intro and invitation

[Alice Maher]

Hi all,

I just wrote this for my college class notes, and I thought I'd share it here as a way of reintroducing myself and my work. If anyone is interested in hearing more, or possibly participating in my Waging Dialogue project, please contact me.

I'm a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in full time private practice on the upper west side. In recent years,  I've been increasingly concerned with the divisions in our political world. I wrote a book, Catalysis: A Recipe to Slow Down or Abort Humankind's Leap to War, and I'm developing a project that I call Waging Dialogue. People with political differences agree to zoom, email, zoom, and email, to try to develop a working alliance that will allow them to push past areas of disagreement that would otherwise lead to "cancelling." The groups will come together to find patterns that can lead to the development of theories and methodologies. Google Alice Maher Bobby Powell and you'll see a dialogue that I had with a man who was at the Jan 6 insurrection documenting the presence of the FBI and Antifa.

If anyone might be interested in participating, I can be reached at Alice...@msn.com

[Arnold Richards]

This is very insidious  January 6 was not driven by the FBI or Antifa. That was Trump and his enablers conspiracy theory  Someone just got a seven year sentence Bobby Powell does not deserve a platform Or does Alice’s political moral relativism 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 5:46 AM, Alice Maher <alice...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Ken Fuchsman]

Alice,

A center of your approach is how to cross divides, and so dialogue between partisan opponents is important.  In your approach is there much attention given to distinguishing between legitimate disagreement and in sorting through what is factual and  what is untrue but believed>.  Is not the willingness of many to believe big lies and not to be receptive to factual accuracy on the same level of importance as that partisans stay in separate corners?  For you to repeat that Antifa was prominent in January 6th without fact checking that claim is a big problem.  Don't you worry that some folks will join your  sessions not to dialogue but as a method of spreading their own views and gaining more followers?

Ken .          

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[Brian D'Agostino]

I think Arnie and Ken are raising important questions.  What Alice is doing may have value as research, but I agree that giving someone a platform can in some cases give oxygen to views that do not deserve oxygen and should be permitted to die.  Alice takes the posture of a therapist or mediator, in which suspending judgments about values and truth may be appropriate as part of the healing process.  Isn't that kind of neutrality a fundamental requirement of psychoanalysis?  The problem, however, is that the political arena is not a consulting room and does not operate under the same rules.  Nor is it a research space, though a case can be made for "participant observer" methods of research.

One of the best models for this kind of research was Robert Jay Lifton's interviews of the Nazi doctors.  He managed to elicit what the Nazi doctors really thought, but also avoided legitimizing their ideas.  This is an extremely difficult kind of research to pull off, and I don't think Alice adequately understands the pitfalls.  And in any case, she is not really interested in research, but rather in an intervention that can change the world.  Any such intervention must confront the questions that Arnie and Ken are raising.

Brian D'Agostino

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[Arnold Richards]

Ken and Brian 

You are absolutely right I’ve been saying this to ALICE for years until I’m blue in the face but she won’t listen because she has her own agenda and her need to change the world she wants to matter even if she’s destructive

Arnie 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 10:24 AM, Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Alice Maher]

Damn, I didn’t say that! I had a dialogue with someone who did. There’s a difference, guys!

On Aug 2, 2022, at 10:38 AM, 'Arnold Richards' via Clio’s Psyche <clios...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Ken and Brian 

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[Brian D'Agostino]

Alice, I think the question is whether you challenge the other person when they say things that are manifestly untrue.  It has been a while since I listened to your video, but if I remember correctly, you did challenge him, at least to some extent.  So if that is the case, members of the general public get to hear both the lies and challenges to the lies and how a conspiracy theorist responds when his delusions are challenged.  I wonder if Arnie and Ken would agree that this kind of dialogue has merit, and if not, why not.

