Matthew H. Bowker (M.H. Bowker) | SUNY: University at Buffalo (original) (raw)
Books by Matthew H. Bowker (M.H. Bowker)
Punctum Books, 2022
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-angels-wont-help-you/
Phoenix Publishing House, 2022
https://firingthemind.com/product/9781800131460/
Punctum Books, 2021
In The Anguished and the Enchanted, M.H. Bowker offers a lengthy critical essay and richly annota... more In The Anguished and the Enchanted, M.H. Bowker offers a lengthy critical essay and richly annotated translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s world-renowned fable, The Little Prince. Bowker’s interpretation is likely to surprise, if not shock, readers with its exploration of the dark fantasies and regressive mentalities infused in the seemingly innocent fable.
That The Little Prince is globally beloved speaks to the importance of understanding the neglected unconscious dynamics operative within the work. Indeed, by making these unconscious dynamic explicit, The Anguished and the Enchanted ensures
that readers’ experiences of The Little Prince will never be the same.
Featuring a substantial Translator’s Preface, M.H. Bowker develops a psychoanalytic lens through which to regard Saint-Exupéry’s classic, offering a more nuanced and less ‘fable-esque’ text than any translation and interpretation to date. On Bowker’s reading, Dark and primitive unconscious forces — including neglect and abuse at home, the hatred of maturation and development, the projection of feelings of worthlessness onto others, the creation of an absurd and futile world, and more — infest the story, not unlike the Baobab trees dreaded by the little prince.
Those already familiar with The Little Prince will find in The Anguished and the Enchanted a new way of regarding what has perhaps become a favorite or even a beloved book. Those unfamiliar with the original work will discover a sometimes tragic, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes harrowing account of the lengths to which persons will go in their struggle to find — or to escape from — meaningful places
for themselves in the world of adults.
Punctum Books, 2019
"Outwardly, Misinterest is concerned with dreams and forgetting and Eros and soaring dogs and gro... more "Outwardly, Misinterest is concerned with dreams and forgetting and Eros and soaring dogs and groups and suicidal suburban teenagers and sex and jury duty and Nazis and fathers and hatred and holy parrots and fundamentalists and plagues and other things that may or may not be interesting. Ultimately, however, it seeks, like Jules Renard, “en restant exact” (in remaining true/real), to shed light on the establishment of misinterest, missingness, and mystery where and when they need not be, and, thus, on the psychic, familial, and political forces that compel us not to be when and where we ought."
Phoenix Publishing House (London, UK), 2019
Published 6-6-2019. David Levine and Matthew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organiz... more Published 6-6-2019. David Levine and Matthew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organized around the conviction that the world we live in is a dangerous place to be, that it is dominated by hate and destruction, and that in it our primary task is to survive by carrying on a life-long struggle against hostile forces. Their method involves the analysis of public fantasies to reveal their hidden meanings. The central fantasy explored is the fantasy of a destroyed world, which appears most commonly in the form of post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Their special concern in the book is with defenses against the painful consequences of the dominance of this fantasy in the inner world, especially defenses involving the use of guilt to assure that something can be done to repair the destroyed world.
Topics explored include: the formation of internal fortresses and their projection into the world outside, forms of guilt including bystander guilt and survivor guilt, the loss of and search for home, and manic forms of reparation.
Routledge, 2018
Over the past several decades, colleges and universities in the United States and United Kingdom ... more Over the past several decades, colleges and universities in the United States and United Kingdom have made significant commitments to increasing diversity, most notably with regard to race and gender. The result has not, however, been an amelioration of conflict over matters of difference. Instead, there has been continuing, if not increasing, conflict and strife in universities, often reflecting conflict in the larger society. While we might presume that university students and faculty are replicating and reacting to social conflicts of a larger scale, a closer examination of actions taken (and not taken) on university campuses suggests that the matter is more complex. Indeed, near-daily reports of protests, controversial decisions, firings, strikes, and other conflictual events on university campuses may tell us more about the emotional struggles of young individuals, and about institutional responses to those struggles, than about the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and identity in civil society. In this book we explore the idea that conflicts in colleges and universities express the way that students, teachers, administrators, and organizations are managing disturbances arising in the process of identity formation. We suggest that conflict over identity in learning institutions is rooted in what Donald Winnicott refers to as the struggle between creativity and adaptation, as manifested in the course of identity development. This struggle involves the individual's need to navigate the pressures and demands of families and identity-groups in such a way as to establish a safe place to be. Specifically, we investigate a number of recent, widely-publicized, and hotly debated events on university campuses, including vociferous protests of discriminatory treatment, calls for the resignation of university officials for failing to 'respond adequately' to social crises occurring both on and off campus, criticism of university spaces as being intolerably 'dangerous' and corollary demands for 'safe spaces,' rejections of 'free speech' as a norm governing campus interactions, the development of training programs to regulate everything from classroom misconduct to 'microaggressions' and debates over the inclusion of 'trigger warnings' on course-related material deemed likely to generate post-traumatic symptoms among students.
Palgrave, 2016
While the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is not unknown to students of political th... more While the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is not unknown to students of political theory, it has received relatively sparse consideration in this field. Instead, political theorists have profited from sustained attention to the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and others. Perhaps Winnicott’s deceptively simple language, compared, for instance, with the complexity of a Lacan, has made Winnicott’s work less tempting for cross-disciplinary theoretical extrapolation. But we believe that the fundamental insights guiding Winnicott’s thought are far from simple. Indeed, this volume’s central premise is that Winnicott’s psychoanalytic contribution holds extraordinary value in traversing the impasses faced by contemporary political theorists.
Political theory is most vital today where it exceeds its disciplinary boundaries, and where it reconsiders both ancient orthodoxies and today’s fashions. Those familiar with D.W. Winnicott consider him a rare thinker whose psychoanalytic insights challenge the governing assumptions of several academic fields and professional practices. In this volume, we show, for the first time, that Winnicott’s most notable contributions to object-relations theory and to the practice of psychoanalysis — particularly his theorization of transitional phenomena, his conception of the role of destruction in the use of objects, his emphasis on the significance of creativity in facilitating subjectivity, his understanding of the functions and failings of political environments of all sizes, and his resistance to trends that threatened to reify psychoanalysis — speak directly to the fundamental political question of what it takes for contemporary persons and groups to thrive.
This volume brings together some of world’s leading scholars in the growing field of psychoanalytic political theory, offering readers diverse perspectives as well as a thorough introduction to the individuals and approaches guiding this area of research.
Routledge, 2016
This book offers a novel analysis of “experience”: the vast and influential concept that has shap... more This book offers a novel analysis of “experience”: the vast and influential concept that has shaped Western social theory and political practice for the past half-millennium.
While it is difficult to find a branch of modern thought, science, industry, or art that has not relied in some way on the notion of “experience” in defining its assumptions or aims, no study has yet applied a politically-conscious and psychologically-sensitive critique to the construct of experience.
Doing so reveals that most of the qualities that have been attributed to experience over the centuries — particularly its literality, its incommunicability, and its correspondence with suffering — are part of an unlikely fantasy or ideology.
By analyzing a series of related cases, including the experiential education movement, the ascendency of trauma theory, the philosophy of the social contract, and the psychological study of social isolation, the book builds a convincing case that the ideology of experience is invoked not to keep us close to lived realities and ‘things-in-themselves,’ but, rather, to distort and destroy true knowledge of ourselves and others.
In spite of enduring admiration for those who may be called champions of experience, such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others treated throughout the work, the ideology of experience ultimately discourages individuals and groups from creating, resisting, and changing our experience, urging us instead to embrace trauma, failure, and self-abandonment.
