas, trauma is not just an encounter with the Infinite.  Trauma is the way we escape being trapped in being, what he calls the il y a.

The most ambitious attempt to use Emmanuel Levinas to justify a new moral philosophy in a postmodern world is that of Zygmunt Bauman in Postmodern Ethics.  Levinas cannot be used.  Bauman would use Levinas in order to "desocialize" the subject.  That is, to render the subject less a creature of the organization, community, and group, each of which is the enemy of ethics.  While Levinas would also desocialize the subject, the terms and concepts he employs are only superficially similar to those employed by Bauman, as well as other social theorists.  Terms such as  "the other" or the "face" are employed by Levinas in such unique ways that they are unavailable to be used as  guidance or inspiration for social theory.  In many respects this is a good thing, for it means that Levinas must be encountered on his own terms.

Levinas and Political Theory
How best to avoid the Levinas Effect, as it has been called, the tendency to make Emmanuel Levinas everything to everyone?  One way is to demonstrate that Levinas’ thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory.  If one were forced to categorize Levinas’ political theory, the term inverted liberalism would come closest to the mark.  As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term “inverted” over “liberalism.”  Levinas’ defense of liberalism is likely the strangest defense the reader has encountered.  We should, argues Levinas, foster and protect the individual because only the individual can see the tears of the other, the tears that even the just regime cannot see. The individual is to be fostered and protected for the sake of the other individual.  Whether this has anything to do with “real” liberalism, and whether it should, is the topic of this essay.

Judith Butler, like several other contemporary authors, has sought to build a political theory based upon an ontology on the interrelated, imbricated human, quite different from that of the liberal individual modern political theory is associated with.  In creating this theory, she draws upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas, a Talmudic scholar whose work has become influential among postmoderns among others.  The ironic result is to show the disadvantages of "ontologizing" political theory, for it is Levinas who would move ethics beyond being.  Political theory is best practiced when we remember that it is about the power to move what seem like ontological givens, such as human suffering, from one group to another, at least in the short run.  But then again, politics is almost always about the short run.

Wilfred Bion's late work, especially his speculations about "O," are awfully weird.  I think it's most useful to see them as a way of talking about experiences that are beyond words, even psychoanalytic ones.  From this perspective, psychoanalysis itself becomes a defense against experience.  That's not all bad.

W. R. Bion experienced terrible trauma as a tank commander during WW 1.  Though one doesn't ordinarily think of Bion as a trauma theorist, one can see this trauma reflected in many of his works.  Only in his last work did the details more fully emerge.  They are horrendous, his guilt enormous.  It made him a better therapist.

Reinhold Niebuhr could not think thoroughly about the Holocaust.  This may surprise some, for Niebuhr is generally known as the hard-headed realist who understood sin and evil to be real and active in the world.  Niebuhr could not think thoroughly about the Holocaust because he could not think thoroughly about the emergence of a new type of evil.  If Germans took pleasure in the destruction of Jews for its own sake, then the meaning of history is itself put at risk, at least for those who would learn from Niebuhr.  For all his realism about sin and evil, Niebuhr cannot imagine a world in which the mysterious meaning of history will not be revealed at the end of days.  For many who survived the Holocaust, Auschwitz was the end of days.  This does not make their experience definitive for the rest of us.  It does mean that evil, when pursued for ends that are fundamentally meaningless, threatens both faith and confidence in the meaning of history.  In thinking about the Holocaust, this essay draws not only on Hannah Arendt, but also on my own research in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University.

A number of psychoanalysts have become excited about mirror neurons, as they are called by neuroscientists.  Mirror neurons have the remarkable property of responding identically to an action I intend as well as an action you intend.  The argument of some psychoanalysts is that mirror neurons open a new pathway to understanding the intentions of others.  They make possible a new type of empathy, more direct and less mediated by the typical defenses.  One result of such a perspective on psychoanalysis is the virtual death of the countertransference.  If one has direct empathic contact with another mind, then countertransferential experience is only a barrier, not a guide.  The essay not only looks at the evidence for mirror neurons, which is ambiguous, but also at what need they might be filling in our contemporary culture.

In ‘The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man’, Herbert Marcuse regretted the loss of the bourgeois individual with a strong ego. Not because he thought such an individual
was good, but because of what came next, what he calls mass man, whose ego is merged with others. In an entirely different utopian context, laid out in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, the
loss of the autonomous ego would be a good thing, an expression of liberation. In this world, the loss of the autonomous ego simply leaves individuals more subject to manipulation. Recently, several affect theorists, as they are known, have argued that the autonomous ego is an
illusion. Or rather, ego is a rationalizing machine, giving reasons for actions that we know to be retrospective rationalizations. It might seem as if this loss of ego is good, a step in the direction of liberation. In fact, the idealization of the loss of ego, sometimes called the de-situated subject, by theorists such as Brian Massumi and William Connolly is dangerous, because it is happening now, in a world far from utopia. Massumi and Connolly employ recent neuroscientific
discoveries as metaphors in their account of how individuals might liberate themselves from their egos. This essay concludes that while a genuinely neuroscientific study of sychoanalysis is possible and desirable, one must choose between utopia and science. Marcuse chooses utopia;
the new affect theorists choose neither.