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[Arnold Richards]

I am not sure that it does when it is with someone who is fixed in his destructive views. And he does not acknowledge what happened what trump did and why he did it 

He won’t recognize the enormity of the danger to our democratic process that happened that day it can’t be explained away or blamed on the FBI and antifa. Keep in mind he was there engaged in a criminal act 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 11:41 AM, Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Arnold Richards]

Shall we have i dialogue with goebles who will make a case the Jews were a danger to Germany and needed to be exterminated

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 11:49 AM, Arnold Richards <arn...@aol.com> wrote:

I am not sure that it does when it is with someone who is fixed in his destructive views. And he does not acknowledge what happened what trump did and why he did it 

[Brian D'Agostino]

Arnie, that is exactly what Lifton did in his interviews with the Nazi doctors, and in the process he exposed the thought processes of these people.  I don't think we should categorically rule out such dialogues, but the bar for doing this well is very high. If Alice understands the pitfalls and aspires to meet the very high bar, then I would have an open mind about the merit of what she is doing. 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/DFAD16B3-705A-4719-8AB0-C9D43609EBB2%40aol.com.

[Arnold Richards]

Neither opinion will change so what is point imo Alice is being used 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 11:51 AM, 'Arnold Richards' via Clio’s Psyche <clios...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Shall we have i dialogue with goebles who will make a case the Jews were a danger to Germany and needed to be exterminated

[Arnold Richards]

Having connected with her for years I don’t think she is up to it And she has an agenda which lift and did not have

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 12:08 PM, 'Arnold Richards' via Clio’s Psyche <clios...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Neither opinion will change so what is point imo Alice is being used 

[Arnold Richards]

She is not very knowledgeable about political matters and insist that she doesn’t feel she needs to be and it’s not interested that’s not her thing she’s only interested in unconscious motivation what if Trump and Bobby and their cohorts had succeeded where would we be now do you believe in Bobby’s FBI false flag operation

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 12:32 PM, 'Arnold Richards' via Clio’s Psyche <clios...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Having connected with her for years I don’t think she is up to it And she has an agenda which lift and did not have

[Hans Bakker]

"Shall we have i dialogue with goebles who will make a case the Jews were a danger to Germany and needed to be exterminated"?

It is interesting that Goebbels' name is spelled "goebles". 

Should one dialogue with Goebbels? 

Yes, if you could have had a sincere dialogue with the very young Goebbels it might have made him aware of major fallacies in his thinking.

The Jews were NOT a danger to Germany. Imagine how the war would have gone if Goebbels had changed his mind and his "Total War" had enlisted all the Jews (and those deemed by racist ideology to be Jews or "half Jews").

Impossible? Well, not really. 

Fascism does not depend 100% on antisemitism. It depends on "anit-something". Think of Spain. Even Italy was not as fierce as Germany during part of the history of fascism in Europe. 

I "hate" all forms of fascism. But it is true that one must know one's enemy. It is scholarly practice to study things we do not like. We want to get at the bottom of it. Imagine if scholars refused to study Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, etc. 

Read the Wikipedia article on Goebbels and think about his handicaps. He adored Adolph (Adolf) Hitler initially because Hitler recognized his talent and overlooked his obvious deficits. (Early on Hitler sent his own car to pick up the young Goebbels and that impressed Goebbels.) He came to adore Hitler. Like Himmler, Goebbels did everything he could to win Hitler's favor.

Think of those who tried so hard to win DJT's favor when DJT was POTUS.  

Goebbels' treatment of "Jews" was based almost entirely on major mistakes in thinking about Russia and Bolshevism. 

The idea of what "Jew" represented was very, very confused. Some of the criticism was of modern capitalism. 

Goebbels had a major inferiority complex (I would guess). His rise in the National Socialist Worker's Party allowed him to become important. 

It reminds me a bit of a movie I saw many, many years ago. A young French boy wants to fight with the French resistance against the Nazi army. But the French men think he is too young. So, he turns to the French fascists and they accept him. He gets his chance to be "important".  "Lacombe, Lucien [lakɔ̃b ly.sjɛ̃] is a 1974 French war drama film by Louis Malle about a French teenage boy during the German occupation of France in World War II." (I had to look it up & mistakenly remembered it as by Truffaut not Malle.) 

SEE:

Goebbels und die Juden, Christian T. Barth (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003), 315 pp., €31.90. 

Jeffrey Herf

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2, Fall 2006, Pages 317–319, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcl009

Published: 01 October 2006

... equally detailed accounts of the construction of the Nazi propaganda apparatus and the importance Goebbels attributed to antisemitism within it. He recalls his subject’s central role in driving Jews out of German cultural and intellectual life, the link between antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism in the mid...