Punctum Books, 2015
“Experience” is a concept paradoxically deployed to accentuate the aconceptual. Although thinking... more “Experience” is a concept paradoxically deployed to accentuate the aconceptual. Although thinking, knowing, reflecting, and analyzing are kinds of experiences, invocations of “experience” typically direct our attention to what is immediate, embodied, unrepresented, unthought, even unthinkable. And yet, whether by learning experience, traumatic experience, life experience, mystical experience, or all of these, we hope most fervently that our experience will teach us, transform us, become part of us. Why do we strive to find, profit from, and possess experience while insisting upon experience’s intellectual elusiveness? What do we intend when we petition (and re-petition) experience for truth, for growth, for strength? To whom or to what do we sing when we sing experience’s song?
Escargotesque, or, What is Experience? asks why both our lived experiences and our mythologies of experience so often fold inward, repeat, return. Departing from his unusual experience of working as a garbage-collector in the West African country of Benin, M.H. Bowker converses with several champions of experience (from Michel de Montaigne to John Dewey, from Søren Kierkegaard to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Simone Weil to R.D. Laing) to pose radical questions about the intentions and dynamics that guide our quest for experience, intentions and dynamics that are more destructive and more melancholy than celebrants of experience would care to admit.
Across Escargotesque’s six loosely linear parts, fragments of prose memoir intersect with poetry, sketch art, philosophical reflection, cultural criticism, and psychological examination in ways that both evoke and unsettle the thinking person’s experience. Escargotesque both testifies to an experience and reveals surprising fantasies driving the modern and postmodern turn to experience as a source of truth and hope. Such fantasies include the sacredness of even the most violent ‘pure experience,’ the necessity of supplicating experience’s objects, and the ultimate demise of the one who experiences.
"In this unflinching, unconventional meditation on the understanding of self and identity, filtered through an ethical struggle with visitation and privilege, M.H. Bowker creates an odd, beautiful song of the self."
— Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and The Face: A Cartography of the Void
"Escargotesque, M.H. Bowker’s restive, memoir-driven meditation on experience, immerses the reader in a mood of sustained contemplative urgency, the peculiarly forceful pull of which inheres, I think, in the unnerving experience of gradually coming to appreciate, with the author, just what a maddening, grasp-slipping Ouroboros of a concept “experience” is — as, e.g., when he cites Freud citing Lichtenberg’s joke that “experience consists in experiencing what one does not wish to experience,” and we glimpse with him the koanic impossibility, the uncrackable kernel of encrypted (non-? anti-?) wisdom this remarkable book winds sinuous coil on coil around, in dexterously flexible prose (plus the occasionally interspersed pencil-sketch and snatch of verse) that when called on to do so adroitly tone-shifts from assured, Montaignian savoir faire to bursts of Kierkegaardian intensity."
— Jonathan Callahan, author of The Consummation of Dirk, Winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction
Routledge, 2014
What does it mean to describe to something or someone as absurd? Why did absurd philosophy and li... more What does it mean to describe to something or someone as absurd? Why did absurd philosophy and literature become so popular amidst the violent conflicts and terrors of the mid- to late-twentieth century? Is it possible to understand absurdity not as a feature of events, but as a psychological posture or stance? If so, what are the objectives, dynamics, and repercussions of the absurd stance? And in what ways has the absurd stance continued to shape postmodern thought and contemporary culture?
In Rethinking Absurdity, Matthew H. Bowker, Ph.D. offers a surprising account of absurdity as a widespread endeavour to make parts of our experience meaningless. In the last century, he argues, fears about subjects’ destructive desires have combined with fears about rationality in a way that has made the absurd stance seem attractive. Drawing upon diverse sources from philosophy, literature, politics, psychoanalysis, theology, and contemporary culture, Bowker identifies the absurd effort to make aspects of our histories, our selves, and our public projects meaningless with postmodern revolts against reason and subjectivity. Weaving together analyses of the work of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas, and others with interview data and popular narratives of apocalypse and survival, Bowker shows that the absurd stance and the postmodern revolt both invite a kind of bargain by which meaning is sacrificed in exchange for the survival of innocence.
Some of today’s foremost ethical thinkers, along with some of today’s most influential story-tellers, are engaged in a defense of the absurd bargain, ostensibly for the sake of protecting individuals and communities from exploitation and violence. Bowker asks us to consider, however, that the very premise of this bargain is false: that ethical subjects and healthy communities can not be created in absurdity. Instead, we must make meaningful even the most shocking losses, terrors, and destructive powers with which we live.
Rethinking Absurdity will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in the fields of political science, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural studies.
"Bowker rescues absurdity from literary and philosophical neglect, showing how it affects the work of diverse authors such as Dylan Thomas, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Emmanuel Levinas, not to mention a television show about zombies. Absurdity, he argues, is a protest and defense against the meaningful experience of loss. Especially valuable is Bowker’s playing off the literature of absurdity with his own qualitative research on the topic. The book is a dazzling display of erudition by an intellectual who has his feet on the ground, a rare combination of virtues."
—C. Fred Alford, University of Maryland, College Park
"Matthew Bowker has written a welcome exploration and critique of the treatment of subjectivity in contemporary literature. Especially notable is Bowker’s treatment of grief and the insistence on the part of some authors that acceptance of loss is neither possible nor desirable. In developing his ideas, Bowker poses and suggests answers to a number of genuinely important questions including whether what he refers to as the "absurd experience" offers freedom from illusion or instead "a regressive and melancholy illusion about the value of perpetual grief whose goal is to incapacitate subjects so that all may share the same absurd fate." This is an engaging book filled with sharp insights into matters of importance. It offers a much needed counterpoint to the celebration of suffering that is so much a part of our intellectual and political landscape."
—David Levine, University of Denver
"A valuable addition to the literature that contests the fashionable celebration of an absurd existence. This is an insightful and important work."
—Stephen Eric Bronner, Rutgers University
This book demonstrates that Albert Camus’ concept of absurdity is best understood when decoupled ... more This book demonstrates that Albert Camus’ concept of absurdity is best understood when decoupled from what might be called its ontological aspirations. Rather than pretend that absurdity usefully describes ‘the human condition,’ ‘the silence of god,’ ‘the deprivation of transcendence,’ or ‘metaphysical revolt,’ I argue that, for absurdity to be a fruitful idea, it must be approached as a psychological disposition and its basic tenets must be translated into phenomenal and psychological language. The book defines the particular psychological disposition of absurdity by analogizing it with the constructs of ambivalence, integration, conscious resistance, and creativity. Its central contention is that absurdity may be interpreted as a kind of ambivalence and, thus, as an aspect of psychological experience that demands a creative and mature response.
Absurdists’ cries of spiritual anguish need not persuade us that the conditions of loss, terror, alienation, and deprivation they describe are objectively ‘real’. If, instead, descriptions of absurdity may be understood as psychological accounts of the powerfully ambivalent impulses toward merger and toward separateness, toward group-immersion and toward subjectivity, then absurd revolt involves recognizing, resisting, and integrating such impulses in order to facilitate mature ethical action. It may be possible, I argue, by examining the dynamics of absurdity, ambivalence, resistance, and creativity, to develop a new grounding for an absurd political morality. This book asks what unique properties and advantages this renewed political morality offers and applies this grounding to some of the political and moral crises of Camus’ time and of our own.
