Radicalism in the Contemporary Age, Volume 1: Sources of Contemporary Radicalism by Seweryn Bialer & Sophia Sluzar

Author:Seweryn Bialer & Sophia Sluzar [Bialer, Seweryn & Sluzar, Sophia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000308884
Google: 0ZSpDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 51221918
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

The Clinical Evidence

The clinical evidence (Rorschachs, TATs and interviews)108 supports and enriches the findings of the questionnaires. Our groups were all diverse; the Jewish radicals were the most homogenous, but even here individuals were far more complicated than any simple categorization can capture.

As indicated earlier, thirty-six white male students were interviewed from two to four hours, in one-hour sessions. Clinical Rorschachs and TATs were also administered. These respondents were volunteers who had indicated their willingness to be interviewed on their questionnaire at the time that it was administered. The group was divided equally among radicals and moderates of Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds.

The radical group fairly closely resembled the larger set of radicals from which it was chosen, at least in terms of political ideology. (The mean radicalism score for the radicals of Jewish background was 5.7; that of non-Jewish radicals 5.9.) The moderates, on the other hand, were chosen both from relatively conservative and relatively liberal students, and thus were politically more heterogenous. (The mean radicalism score for Jews equalled 3.4; for non-Jews 3.5.)

The following discussion is preliminary. It must be noted that, especially in the case of adolescents, Rorschach and TAT interpretations tend to overemphasize pathological elements in those studied.

The key variables on the projectives which differentiated Jewish radicals from non-Jewish radicals were: (1) the presence of wandering and exile fantasies, which we interpret along with Keniston109 as associated with the desire to merge with a strong mother and fear of this desire; (2) the theme of flight from the mother; (3) the salience of the mother; and (4) the emphasis on "machismo," i.e., the need to demonstrate masculine processes.

Jewish and Christian radicals shared the desire to establish a negative identity. However, given the salience of a flawed father in the projectives of the Christian radicals, it seems clear that the parent against whom rebellion was directed was different for these two groups. Both Jewish and non-Jewish radicals also shared a tendency to treat people as concepts, as against moderate respondents.

We did not discover any significant personality variables which differentiated Jewish moderates from Christian moderates in the clinical projectives. However, we did have the impression that Jewish subjects (of whatever political persuasion) tended to be more caught up in their minds and lives with their families than did Christian respondents.

Many clinicians of a psychodynamic persuasion will rely on scoring systems for the Rorschach only as an aid in determining pathology; there are no clinical scoring systems for the TAT which are widely used. Clinicians tend to respond to these projectives as a whole and hesitate to isolate particular responses. Yet, one can, for both groups of radicals, pick out responses which illustrate characteristic themes. For example, the combination of negative identity, flight from the mother, and exile are brought up again and again by radicals of Jewish background on the TAT.

On Card 6BM of the TAT one respondent (No. 343) tells the following story which illustrates all these themes and the concern with "machismo":

"Well, Ma. I had to do it (laughs).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.