• Extract 

  Goebbels und die Juden is a revised dissertation completed at the University of Mainz. Christian Barth reports that while working on the project he encountered skepticism that there was anything more to say either about Goebbels or his antisemitism. His careful research proves the skeptics wrong. He has made a valuable addition to previous works on Goebbels by Jay Baird, Ernst Bramsted, Richard Herzstein, and Ralf Reuth by focusing on the continuity and depth of Goebbels’ hatred of the Jews and his key role in infusing Nazi propaganda with antisemitism. Barth examines Goebbels’ role from the mid-1920s, when his antisemitism was fully crystallized, through the Holocaust. He relies heavily on the over twenty volumes of the Goebbels diaries published since 1987, while making rather less use of Goebbels’ readily available published texts.

  We read again about the evolution of the young doctoral student at the University of Heidelberg; his entry...

Holocaust and Genocide Studies is an excellent source of very good academic papers. I will read more of those papers as time allows. 

I read Alice's book. Parts of it are very good. Other parts are based on what I myself would consider false assumptions. On her Facebook page she takes it for granted that we should believe in a mystical version of an entity that in the Germanic word is called Gott ("God") and not a careful analysis of the YHWH concept as found in James Kugel.

I believe that children who are indoctrinated to believe in a false, mythical entity called "Jesus Christ" (as usually discussed by US "white" "Christian" "nationalists" ) would be better served if they learned about the academic, scholarly discussions of the entity we call Iesu (in Greek) or Yeshua, etc. 

Many of my students (including "Christians") did not know that "Christ" is not Yeshua (Iesu) of Nazareth's family name! (Mashiach is a word rarely used by US Evangelicals).

That is already "too many words" for an email. There is much to discuss. There is a deep "grain of truth" in what Alice is trying to promote. I wish she would go the next step and carefully read social science and history more often. Instead, she sometimes moves to being a mom and "knowing things" about "creation" and "discovery" for that reason (which is at best only a limited, partial truth).

Respectfully,

Hans

J. I. Bakker.

---

From: 'Arnold Richards' via Clio’s Psyche <clios...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 2, 2022 12:32 PM
To: 'Arnold Richards' via Clio’s Psyche <clios...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] intro and invitation

 

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[Arnold Richards]

Reading stuff is not her thing as she has told me again and again 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 1:39 PM, Hans Bakker <hba...@uoguelph.ca> wrote:



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[Arnold Richards]

My disagreement with ALICE began more than 10 years ago when she told me the Jews need to think about what they do that make people not like them I had a problem with that question now and I still do and I still do

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 2:36 PM, Arnold Richards <arn...@aol.com> wrote:

Reading stuff is not her thing as she has told me again and again 

[Arnold Richards]

And now 

https://amp.dw.com/en/one-in-four-germans-hold-anti-semitic-beliefs-study-finds/a-50958589

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 2:39 PM, Arnold Richards <arn...@aol.com> wrote:

My disagreement with ALICE began more than 10 years ago when she told me the Jews need to think about what they do that make people not like them I had a problem with that question now and I still do and I still do

[Arnold Richards]

The next issue of the international journal of controversial discussions volume two issue 2is devoted to the topic the multiple functions of Jew hatred the black milk of “civilization “I would welcome contribution from Hans and others we have an outstanding list of contributors so far. I would welcome a contribution from ALICE as well The  target paper is my paper on Freud’s need not to believe and a commentary by David Lotto

The journal is free by subscription. Email PSy...@aol.com and put subscribe in the subject heading 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 2:40 PM, 'Arnold Richards' via Clio’s Psyche <clios...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

And now 

[Alice Maher]

"Reading stuff is not her thing as she has told me again and again"

Do you know why, Arnie?

In 1932, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Sigmund Freud. In it he asked, "Is it possible to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called 'intelligentsia' that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form - upon the printed page."

Is he suggesting that left-leaning, self-proclaimed pacifist academics are unconsciously MOST apt to yield to the psychosis of hate and destruction because they're comfortable arguing in words while they're missing something important?

Is it possible that he's correct?

I think he is.

I think printed-page academics are every bit as aggressive/destructive as right-leaning "uncultured masses" are. They just rationalize it better.

It's analogous to the difference between parents who beat their kids and parents who shame them. The former gets the cops called. The latter can feel morally superior.

I don't think Antifa set up the Jan 6 insurrection. But I do think that the left-leaning, cancel-culture, "Don't you dare think those thoughts!!" people did set the stage for it. If a person is constantly misunderstood and demonized ("racist!" "sexist!" "transphobic!" "antisemitic!"), they have no choice but to throw a temper tantrum.