Reviews:
"Bowker’s book examines Camus’ notion of the absurd in relation to the findings of modern psychoanalytic theory of ambivalence. His reading sets aside the 'ontological' questions most often associated with the absurd—the ‘human condition,’ ‘the silence of god,’ ‘the deprivation of transcendence,’ ‘metaphysical revolt’—in favor of an analysis that treats the experience as a ‘psychological disposition.’ By means of this approach, Bowker succeeds both in overcoming the fruitless logical and epistemological debates about Camus’ achievement that have dominated the literature for decades and in opening up a space in which the anthropological and experiential depth of Camus’ analysis might be regained. Paradoxically, he also restores the ontological realities he initially sets aside to their rightful place in Camus’ thought—‘more as overpowering love-object[s] than an unthinkable ‘is-ness’.’ A thoughtful and engaging book." (Ron Srigley, Laurentian University of Sudbury)
"Reworking his 2008 dissertation, Bowker recasts the Camusian theme of absurdity in pursuit of a distinct moral and political philosophy. In a spirited if somewhat meandering argument, he disentangles the absurd from Camus's biography and codifies an independent ethic of the absurd. Beginning with a historical overview of the absurd, the author details the doctrine of absurdity directly through close analysis of Camus's works and indirectly through the lens of the concept of ambivalence. Both The Stranger and The Rebel function as loci in Bowker's analysis, and the exegetical chapters examining each book offer subtle reappraisals of traditional scholarship. Bowker wraps up with two chapters arguing for the relevance of absurd morality in the political sphere, and he ends with a turn back to Camus's biography and views on political assassinations and Algerian independence. In the end, Bowker posits that a political morality of the absurd arises through acknowledgment that all political systems and acts are fraught with injustice and that one need not necessarily rebel against them. Only by embracing the absurd can one develop a creative and mature ethical space for political deliberation. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." (CHOICE)
Ostranenie, the term for defamiliarization introduced by Russian writer and critic Victor Shklovs... more Ostranenie, the term for defamiliarization introduced by Russian writer and critic Victor Shklovsky, means, among other things, to see in strangeness. To see in strangeness is to participate in an illusion that is more real than real. It may be achieved by (re)presenting the surface as the substance, the play as the thing, or by examining (from exigere: to drive out) what is present before one’s eyes. Ultimately, ostranenie means confessing one’s complicity in making known what is known.
M.H. Bowker’s Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing is a meditation upon the moment of a mother’s death: a moment of defamiliarization in several senses. The body of the work consists of footnotes which elaborate, by exegesis, by parataxis, and sometimes by surprise, the intimate and often hidden relationships between parent and child, illusion and knowledge, shame and loss. These elaborations raise questions about the power of the familiar, the limitations of discursive thought, and the paradoxical nature of the interpersonal, political, and spiritual bargains we make for the sake of security and freedom.
Ostranenie treats the personal relationship between the author and his mother in both direct and oblique ways. In a candidly unsettled examination of this relationship and its influence upon the reflections and concerns of the author, the reader is invited to experience a family, a disintegration, a psyche, and its defamiliarization, from the perspectives of both an adult and a child.
Review: "While Ostranenie takes its title from an obscure Russian term for feelings of defamiliarization, and while its form foregrounds the cerebral, footnotes pushing poetic text off the page, and while its author is shamelessly intellectual, dropping, for instance, “Verfremdungseffekt” in the book’s first fifty words, and while we might thus expect coolness, austerity, or flippancy from such a set of particulars, quite the opposite is true: this is a deeply moving book about the experience of grief, about how our books do and don’t prepare us for it, about how our closest human connections are both alienating and familiar, how grief takes us out of ourselves and returns us to ourselves. Bowker comes through the books and thinkers and languages to a very human place, as if to say,why shouldn’t thinking also make us human? And, why is this a surprise? Required reading for grad school people from working class roots." ~Ted Pelton, Starcherone Books
Journal Articles by Matthew H. Bowker (M.H. Bowker)
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2022
In this essay, I discuss the root and meaning of anxiety before turning my attention to the relat... more In this essay, I discuss the root and meaning of anxiety before turning my attention to the relationship between anxiety and courage, arguing that courage is often a defense against anxiety: an externalization of an internal crisis. Discourses of courage draw attention away from the true problem of anxiety, rather than addressing it, sponsoring a kind of uncourageousness by externalizing anxiety, transposing it onto concrete and manageable external feared objects. Furthermore, courage and bravery discourses do not accord with the reports of persons who have performed brave acts, who describe their behavior either as forms of service to internalized values or as moments of madness. Contemporary courage discourses reinforce the belief that, in courage, there is a component of the self that is capable of helping the self in times of need. Yet, this helper self is either substantially degraded or missing entirely in the case of anxiety, which is organized around failures of help and consequent experiences of shame and helplessness.
Clio's Psyche - Psycho-history Forum, 2021
In this paper, I argue that the root of anxiety is helplesssness. To properly understand anxiety,... more In this paper, I argue that the root of anxiety is helplesssness. To properly understand anxiety, we must understand help and its relation to the development of feelings of worth, security, and autonomy in the self. I describe how adequate help in infancy and childhood generates a benign internal world. I then demonstrate that, later in life, both prospects of help and failures of help may trigger enormous anxiety against which we defend through a kind of psychic survivalism that is hostile to the provision of help to the self and others. In the wave of recent global crises and the US Democratic victories in 2020, questions of government assistance, help, and care-from vaccine-distribution to loan-forgiveness, from affordable health care to stimulus packages-have returned to the forefront of public discourse. At the same time, we face an extraordinarily uncertain and anxious moment, speaking politically, economically, and culturally. If a moment's reflection on anxiety and help are therefore appropriate, I will argue that helplessness, expressed in a multitude of languages, from the infant's first cries to countless philosophical and psychological works on the subject, is at the heart of anxiety. 'Help' refers us to a relation both between persons and within a person or self, which double-sense reveals help's central dilemma: that the receipt of help risks the anxiety-piquing possibility that the recipient is not self-sufficient or has failed to overcome helplessness. The anxiety about which I write is anxiety about the self's basic worth and value: If the
Free Associations (79) , 2020
Bowker, M.H. “The American Cult of Experience and the Real / Psychosocial Split.” Free Associatio... more Bowker, M.H. “The American Cult of Experience and the Real / Psychosocial Split.” Free Associations 79. https://doi.org/10.1234/fa.v0i79.341. (2020)
Journal of Psychosocial Studies: Special Issue on the American Tradition of Psycho-Social Theory, 2020
Clio's Psyche, 2019
I respectfully disagree with David Lotto's essay, "A Male Perspective on Sex and Power in the Age... more I respectfully disagree with David Lotto's essay, "A Male Perspective on Sex and Power in the Age of #MeToo." This short article looks at several problematic elements of Lotto's paper-including its sexual essentialism, its misunderstandings of the nature of sexual and gender based violence, its mistaking of power-dynamics, and more-and analyzes these problems lead only to greater confusion about the nature and context of the #MeToo movement and the events that have given rise to it. In the end, I argue that Lotto's lack of substantial psychohistorical analysis (either of perpetrators' psycho-histories, or of the organizational and social contexts that tolerate or facilitate sexual and gender based crime) may be more hurtful to the discussion than helpful.
Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development, 2019
Hikikomori (social withdrawal that lasts six months or longer) is a growing problem among Japanes... more Hikikomori (social withdrawal that lasts six months or longer) is a growing problem among Japanese adolescents and young adults with recent estimates that approximately 1% of Japanese youth will suffer from an episode of hikikomori in their lifetimes. What remains unclear is whether hikikomori is a culture-bound syndrome or a condition impacting youth around the globe. Hence, the self-reported prevalence and psycho-social correlates of past experiences with hikikomori were examined in cross-sectional samples of university students from Singapore (n = 147), Nigeria (n = 151), and the United States (n = 301). Following tests of measurement invariance, comparisons showed that past experiences with hikikomori were related to elevated levels of current loneliness and depressive symptoms in each sample. However, analyses also revealed evidence of cultural variation in both the prevalence and the psycho-social correlates associated with past experiences of hikikomori, which taken together, provide preliminary evidence that the culture-bound characterization of hikikomori may not be appropriate.
Keywords: Social withdrawal; Hikikomori; Loneliness; Anxiety; Depression; University Students
Punctum Books, 2022
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-angels-wont-help-you/
Phoenix Publishing House, 2022
https://firingthemind.com/product/9781800131460/
Punctum Books, 2021
In The Anguished and the Enchanted, M.H. Bowker offers a lengthy critical essay and richly annota... more In The Anguished and the Enchanted, M.H. Bowker offers a lengthy critical essay and richly annotated translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s world-renowned fable, The Little Prince. Bowker’s interpretation is likely to surprise, if not shock, readers with its exploration of the dark fantasies and regressive mentalities infused in the seemingly innocent fable.
That The Little Prince is globally beloved speaks to the importance of understanding the neglected unconscious dynamics operative within the work. Indeed, by making these unconscious dynamic explicit, The Anguished and the Enchanted ensures
that readers’ experiences of The Little Prince will never be the same.
Featuring a substantial Translator’s Preface, M.H. Bowker develops a psychoanalytic lens through which to regard Saint-Exupéry’s classic, offering a more nuanced and less ‘fable-esque’ text than any translation and interpretation to date. On Bowker’s reading, Dark and primitive unconscious forces — including neglect and abuse at home, the hatred of maturation and development, the projection of feelings of worthlessness onto others, the creation of an absurd and futile world, and more — infest the story, not unlike the Baobab trees dreaded by the little prince.
Those already familiar with The Little Prince will find in The Anguished and the Enchanted a new way of regarding what has perhaps become a favorite or even a beloved book. Those unfamiliar with the original work will discover a sometimes tragic, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes harrowing account of the lengths to which persons will go in their struggle to find — or to escape from — meaningful places
for themselves in the world of adults.
Punctum Books, 2019
"Outwardly, Misinterest is concerned with dreams and forgetting and Eros and soaring dogs and gro... more "Outwardly, Misinterest is concerned with dreams and forgetting and Eros and soaring dogs and groups and suicidal suburban teenagers and sex and jury duty and Nazis and fathers and hatred and holy parrots and fundamentalists and plagues and other things that may or may not be interesting. Ultimately, however, it seeks, like Jules Renard, “en restant exact” (in remaining true/real), to shed light on the establishment of misinterest, missingness, and mystery where and when they need not be, and, thus, on the psychic, familial, and political forces that compel us not to be when and where we ought."
Phoenix Publishing House (London, UK), 2019
Published 6-6-2019. David Levine and Matthew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organiz... more Published 6-6-2019. David Levine and Matthew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organized around the conviction that the world we live in is a dangerous place to be, that it is dominated by hate and destruction, and that in it our primary task is to survive by carrying on a life-long struggle against hostile forces. Their method involves the analysis of public fantasies to reveal their hidden meanings. The central fantasy explored is the fantasy of a destroyed world, which appears most commonly in the form of post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Their special concern in the book is with defenses against the painful consequences of the dominance of this fantasy in the inner world, especially defenses involving the use of guilt to assure that something can be done to repair the destroyed world.
Topics explored include: the formation of internal fortresses and their projection into the world outside, forms of guilt including bystander guilt and survivor guilt, the loss of and search for home, and manic forms of reparation.
Routledge, 2018
Over the past several decades, colleges and universities in the United States and United Kingdom ... more Over the past several decades, colleges and universities in the United States and United Kingdom have made significant commitments to increasing diversity, most notably with regard to race and gender. The result has not, however, been an amelioration of conflict over matters of difference. Instead, there has been continuing, if not increasing, conflict and strife in universities, often reflecting conflict in the larger society. While we might presume that university students and faculty are replicating and reacting to social conflicts of a larger scale, a closer examination of actions taken (and not taken) on university campuses suggests that the matter is more complex. Indeed, near-daily reports of protests, controversial decisions, firings, strikes, and other conflictual events on university campuses may tell us more about the emotional struggles of young individuals, and about institutional responses to those struggles, than about the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and identity in civil society. In this book we explore the idea that conflicts in colleges and universities express the way that students, teachers, administrators, and organizations are managing disturbances arising in the process of identity formation. We suggest that conflict over identity in learning institutions is rooted in what Donald Winnicott refers to as the struggle between creativity and adaptation, as manifested in the course of identity development. This struggle involves the individual's need to navigate the pressures and demands of families and identity-groups in such a way as to establish a safe place to be. Specifically, we investigate a number of recent, widely-publicized, and hotly debated events on university campuses, including vociferous protests of discriminatory treatment, calls for the resignation of university officials for failing to 'respond adequately' to social crises occurring both on and off campus, criticism of university spaces as being intolerably 'dangerous' and corollary demands for 'safe spaces,' rejections of 'free speech' as a norm governing campus interactions, the development of training programs to regulate everything from classroom misconduct to 'microaggressions' and debates over the inclusion of 'trigger warnings' on course-related material deemed likely to generate post-traumatic symptoms among students.
Palgrave, 2016
While the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is not unknown to students of political th... more While the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is not unknown to students of political theory, it has received relatively sparse consideration in this field. Instead, political theorists have profited from sustained attention to the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and others. Perhaps Winnicott’s deceptively simple language, compared, for instance, with the complexity of a Lacan, has made Winnicott’s work less tempting for cross-disciplinary theoretical extrapolation. But we believe that the fundamental insights guiding Winnicott’s thought are far from simple. Indeed, this volume’s central premise is that Winnicott’s psychoanalytic contribution holds extraordinary value in traversing the impasses faced by contemporary political theorists.
Political theory is most vital today where it exceeds its disciplinary boundaries, and where it reconsiders both ancient orthodoxies and today’s fashions. Those familiar with D.W. Winnicott consider him a rare thinker whose psychoanalytic insights challenge the governing assumptions of several academic fields and professional practices. In this volume, we show, for the first time, that Winnicott’s most notable contributions to object-relations theory and to the practice of psychoanalysis — particularly his theorization of transitional phenomena, his conception of the role of destruction in the use of objects, his emphasis on the significance of creativity in facilitating subjectivity, his understanding of the functions and failings of political environments of all sizes, and his resistance to trends that threatened to reify psychoanalysis — speak directly to the fundamental political question of what it takes for contemporary persons and groups to thrive.
This volume brings together some of world’s leading scholars in the growing field of psychoanalytic political theory, offering readers diverse perspectives as well as a thorough introduction to the individuals and approaches guiding this area of research.
Routledge, 2016
This book offers a novel analysis of “experience”: the vast and influential concept that has shap... more This book offers a novel analysis of “experience”: the vast and influential concept that has shaped Western social theory and political practice for the past half-millennium.
While it is difficult to find a branch of modern thought, science, industry, or art that has not relied in some way on the notion of “experience” in defining its assumptions or aims, no study has yet applied a politically-conscious and psychologically-sensitive critique to the construct of experience.
