Godwin is busy explaining why dissidents exist in the US (and why
the bulk of the population is boycotting elections).  The system has
40 M. people with virtually no health care, unemploy ment officially 5%,
ignoring another 5% who have stopped looking for jobs, 50M underemployed
1 M unemployed in prisons, another 1 M in the military, also unemployed.
To mention but a few of the exotic features which have attracted the
attention of Noam.  Who asked for a psycho history from this amateur?

And while searching entrails for explanations of why all are not singing
 hymns of praise to  the corp.s the good gentleman might keep in mind
for example the plucky activities of Nike: having shoes made in Indonesia
by children for $5.60 and selling them in the US for $120.  Yes the invisible
hand at work (or is it the invisible finger).  And why would Noam object to
sending 20 billion of taxpayer money to support the fascists who run that
Asian country. Yes Chomsky must have had a not jolly childhood.

Again thanks to psychology for the hilarious, though slightly irrelevant, analysis.

>
> Robert Godwin, a clinical psychologist in Calabasas, California, has
> written a series of articles of great potential interest to fans and
> sympathizers of Noam Chomsky and his continuing efforts at institutional
> analysis. After this initial encounter, assuming you read on, you will
> find that Godwin has considerably expanded the debate that Chomsky has
> broached. Where Chomsky predominantly identifies the problems in
> contemporary American society, Godwin tries to identify their cause,
> elaborate their function and provide solutions for their elimination.
>
> Below I give a number of references (all appearing in _The Journal of
> Psychohistory_) to Godwin's work and along with them I include
> deliberately provocative and sometimes unresolved or leading excerpts. As
> an enticement, dare I say a teaser, I start with the article containing
> his thoughts on Chomsky and his critics. I move from there to try and
> provide a summary of Godwin's thought using his own words in which he
> manages to skewer the conventional wisdom of both the left and the right.
>
> For any deep understanding of Godwin, it will be necessary to go beyond
> these aphorisms I've extracted and track down these articles for intense
> study.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> "Dimensions of the American Political Mindscape" v21(1) Summer 1993 pp.
> 79-96
>
> `...it is because he is most often operating in a type A field [see below
> and actual article for details of what that means] that Chomsky is almost
> never (in the U.S.) invited to speak in any mainstream forum...There are
> deep psychological reasons for why he has been dispatched to the fringe in
> this manner.'
>
> `...[Alexander] Cockburn quotes a familiar complaint about Chomsky to the
> effect that his works are "all so depressing," to which Chomsky responds
> that it is not his job to make people feel good or to shelter them from
> emotionally disturbing facts. This is precisley the point: the type A
> field is predicated on the ability to tolerate psychic pain and confront
> catastrophic truths. Many intellectuals assume that truth will prevail in
> the marketplace of ideas, failing to realize that what generally prevails
> inheres more in the realm of ego-consoling mythology, and that the
> marketplace rewards those who best articulate this mythological construct
> -- and ignores those who challenge it.'
>
> `A stamp of authenticity in reading Chomsky is that it is deeply painful
> to do so...'
>
> `The most vocal critic of Chomsky that I have encountered is David
> Horowitz...A psychologically unsophisticated man, it is clear by his naive
> extremism that Howowitz cannot tolerate ambivalence in his psyche, and
> that everything he doesn't like about his own unconscious is attributed to
> Chomsky...'
>
>
> "On the Deep Structure of Conservative Ideology" v20(3) Winter 1993 pp.
> 289-304
>
> `The idea for this paper began with the question to which there appeared
> to be no satisfactory answer. That is, why is it that for so many
> individuals their various political beliefs -- which on the surface do not
> seem to bear any necessary relationship -- so often cohere into one of two
> major groups?'
>
> `As a rule, it is clear that on most issues, no amount of logic or
> evidence...will ever convince the other party. This is quite simply
> because we mistakely think of "sides" of an arguemnt, when in many cases
> we should more appropriately be thinking of something akin to "levels" of
> an argument, levels that roughly correspond to degrees of psychological
> maturity.'
>
> `While it is permissible to view our leaders as scheming (Nixon), goatish
> (Kennedy[s]), egomaniacal (Johnson), or dull-witted (Ford, Reagan), their
> beliefs and actions are rarely examined in terms of being an expression of
> frank psychopathology. But because the question of emotional maturity is
> off limits, it leads to an attempt to understand political beliefs with
> ultimately faulty ideas.'