Alice

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[Burton N. Seitler]

Alice,

There is ALWAYS a choice to follow one

who has a temper tantrum and/or to have

a temper tantrum of our own, vs opposing

those that would stir up the masses just to

achieve (or maintain) power. Asking if dialog is

the answer, oversimplifies the huge complexities

involved. On the face of it, communication back

and forth seems  like a terrific idea. But, in reality, 

we know that there are those who would seize upon 

the opportunity for dialog as a chance to obtain free 

publicity. And, as we  know, even negative publicity is 

better than no publicity. In those cases, dialog unwittingly

feeds and/or resuscitates evil intentions and actions,  

In other words, there really is a time and place when

having a dialog is useful, and of course, when it is not!

To be crude, not every fart should be aired (or brought 

to center stage). To do so, makes it just as important as 

all other airings.

Burton

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[Michael Britton]

Somehow "dialogues" between Alice and Cliopsyche seem always to be "arguments."  Though many important things are brought up, on both sides.  Realities and possibilities.

Myself, I am more inclined to trust that Alice, in whatever she actually does with whomever that actually is, does so in ways most would be okay with, and at least some of the time appreciate --  even though her communications about what she does often somehow slip into evoking visions of her doing something mistaken or destructive, which is to say imagine her dialogues to be something other than they are (in her eyes).  Why this  should be so begs interrogation from both sides, a genuine dialogue, not what actually takes place here.  And yes, I get it, everyone is in the right, on all sides, so there's nothing to interrogate, just admissions of error to be made by the other side.  Sigh.  That's my response:  Sigh.

And I don't think Alice by herself, or her method by itself, can save the whole world or address every important situation, but I do think she's doing good and setting something in motion -- amid the world's wide array of efforts and approaches to moving toward a better future -- something that is better for her doing it than if it never arose because she didn't take on the effort, which given her passionate and creative nature she can't not do.  She seeds possibility, one might say, and then the seeds must do the work.  I don't think she sees it otherwise. 

And, lest I be misconstrued, I find myself respecting the core ideas everyone presents about the nature of our world and how things work.  I learn from all of it.  Apart from the conflicting visions as to what Alice is actually doing. 

Michael

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[Michael Britton]

from Brian

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 1:07 PM
Subject: Fwd: [cliospsyche] intro and invitation
To: Michael Britton <mfb...@gmail.com>

Michael, I tried to post this on the Clio's Psyche listserv, but I'm having technical problems.  Can you post it for me?  Also, did my response to Brigitte in the "understanding the assassination of al-Zawahiri" thread that I sent this morning get posted to the listserv?

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 12:53 PM
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] intro and invitation

To: Clio's Psyche Forum <clios...@googlegroups.com>

I agree entirely with Michael's "take" on all this.  I respectfully suggest that if we are going to discuss Alice's work further on this listserv, our starting point should be her actual conversation with Bobby Powell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTqbVLOxigo  It is an hour and ten minutes.  I am not suggesting that we necessarily should watch this, but that we should do so if we are going to continue this conversation, so that what we say will be informed by what Alice actually does.  --Brian

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/CAOd-ijOpurWo-z5NR44HeNvqG2--JYP9%2Bn00howuJCvqHYxjBg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Ken Fuchsman]

Michael,

 

Let’s review how the exchanges with Alice got started.  She wrote that Bobby Powell is “a man who was at the Jan 6 insurrection documenting the presence of the FBI and Antifa."  The implication is that he was an eyewitness making a factual report. If Alice had written that Powell claimed to have seen the FBI and Antifa at the insurrection, there would have been no problem.  But that is not what she did .   

In this explosive divisive time in which we live, it is even more important than usual to be precise in what we say and to fact check what we put out for others to read.  Many Americans are prone to believe things that are not true.  Polls taken from November 2002 to June 2022 show that around 35% of American polled believed that the 2020 results were fraudulent and that Biden did not actually win.  There is no reason for any of us to repeat statements such as Alice attributes to Powell without looking for reliable sources before we repeat it.  