Doing so reveals that most of the qualities that have been attributed to experience over the centuries — particularly its literality, its incommunicability, and its correspondence with suffering — are part of an unlikely fantasy or ideology.
By analyzing a series of related cases, including the experiential education movement, the ascendency of trauma theory, the philosophy of the social contract, and the psychological study of social isolation, the book builds a convincing case that the ideology of experience is invoked not to keep us close to lived realities and ‘things-in-themselves,’ but, rather, to distort and destroy true knowledge of ourselves and others.
In spite of enduring admiration for those who may be called champions of experience, such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others treated throughout the work, the ideology of experience ultimately discourages individuals and groups from creating, resisting, and changing our experience, urging us instead to embrace trauma, failure, and self-abandonment.
Punctum Books, 2015
“Experience” is a concept paradoxically deployed to accentuate the aconceptual. Although thinking... more “Experience” is a concept paradoxically deployed to accentuate the aconceptual. Although thinking, knowing, reflecting, and analyzing are kinds of experiences, invocations of “experience” typically direct our attention to what is immediate, embodied, unrepresented, unthought, even unthinkable. And yet, whether by learning experience, traumatic experience, life experience, mystical experience, or all of these, we hope most fervently that our experience will teach us, transform us, become part of us. Why do we strive to find, profit from, and possess experience while insisting upon experience’s intellectual elusiveness? What do we intend when we petition (and re-petition) experience for truth, for growth, for strength? To whom or to what do we sing when we sing experience’s song?
Escargotesque, or, What is Experience? asks why both our lived experiences and our mythologies of experience so often fold inward, repeat, return. Departing from his unusual experience of working as a garbage-collector in the West African country of Benin, M.H. Bowker converses with several champions of experience (from Michel de Montaigne to John Dewey, from Søren Kierkegaard to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Simone Weil to R.D. Laing) to pose radical questions about the intentions and dynamics that guide our quest for experience, intentions and dynamics that are more destructive and more melancholy than celebrants of experience would care to admit.
Across Escargotesque’s six loosely linear parts, fragments of prose memoir intersect with poetry, sketch art, philosophical reflection, cultural criticism, and psychological examination in ways that both evoke and unsettle the thinking person’s experience. Escargotesque both testifies to an experience and reveals surprising fantasies driving the modern and postmodern turn to experience as a source of truth and hope. Such fantasies include the sacredness of even the most violent ‘pure experience,’ the necessity of supplicating experience’s objects, and the ultimate demise of the one who experiences.
"In this unflinching, unconventional meditation on the understanding of self and identity, filtered through an ethical struggle with visitation and privilege, M.H. Bowker creates an odd, beautiful song of the self."
— Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and The Face: A Cartography of the Void
"Escargotesque, M.H. Bowker’s restive, memoir-driven meditation on experience, immerses the reader in a mood of sustained contemplative urgency, the peculiarly forceful pull of which inheres, I think, in the unnerving experience of gradually coming to appreciate, with the author, just what a maddening, grasp-slipping Ouroboros of a concept “experience” is — as, e.g., when he cites Freud citing Lichtenberg’s joke that “experience consists in experiencing what one does not wish to experience,” and we glimpse with him the koanic impossibility, the uncrackable kernel of encrypted (non-? anti-?) wisdom this remarkable book winds sinuous coil on coil around, in dexterously flexible prose (plus the occasionally interspersed pencil-sketch and snatch of verse) that when called on to do so adroitly tone-shifts from assured, Montaignian savoir faire to bursts of Kierkegaardian intensity."
— Jonathan Callahan, author of The Consummation of Dirk, Winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction
Routledge, 2014
What does it mean to describe to something or someone as absurd? Why did absurd philosophy and li... more What does it mean to describe to something or someone as absurd? Why did absurd philosophy and literature become so popular amidst the violent conflicts and terrors of the mid- to late-twentieth century? Is it possible to understand absurdity not as a feature of events, but as a psychological posture or stance? If so, what are the objectives, dynamics, and repercussions of the absurd stance? And in what ways has the absurd stance continued to shape postmodern thought and contemporary culture?
In Rethinking Absurdity, Matthew H. Bowker, Ph.D. offers a surprising account of absurdity as a widespread endeavour to make parts of our experience meaningless. In the last century, he argues, fears about subjects’ destructive desires have combined with fears about rationality in a way that has made the absurd stance seem attractive. Drawing upon diverse sources from philosophy, literature, politics, psychoanalysis, theology, and contemporary culture, Bowker identifies the absurd effort to make aspects of our histories, our selves, and our public projects meaningless with postmodern revolts against reason and subjectivity. Weaving together analyses of the work of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas, and others with interview data and popular narratives of apocalypse and survival, Bowker shows that the absurd stance and the postmodern revolt both invite a kind of bargain by which meaning is sacrificed in exchange for the survival of innocence.
Some of today’s foremost ethical thinkers, along with some of today’s most influential story-tellers, are engaged in a defense of the absurd bargain, ostensibly for the sake of protecting individuals and communities from exploitation and violence. Bowker asks us to consider, however, that the very premise of this bargain is false: that ethical subjects and healthy communities can not be created in absurdity. Instead, we must make meaningful even the most shocking losses, terrors, and destructive powers with which we live.
Rethinking Absurdity will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in the fields of political science, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural studies.
"Bowker rescues absurdity from literary and philosophical neglect, showing how it affects the work of diverse authors such as Dylan Thomas, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Emmanuel Levinas, not to mention a television show about zombies. Absurdity, he argues, is a protest and defense against the meaningful experience of loss. Especially valuable is Bowker’s playing off the literature of absurdity with his own qualitative research on the topic. The book is a dazzling display of erudition by an intellectual who has his feet on the ground, a rare combination of virtues."
—C. Fred Alford, University of Maryland, College Park
"Matthew Bowker has written a welcome exploration and critique of the treatment of subjectivity in contemporary literature. Especially notable is Bowker’s treatment of grief and the insistence on the part of some authors that acceptance of loss is neither possible nor desirable. In developing his ideas, Bowker poses and suggests answers to a number of genuinely important questions including whether what he refers to as the "absurd experience" offers freedom from illusion or instead "a regressive and melancholy illusion about the value of perpetual grief whose goal is to incapacitate subjects so that all may share the same absurd fate." This is an engaging book filled with sharp insights into matters of importance. It offers a much needed counterpoint to the celebration of suffering that is so much a part of our intellectual and political landscape."
—David Levine, University of Denver
"A valuable addition to the literature that contests the fashionable celebration of an absurd existence. This is an insightful and important work."
—Stephen Eric Bronner, Rutgers University
This book demonstrates that Albert Camus’ concept of absurdity is best understood when decoupled ... more This book demonstrates that Albert Camus’ concept of absurdity is best understood when decoupled from what might be called its ontological aspirations. Rather than pretend that absurdity usefully describes ‘the human condition,’ ‘the silence of god,’ ‘the deprivation of transcendence,’ or ‘metaphysical revolt,’ I argue that, for absurdity to be a fruitful idea, it must be approached as a psychological disposition and its basic tenets must be translated into phenomenal and psychological language. The book defines the particular psychological disposition of absurdity by analogizing it with the constructs of ambivalence, integration, conscious resistance, and creativity. Its central contention is that absurdity may be interpreted as a kind of ambivalence and, thus, as an aspect of psychological experience that demands a creative and mature response.