>
>
> Book Review of _Political Psychology_ edited by Niel J. Kressel v21(3)
> Winter 1994 pp. 355-359
>
> `[The author] properly points out that "A study of politics which leaves
> man out of its equations is a rather barren politics." Bravo! The problem
> is, however, that _a study of man which leaves childhood out of its
> equations is a rather barren psychology_. And one cannot study childhood
> with objective, academic detachment and come away with anything that is
> non-trivial. Rather, one must abandon the scholarly pretense that divides
> objective and subjective, and use these two modes of inquiry to inform one
> another.'
>
> `I have often pondered the thought, "what is the mind like such that it
> can consider B.F.Skinner a psychologist?"'
>
>
> "On the Function of Enemies: The Articulation and Containment of the
> Unthought Self" v22(1) Summer 1994 pp. 79-102
>
> `The perennial problem with groups is that they tend to impede emotional
> growth, because the very function of the group is often to legitimize
> paranoid-schizoid defenses by finding an external source point for anxiety
> (homosexuals, witches, communists), thus confusing feelings with the world
> of facts. Insight into this cycle is naturally fiercely opposed by the
> group. In fact, this is why groups generally do not tolerate an
> emotionally healthy leader (one in contact with emotional reality), at
> least not for long.'
>
> `Most extremist groups -- for example, the anti-abortion movement -- might
> as well advertise: "Wanted: like-minded individuals to take part in group
> delusion by placing psychotic anxiety into persecuted fetus; those with
> insight need not apply."' (For a clear understaning of this phenomenon on
> both sides of the abortion debate, I suggest the movie _Citizen Ruth_.)
>
>
> "The Making of an Anti-President: Dr. Clinton and Mr. Newt" v22 or 23 pp.
> 399-403 1995
>
> `My understanding of politics is that it is primarily a vast
> intersubjective field that shares the qualities of any mental space where
> psychological processes take place. Like religion, medicine and
> psychotherapy, politics draws into it the acting out of ultimate fantasies
> concerning sickness and sin, and thus, cure and salvation.'
>
>
> "The Exopsychic Structure of Politics" v23(3) Winter 1996 pp. 252-259
>
> `...what fundamentally evolves in human affairs is the parent-child unit,
> as measured along the twin vectors of integration and actualization of the
> self.'
>
> `Recall that according to Fairbairn, in the face of inadequate parenting,
> the ego splits three ways, with a central part remaining conscious, and
> the angry and victimized parts forming the polarized, unconscious
> structure...I believe this to be one of the critical factors underlying
> the popular disgust with politics, along with the growing demand for a
> third party. That is to say, the political landscape is dominated by
> authoritarian conservatives from the right in dynamic relationship to
> self-defeating victims from the left, in a transparent externalization of
> Fairbairn's internal, endopsychic structure.'
>
> `I have come to believe that an emotionally integrated, humanistic liberal
> has far more in common with a rational, non-authoritarian conservative
> than with the typical left wing victim group-fantasy, and that the
> emergence of a political "central ego"  is behind the impetus for a third
> party. This third way, of course, would represent the externalization of a
> psyche in which aggression and desire are not split off, but integrated
> into the personality. In political practice, this would mean that we would
> _demand_ maturity, standards, and ethical behavior from citizens (as from
> the right), but critically, work toward providing the _means_ for
> individuals to integrate their personality and to actualize their
> potential through a genuine societal commitment to developing parenting
> skills, providing meaningful education, and creating an economy that can
> actually support family life (as from the left).
>
> `...the deepest divisions in any nation are not fundamentally political,
> ideological or economic, but _psychological_. And if we accept the tenets
> of modern developmental psychology, we must therefore conclude that these
> divisions ultimately involve clusters of individuals who resonate around a
> similar deep structure of emotional experience -- what deMause has termed
> _psychoclasses_.'
>
>
> "The Interior of History: Whose Nightmare Is It, Anyway?" v24(3) Winter
> 1997 pp 273-286 (a book review of _Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its
> Causes_ by James Gilligan, M.D. and _Shame and Humiliation: Presidential
> Decision Making on Vietnam_ by Blema S. Steinberg)
>
> `Psychohistory hinges on the recognition that history has an irreducible
> interior horizon that is inaccessible to any empirical, positivist or
> materialistic description. Furthermore, this dimension may not be
> understood through the use of objectifying "they" or "it" language;
> rather, it can only be accessed and explicated through the "we" or "I"
> pronoun.'
>
> "...the vast majority of rage carried around by adults -- from the
> Unabomber to the Freemen, from Farrakhan to Gingrich, from gay basher to
> Queer Nation -- emanates not from rational apprehension of adult
> circumstances but from childhood experiences."