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/CAOd-ijMK7Ymt62WCAkueBTNt5s_C9auMF%2BT4ZYXMeb9zDg5DoQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Michael Britton]

Ken,

You have spelled out exactly the point I tried to make too:  Alice's specific choice of words evoked a negative reaction, she then reacted to the response like it's strange that there should be this 'misunderstanding' of  her work.  As you noted, more accurate words about the guy would have evoked a very different reaction. The "now let's argue" pattern would not have taken place. 

In an arena of "dialogue" where intense passions and very real dangers are/were involved, words really matter, exactly as you noted.  I am of the school that the repeated use of words that misrepresent and set conflicts in motion reflect some kind of thought or motive not yet articulated.  From that perspective I am suggesting, in the spirit of dialogue, a querying of that misrepresentation of her work (if that's what it is:  I haven't seen the youtube yet) that launches this pattern, over and over.  There it is; how come?

And I'm suggesting a querying of why we so readily get sucked in by the word-triggers she throws in our path, thinking this is where she's coming from for real.  (And maybe it is.  Only the youtube knows for sure.)

Michael

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/CAD5XYcME8NiKzLw9A1-y%2BnEJ_3LBtGM9aXpzeGH60ATDfBLA7A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Alice Maher]

Hi Michael, Ken, Burt, Brian, Arnie, and everyone,

It took me a day to get past my astonishment that any of you - especially people who know me - would think that I believe that Antifa and the FBI set up the event on Jan 6.

That said, I choose my words carefully, for a reason. I honor the experiences of both sides - yes, even the "farters" - in the hope of engaging in dialogue rather than splitting. If I used that language on my Facebook page, my friends on the far right would know that they were invited to jump in and present their perspective, and my friends on the left would understand that they could well. I don't know anyone else who is able to create a space safe enough to contain those powerful energies and differences. I'm proud of that.

I've also come to believe that, while many ideas seem ridiculous when presented literally, on another level of abstraction there's more truth than the other side would want to believe. For example, consider Einstein's ideas about the "intelligentsia" being most apt to lead to the disastrous collective suggestions that lead to war rather than the "uncultured masses." Allying with documented facts regarding Jan 6 and the absence of voter fraud supports the side of the left and doesn't make room for the emergence of feelings and fantasies that offer empathic imagination for the "uncultured masses" who do not think the way that we do.  There's a level of abstraction where the left did "set up" the event by continually misunderstanding and ridiculing Trump supporters.

I choose to honor those people's experiences and worldviews and invite them to surface. I choose my words with that goal in mind. I'm very aware of the risks that my stance entails, but after negotiating the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis for 45 years, I sincerely and powerfully believe that aggressively challenging and "cancelling" people without an effort to understand them doesn't make them go away. It makes them louder.

If anyone reading this might be interested in venturing into new territory and take the risk of doing what I did here - not to post on youtube, but to reflect on together and write a paper about potential theory and technique - let me know. We're designing the Dyad Project right now.

https://youtu.be/WTqbVLOxigo

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[Alice Maher]

Brian is having trouble posting, so he asked me to post this for him.

Alice,

From the videotape of your conversation with Bobby Powell, it seems he is not a con-man and liar like Alex Jones.  He seems typical of millions of people who were duped by such con-men, including by Trump.  I think your effort to understand the psychology of such people has merit. 

It is a separate question whether such dialogues can heal what is ultimately ailing the US and the world.  I would say no, because the mass public, even opinion leaders like Bobby Powell, have little influence over public affairs.  Those who hold real power (e.g. CEOs, Pentagon officials) do not care what any of us think; for them, public opinion is a mere inconvenience to be manipulated and neutralized through a whole repertoire of well documented methods.  I would be happy to say more about this, and about the kinds of innovation that can actually change political-economic structures, but I don't think you are interested in such things.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, perhaps a more truthful choice of words that would have served your purposes might have been that Powell was "trying to document" the presence of Antifa.  That does not imply anything about whether Antifa really were or were not behind the insurrection.

Brian

[Paul Elovitz]

Hi Alice,

   Thanks for doing this.  I don't understand why Brian has this problem periodically, no one else appears to.

Best,

Paul 

Paul H. Elovitz, PhD, Historian, Research Psychoanalyst, Professor, Psychohistory Forum Director, and Editor, Clio's Psyche

Author, The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (Routledge, 2018) 

Editor, The Many Roads of the Builders of Psychohistory (ORI Academic Press, 2021)  

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