Absurdists’ cries of spiritual anguish need not persuade us that the conditions of loss, terror, alienation, and deprivation they describe are objectively ‘real’. If, instead, descriptions of absurdity may be understood as psychological accounts of the powerfully ambivalent impulses toward merger and toward separateness, toward group-immersion and toward subjectivity, then absurd revolt involves recognizing, resisting, and integrating such impulses in order to facilitate mature ethical action. It may be possible, I argue, by examining the dynamics of absurdity, ambivalence, resistance, and creativity, to develop a new grounding for an absurd political morality. This book asks what unique properties and advantages this renewed political morality offers and applies this grounding to some of the political and moral crises of Camus’ time and of our own.
Reviews:
"Bowker’s book examines Camus’ notion of the absurd in relation to the findings of modern psychoanalytic theory of ambivalence. His reading sets aside the 'ontological' questions most often associated with the absurd—the ‘human condition,’ ‘the silence of god,’ ‘the deprivation of transcendence,’ ‘metaphysical revolt’—in favor of an analysis that treats the experience as a ‘psychological disposition.’ By means of this approach, Bowker succeeds both in overcoming the fruitless logical and epistemological debates about Camus’ achievement that have dominated the literature for decades and in opening up a space in which the anthropological and experiential depth of Camus’ analysis might be regained. Paradoxically, he also restores the ontological realities he initially sets aside to their rightful place in Camus’ thought—‘more as overpowering love-object[s] than an unthinkable ‘is-ness’.’ A thoughtful and engaging book." (Ron Srigley, Laurentian University of Sudbury)
"Reworking his 2008 dissertation, Bowker recasts the Camusian theme of absurdity in pursuit of a distinct moral and political philosophy. In a spirited if somewhat meandering argument, he disentangles the absurd from Camus's biography and codifies an independent ethic of the absurd. Beginning with a historical overview of the absurd, the author details the doctrine of absurdity directly through close analysis of Camus's works and indirectly through the lens of the concept of ambivalence. Both The Stranger and The Rebel function as loci in Bowker's analysis, and the exegetical chapters examining each book offer subtle reappraisals of traditional scholarship. Bowker wraps up with two chapters arguing for the relevance of absurd morality in the political sphere, and he ends with a turn back to Camus's biography and views on political assassinations and Algerian independence. In the end, Bowker posits that a political morality of the absurd arises through acknowledgment that all political systems and acts are fraught with injustice and that one need not necessarily rebel against them. Only by embracing the absurd can one develop a creative and mature ethical space for political deliberation. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." (CHOICE)
Ostranenie, the term for defamiliarization introduced by Russian writer and critic Victor Shklovs... more Ostranenie, the term for defamiliarization introduced by Russian writer and critic Victor Shklovsky, means, among other things, to see in strangeness. To see in strangeness is to participate in an illusion that is more real than real. It may be achieved by (re)presenting the surface as the substance, the play as the thing, or by examining (from exigere: to drive out) what is present before one’s eyes. Ultimately, ostranenie means confessing one’s complicity in making known what is known.
M.H. Bowker’s Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing is a meditation upon the moment of a mother’s death: a moment of defamiliarization in several senses. The body of the work consists of footnotes which elaborate, by exegesis, by parataxis, and sometimes by surprise, the intimate and often hidden relationships between parent and child, illusion and knowledge, shame and loss. These elaborations raise questions about the power of the familiar, the limitations of discursive thought, and the paradoxical nature of the interpersonal, political, and spiritual bargains we make for the sake of security and freedom.
Ostranenie treats the personal relationship between the author and his mother in both direct and oblique ways. In a candidly unsettled examination of this relationship and its influence upon the reflections and concerns of the author, the reader is invited to experience a family, a disintegration, a psyche, and its defamiliarization, from the perspectives of both an adult and a child.
Review: "While Ostranenie takes its title from an obscure Russian term for feelings of defamiliarization, and while its form foregrounds the cerebral, footnotes pushing poetic text off the page, and while its author is shamelessly intellectual, dropping, for instance, “Verfremdungseffekt” in the book’s first fifty words, and while we might thus expect coolness, austerity, or flippancy from such a set of particulars, quite the opposite is true: this is a deeply moving book about the experience of grief, about how our books do and don’t prepare us for it, about how our closest human connections are both alienating and familiar, how grief takes us out of ourselves and returns us to ourselves. Bowker comes through the books and thinkers and languages to a very human place, as if to say,why shouldn’t thinking also make us human? And, why is this a surprise? Required reading for grad school people from working class roots." ~Ted Pelton, Starcherone Books
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2022
In this essay, I discuss the root and meaning of anxiety before turning my attention to the relat... more In this essay, I discuss the root and meaning of anxiety before turning my attention to the relationship between anxiety and courage, arguing that courage is often a defense against anxiety: an externalization of an internal crisis. Discourses of courage draw attention away from the true problem of anxiety, rather than addressing it, sponsoring a kind of uncourageousness by externalizing anxiety, transposing it onto concrete and manageable external feared objects. Furthermore, courage and bravery discourses do not accord with the reports of persons who have performed brave acts, who describe their behavior either as forms of service to internalized values or as moments of madness. Contemporary courage discourses reinforce the belief that, in courage, there is a component of the self that is capable of helping the self in times of need. Yet, this helper self is either substantially degraded or missing entirely in the case of anxiety, which is organized around failures of help and consequent experiences of shame and helplessness.
Clio's Psyche - Psycho-history Forum, 2021
In this paper, I argue that the root of anxiety is helplesssness. To properly understand anxiety,... more In this paper, I argue that the root of anxiety is helplesssness. To properly understand anxiety, we must understand help and its relation to the development of feelings of worth, security, and autonomy in the self. I describe how adequate help in infancy and childhood generates a benign internal world. I then demonstrate that, later in life, both prospects of help and failures of help may trigger enormous anxiety against which we defend through a kind of psychic survivalism that is hostile to the provision of help to the self and others. In the wave of recent global crises and the US Democratic victories in 2020, questions of government assistance, help, and care-from vaccine-distribution to loan-forgiveness, from affordable health care to stimulus packages-have returned to the forefront of public discourse. At the same time, we face an extraordinarily uncertain and anxious moment, speaking politically, economically, and culturally. If a moment's reflection on anxiety and help are therefore appropriate, I will argue that helplessness, expressed in a multitude of languages, from the infant's first cries to countless philosophical and psychological works on the subject, is at the heart of anxiety. 'Help' refers us to a relation both between persons and within a person or self, which double-sense reveals help's central dilemma: that the receipt of help risks the anxiety-piquing possibility that the recipient is not self-sufficient or has failed to overcome helplessness. The anxiety about which I write is anxiety about the self's basic worth and value: If the
Free Associations (79) , 2020
Bowker, M.H. “The American Cult of Experience and the Real / Psychosocial Split.” Free Associatio... more Bowker, M.H. “The American Cult of Experience and the Real / Psychosocial Split.” Free Associations 79. https://doi.org/10.1234/fa.v0i79.341. (2020)
Journal of Psychosocial Studies: Special Issue on the American Tradition of Psycho-Social Theory, 2020
Clio's Psyche, 2019
I respectfully disagree with David Lotto's essay, "A Male Perspective on Sex and Power in the Age... more I respectfully disagree with David Lotto's essay, "A Male Perspective on Sex and Power in the Age of #MeToo." This short article looks at several problematic elements of Lotto's paper-including its sexual essentialism, its misunderstandings of the nature of sexual and gender based violence, its mistaking of power-dynamics, and more-and analyzes these problems lead only to greater confusion about the nature and context of the #MeToo movement and the events that have given rise to it. In the end, I argue that Lotto's lack of substantial psychohistorical analysis (either of perpetrators' psycho-histories, or of the organizational and social contexts that tolerate or facilitate sexual and gender based crime) may be more hurtful to the discussion than helpful.
Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development, 2019
Hikikomori (social withdrawal that lasts six months or longer) is a growing problem among Japanes... more Hikikomori (social withdrawal that lasts six months or longer) is a growing problem among Japanese adolescents and young adults with recent estimates that approximately 1% of Japanese youth will suffer from an episode of hikikomori in their lifetimes. What remains unclear is whether hikikomori is a culture-bound syndrome or a condition impacting youth around the globe. Hence, the self-reported prevalence and psycho-social correlates of past experiences with hikikomori were examined in cross-sectional samples of university students from Singapore (n = 147), Nigeria (n = 151), and the United States (n = 301). Following tests of measurement invariance, comparisons showed that past experiences with hikikomori were related to elevated levels of current loneliness and depressive symptoms in each sample. However, analyses also revealed evidence of cultural variation in both the prevalence and the psycho-social correlates associated with past experiences of hikikomori, which taken together, provide preliminary evidence that the culture-bound characterization of hikikomori may not be appropriate.
Keywords: Social withdrawal; Hikikomori; Loneliness; Anxiety; Depression; University Students
Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, 2019
This essay examines convictions about the importance of speech and activity with reference to an ... more This essay examines convictions about the importance of speech and activity with reference to an ideal of change, where change may be understood in at least two ways: first, as a process by which persons or things become new or different in reality, and, second, as a grandiose fantasy in which change represents an end in itself and is aligned with ideals such as eternality, centrality, and significance. The essay compares analytic and political situations without suggesting that analytic and political arenas are identical, or that individuals or groups involved in either sort of activity ought to behave identically. Rather, it maintains that much of the dedication to speech and activity relies on a fantasy of change that may be orthogonal, if not antithetical, to a goal shared by psychoanalysis and progressive politics: the facilitation of the capacity to be, to act, and to generate meaningful change for the self and others.
Clio's Psyche: Psychohistory Forum
Forthcoming, 2019
Free Associations, 2018
Tension between the ideal of analytic neutrality — although conceived and applied in various ways... more Tension between the ideal of analytic neutrality — although conceived and applied in various ways — and the putative danger of political neutrality is intrinsic to psychoanalytic investigations of culture and society. It presents itself with urgency in times of social conflict, especially when such conflict is characterized by or framed in terms of victimization, but it has not been a subject of rigorous debate. That the tension between analytic and political neutrality has not been widely examined might mean that when analysts engage in scholarly work outside of clinical settings (e.g., writing books or papers), we adopt a different set of norms to guide our behavior, norms that do not include whatever attitude of neutrality we may observe in the consulting room. 1 But it might also mean that this tension is a site of resistance, that we are unwilling to look closely at a difficult aspect of our work because we expect it to yield uncomfortable experience. Of course, this resistance may be largely unconscious, leading us to miss or mistake the meanings and consequences of our positions. Analytic Neutrality Due to limitations of space, in this essay I do not review the long history or many variations of the idea of analytic neutrality. There remains a healthy discourse on the subject, particularly as it pertains to the timing and nature of interpretations, the self-presence or self-absence of the analyst, and the establishment of an appropriate working atmosphere (see e.
In this essay, I resist the idea of connecting a Freudian death drive or Todestrieb to acts of su... more In this essay, I resist the idea of connecting a Freudian death drive or Todestrieb to acts of suicide-terrorism. Instead, I re-frame the issue in terms of inclinations toward being and non-being in the inner world. The truly difficult question, in my view, and one that can not be fully answered here, is: Should we consider the suicide-terrorist's violence an attempt to make his life meaningful, to forge attachments, and to act creatively from a vital (if also aggressive) impulse, or should we understand it in terms of a regressive group identity, envious and destructive desires, and uncreative or defensive (re)actions to anxiety, loss, or deprivation? To put it more simply, if we can set aside our abhorrence of acts of violence as well as the many confusions associated with the idea of the death drive, we may ask if it is possible for a suicide-terrorist to kill and die creatively, in D.W. Winnicott's sense of the term, or if, rather, the suicide-terrorist's actions are best understood as particularly destructive examples of the kind of doing that expresses (psychic) non-being.
In: Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (2017) Vol. 16, nos. 1-2
In this paper, we apply Ronald Fairbairn's notion of a "moral defense" to the idea of "moral inju... more In this paper, we apply Ronald Fairbairn's notion of a "moral defense" to the idea of "moral injury," a construct lately advanced by American psychiatrists and researchers to account for the psychological suffering of soldiers in and after combat. By limiting discussion of the causes of "moral injury" to battlefield experiences, and by leaving out of account the states of mind individuals bring with them into the military, as well as the psychic and moral meanings invested in the military as an institution, the construct of "moral injury" currently obscures as much as it illuminates. We argue that limiting causation to combat experience is a way of hiding more complex issues concerning the moral relationship between the soldier, the military, and the ideal of goodness, as well as the ambivalent role the soldier occupies in the fantasy life of the nation.
The Japanese term, hikikomori, refers to a condition of severe social isolation, most often lasti... more The Japanese term, hikikomori, refers to a condition of severe social isolation, most often lasting several years. According to recent estimates, approximately twenty-five percent of Japanese young people, as well as young people around the world at somewhat lower rates, will experience hikikomori in their lifetimes. In spite of the global surge of clinical and scholarly interest in the phenomenon, there remains a great degree of confusion regarding hikikomori. This paper argues that apparent difficulties in understanding hikikomori derive from defensive mystifications and distortions in which both individuals in hikikomori and those who study and treat these individuals participate. First, I argue that the current scholarly and clinical practice of treating hikikomori as a Japanese “culture-bound” phenomenon obscures more than it clarifies and signifies a reticence to acknowledge a particular crisis in the child-parent relationship. Second, hikikomori, itself, may be interpreted as a repressed and distorted desire for amae, a Japanese term for loving parental indulgence. While current applications of the construct of amae to the phenomenon of hikikomori find it to be a cause of the disorder, this paper argues that amae need not be read as pathogenic nor culturally-unique. Rather, it is the absence or loss of emotional indulgence that ultimately leads individuals to the shame, confusion, self-incarceration, and family-victimization that defines hikikomori.
Pedagogy and the Human Sciences, 2016
Contemporary discussions of critical thinking lack serious consideration of students’ thinking-pr... more Contemporary discussions of critical thinking lack serious consideration of students’ thinking-processes as phenomena embedded within the contexts of psychological and interpersonal relationships. This paper departs from past and present approaches to critical thinking pedagogy by analogizing thinking and critical thinking with forms of relating: to self, to others, to objects of thought, and to what we describe as “thinking-relationships.” The analogy of thinking with relating permits us to examine more closely the connections between self, psyche, student, teacher, and learning institution, and to apply valuable insights from the fields of social philosophy and psychoanalytic theory to critical thinking pedagogy and practice. This paper introduces the metaphor of critical thinking as relating to one’s thinking-relationships, explores the contexts in which such critical thinking-relationships are embedded, identifies hidden desires, defenses, and fantasies that may hinder the development of critical thinking, and concludes by reflecting upon the link between the ethical development of the person and the ideal of critical thinking.