>
> `In order to comprehensively understand any phenomenon, be it
> psychological, historical, or biological, four perspectives are required:
> the interior-individual, exterior-individual, interior-social, and
> exterior-social. Thus, for example, in order to begin to fully understand
> a human being, one must take into consideration the brain and body
> (exterior-individual), mind (interior-individual), family and culture
> (interior-social), and political, economic and other objective group
> arrangements (exterior-social). Each of these realms conditions the others
> in a non-linear fashion. No one of them is privileged or ultimately
> reducible to any of the others, and all four must be utilized to
> exhaustively describe even a single person.'
>
> `..we are all familiar with the "great man" approach to history, which is
> no more than a reduction of history to its external-individual modality...
> And of course, Marxism is justifiably famous for reducing the interior of
> both groups and individuals to nothing more than a side effect of
> scientifically lawful and objective class relations.'
>
> `Dr. Gilligan collapses interior into exterior, so that the undeniable
> pathology afflicting much of black culture from within, such as the
> staggering absence of fathers (a disastrous internal problem for the
> developing child) cannot be discussed except as a side effect of
> economics. In effect, Gilligan is arguing that the nightmare of history is
> being dreamt by rich, white racists; blacks are not dreaming their own
> lives -- they have no internal group fantasy that might be obstructing
> them -- but are simply the unthinking psychic "furniture" of other
> malicious dreamers.'
>
> `Complex organismic systems may "go pathological" at any of their multiple
> levels, sending out ripple effect to all other levels. The solution,
> however, is not to collapse the entire hierarchy upon which
> psychohistorical evolution depends, but to identify and weed out those
> conditions that are causing pathology at every level and in each of the
> four dimensions of the process (from malnutrition and inadequate health
> care at the bottom, to poor parenting and deficient education in the
> middle, to illegitimate economic and political structures at the top; all
> of these affect each other).
>
> `The right wing, sympathetic to the mythic doctrine of original sin,
> maintains that criminals are "just like us," only with less discipline and
> self-control. The left wing, magically insistent upon radical
> egalitarianism, also thinks of criminals as being just like the rest of
> us, only not as economically fortunate.'
>
> `...the most efficeint approach to psychohistorically down-regulating
> violence is to ensure proper parenting skills...But ultimately we must
> have a "therapy" appropriate to each dimension of our existence, which
> would have to include such things as full employment with a living wage
> and some understanding of the pathological group fantasies that constrain
> the individual and drive political discussion.  Because when a child is
> born to abusive or neglectful parents, all too often he discovers the most
> paranoid and vengeful aspects of his internalized world confirmed by
> harsh, unforgiving economy, and mirrored by a penal system that feels all
> too familiar and certainly more real than the humanity he has yet to
> experience.'
>
> `...much of what we call history is simply an attempt to master the undead
> apparitions of childhood working their effects in the here and now.'
>
>
> "Business-Family Partnerships: A Therapeutic Intervention into History"
> v24(4) Spring 1997 pp. 353-360 (This is actually a piece by his wife,
> Leslie Godwin.)
>
> `While children should not bear the burden of the mistakes and
> circumstances of their parents...no government entity can stand in for the
> psychological function of fatherhood, particularly because one of the
> functions of any viable culture is to transform men into fathers.'
>
>
> "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Child?" v25(2) Fall 1997 pp. 194-200
> (a book review of _The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents_
> by Mike A. Males)
>
> `In the end, I was forced to conclude that Males is so instinctively
> committed to a liberal agenda of salvation by economics alone, that he is
> unable to transcend the polarized but mutually supporting planks of left
> and right, or righteous victim and malevolent oppressor. Most
> psychohistorians would probably agree that the histrionic debate between
> left and right...is a noisy diversion that allows us to feel good about
> _our_ side while projecting the bad elsewhere, a psychological exercise
> that leaves the fate of children relatively unaffected.'
>
> `A common problem with the left is that its agenda is often not actually
> child-centered but subtley adult-centered. But in order to develop
> normally, children have objective, irreducible needs that have nothing to
> do with what adults want or feel they are entitled to.'
>
> `...one of the functions of civilization is to turn men into husbands and
> fathers, for it is young, unattached males who cause most of the violence
> and mayhem in society.'
>
>
> If you've gotten this far and plan to actually read the articles cited
> above, be sure to peruse _The Journal of Psychohistory_ way back through
> the 70's and 80's in order to read everything you can by Lloyd deMause. He
> has set much of the context in which Godwin developed his thought and
> performs his analysis. In fact, deMause is probably more important than
> Godwin and has certainly been more influential.
>