Journal of Adolescence, 2016
The study of social withdrawal subtypes is no longer limited to Western societies but has extende... more The study of social withdrawal subtypes is no longer limited to Western societies but has extended to non-Western countries, such as China. This study considers, for the first time, social withdrawal subtypes in an African country (Nigeria) by examining emerging adults' (N ¼ 151; 54% female; M age ¼ 19.92 years, SD ¼ 2.54) perceptions, attitudes, and responses to shy, unsociable, and socially competent behaviors. Results revealed that Nigerian emerging adults perceived significant differences between shy, unsociable, and socially competent behavior in several ways incommensurate with participants of previous studies conducted in North America, Europe, and China. Findings highlight the diversity of social meanings attached to social withdrawal in non-Western societies, and point to the need for additional research on social withdrawal and its perception in Africa.
With J.C. Bowker, R. Adams, C. Fisher, and S. Spencer
Thought & Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal 28(1): 106-117, 2012
that represents society. Those who study the beast would not fail to learn its moods and preferen... more that represents society. Those who study the beast would not fail to learn its moods and preferences, and would proudly call their new knowledge a (social) science. These scholars of the social beast, then, would have learned to predict and accommodate all of the animal's appetites, but "would not really know which of the creature's tastes and desires was admirable or shameful, good or bad, right or wrong." 1 An important part of critical thinking, as political philosophers understand it, is developing the ability to reason when faced with the powerful forces of community and convention; it is the capacity to question, which needs, habits, and norms of the community are right and which are wrong. Critical thinking, there-I am often aware of a certain discord between the theme of my first-year seminar in critical thinking and its linked co-curriculum in community-based learning. The antagonism between our objectives becomes apparent early on, when Plato's Republic cautions students against their own fellow citizens who, "give a complete training to young and old, men and women, turning them into just the sort of people they want." The more often a young person interacts with his community, Plato fears, the more likely he is to be "swamped by the flood of popular praise and blame, and carried away with the stream till [sic] he finds himself agreeing with the popular idea of what is admirable or disgraceful, behaving like the crowd and becoming one of them." Plato offers the analogy of the great beast, a "large and powerful animal"
Clio’s Psyche: Psycho-History Forum, 2015
Coming back to the Absurd: Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: 80 Years On, 2022
Sisyphus herded cattle. Beyond that, he was a cheat and a liar. Near him, on Corinth, lived Autol... more Sisyphus herded cattle. Beyond that, he was a cheat and a liar. Near him, on Corinth, lived Autolycus, who was a master thief and whom Sisyphus suspected of stealing. Therefore, one day Sisyphus engraved all of his cattle's hooves "with the monogram 'SS' or, some say, with the words 'Stolen by Autolycus'." 1 After proving Autolycus' theft, Sisyphus snuck into Autolycus' house and seduced his daughter, Anticleia (a woman at first literally "without fame") who would
Getting Lost: Psychosocial Withdrawal in the Covidian Era, 2023
This chapter begins with the puzzle of the relationship between plague and civil war, as epitomiz... more This chapter begins with the puzzle of the relationship between plague and civil war, as epitomized in Thucydides' accounts of the Athenian plague and the civil war at Corcyra. I employ the concept of anomia and stasis to show that plagues and civil conflicts are distinct phenomena, then introduce an understanding of nostos or 'returning home' to offer a possible theoretical bridge. Since my intention is not to dwell on Thucydides' History, in the remainder of the chapter I argue that in the face of crisis, plague, or civil strife, a particularly attractive yet dangerous psychic posture presents itself: what John Steiner famously calls the "psychic retreat." Psychic retreats are attempts both to withdraw from intolerable aspects of reality and to make good on anger and destructiveness via the creation of a Mafialike, gang-like psychic organization that protects the self from guilt or feelings of responsibility, among other negative consequences. As the concept remains somewhat misunderstood, I spend some time exploring and extending it, specifically with reference to the creation of psychic gangs and perversions of reality. By and large, and due in part to limitations of space, I trust the reader to make applications and associations of these concepts to present-day events. 2 Writers on Thucydides often associate the plague that visited Athens in its second year of war against the Peloponnesian League with the failure of the Athenian war effort, itself, and, more specifically, with destructive civil strife as exemplified by the extremism, revolt, and war at Corcyra (Korfu) (see e.g., Bellemore and Plant 1994; Euben 1990; Mittelstadt 1996). But pestilences and civil conflicts are distinct phenomena, as are their causes and effects. Thucydides associates the first, the plague, with anomia, a term that is related to but distinct from our (and the French) 'anomie.' Anomia is a neglect of or falling away from Νόμος [Nomos] and νόμοι [nomoi], which are sometimes treated as merely the singular and plural forms, respectively, of the same idea. But the first, capital-N Nomos, is the daemon or spirit of the law, the Father of all possible laws. In Greek mythology, he is the father of Justice [Dike]. Here is the Orphic Hymn to Nomos: The holy king of Gods and men I call, Celestial Law [Nomos], the righteous seal of all: The seal which stamps whate'er the earth contains, And all conceal'd within the liquid plains: Stable, and starry, of harmonious frame, Preserving laws eternally the same. Thy all-composing pow'r in heaven appears, Connects its frame, and props the starry spheres; And shakes weak Envy with tremendous sound, Toss'd by thy arm in giddy whirls around.
Brill’s Companion to Camus: Camus Among the Philosophers, 2019
Eds. P. Francev, G. Heffernan, M. Kaluza, and M. Sharpe. London: Brill, Forthcoming
Wiley-Blackwell, Dec 2013
D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject, 2017
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject (Bowker and Buzby, Eds.), 2017
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015
The word 'absurd' is derived from the Latin absurdus, which means "out of harmony," discordant to... more The word 'absurd' is derived from the Latin absurdus, which means "out of harmony," discordant to the ear (see Esslin 2001, 23), although its likely root is not surd ('deaf'), but svar ('tune' or 'sound') (see Halsey 1882, 151). In ordinary language, we often use the adjective 'absurd' to mean 'nonsensical,' 'silly,' or 'ridiculous,' but these synonyms have so far stood in unclear relation to philosophical absurdity, articulated most famously by Albert Camus as a sort of metaphysical clash or "divorce" between humanity and the world (Camus 1955, 30, 50; see also Bowker 2012 see also Bowker , 2014. The everyday, absurd incongruities that standard English dictionaries recognize as "laughably foolish or false" take on a grave and tragic air in Camus' thought, where we find ourselves incongruous with others, with ideality, with mortality, and with the world's "unreasonable silence" (Camus 1955, 28). 1 Remarkably, Camus scholars have seldom shown curiosity about the relationship between the philosophical and the comical ("laughable") connotations of absurdity.
In P. Francev (Ed.), Albert Camus's The Stranger: Critical Essays and Perspectives (pp. 204-223). Cambridge Scholars, 2014
Series Editor (Co-edited by David McIvor)
Forthcoming, The Journal of Psycho-Social Studies
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
Journal of Psychosocial Studies
The Journal of Genetic Psychology
D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory, 2017
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
The Buffalo News, May 1, 2015
Psychological Perspectives on Social Isolation, Social Withdrawal, and Being Alone, 2013
The Journal of Early Adolescence
This study examined the longitudinal and bidirectional relations between same- and other-sex popu... more This study examined the longitudinal and bidirectional relations between same- and other-sex popularity and preference across one school year. Participants were 271 sixth-grade students who completed peer nomination measures at three time points in their schools. Tests of cross-lagged autoregressive models indicated that same-sex popularity predicted later other-sex popularity and vice versa. Other-sex preference predicted later same-sex preference but not vice versa. Findings highlight the importance of more carefully considering the distinctions and associations between same- and other-sex popularity and preference during early adolescence, while setting the stage for future group-level peer relations research.