James L Kelley

Dandyism began in Restoration England when sons of the well-to-do shocked their squire fathers by dressing in the style of the French court that many of them witnessed at first hand during their Grand Tours of Europe (Van Dooren, 2006: 25-31). By the time the trend jumped the Channel and arrived in Paris, it had taken on a more theoretical cast with the writings of Barbey d'Aurevilly and Charles Baudelaire. These writers updated the socially progressive Romanticism of the Second Empire by combining intensity of stylistic expression with detachment from the mass readership whom they were forced to address. Many of the same critiques of French Bourgeois society were extended by Baudelaire and his ilk, but whereas the July Monarchy Romantics absolutized the work of art, these dandies absolutized their own mode-molded personae as impotent yet unvanquished denunciations of middling vulgarity (Amann, 2015: 6-7; de Vugt, 2018: 5). The dandy did not seek direct social change; rather, he sought to stand out from mass society by combining Stoic detachment with demonic passion. An uncanny aura emanated from his overwrought style of dress and versification; he was a walking, talking Renaissance hieroglyph who could only be deciphered by disaffected journalists, disowned aristocratic scions, and in-the-know café habitués. Dandyism's combination of marketing savvy with a cynicism toward the average “bourgeois” consumer is replicated in Karl Lagerfeld, who once wrapped a sheaf of wheat in expensive bead necklaces for a model to hold while walking the runway at a “Back to Nature” themed Chanel show. He quipped to the model: “It means money-that's all they care about anyway” (Orth, 1992).

We live in an age in which “esotericism” has become almost synonymous with “spiritual.” Everything from sex to politics has its occult side; in fact, this imagined esoteric counter-face—hidden yet ubiquitous—is often assumed to actually be the true meaning or reality that the material husk—the exoteric, well-known aspect—serves only to obscure. Modern culture is “occulture.” That is, today's everyman recognizes as legitimate cultural expression only that which is grounded in “rejected knowledge.” But rejected by whom and for what? These questions are rarely even acknowledged, much less tackled. All that matters is that their esoteric wisdom is in some sense anti-traditional and pro-gnostic.
Most distressing of all, for an Eastern Orthodox Christian, is the continued—even growing—confusion among theologians and laymen concerning the relationship between esotericism and the teachings of  Orthodoxy. The studies in this volume shed light on the historical development of esoteric thought from an Orthodox perspective.

This three-part analysis of modernity assesses the impact that Western thought and philosophy has had on today's world. Making use of neglected research from the fringes of academia, "Anatomyzing Divinity" traces the circuitous path of occult wisdom from China, India, Egypt and the Hellenistic world to Byzantium and beyond. At the heart of the book is an investigation of the life and thought of G. W. Leibniz, the man who invented calculus and laid the groundwork for binary code, which in turn made computers possible. Leibniz's roots, Kelley shows, lay in the Frankish metaphysical tradition, and thus have little in common with some of his contemporaries' materialism. Along the way, sidelights are turned on 1) the occult basis of Western political systems, as well as 2) the alchemical basis of much Western philosophy and theology.

This study of Greek-American theologian John S. Romanides explores the first half-decade of his career, a span which includes his seminal book Ancestral Sin. Each chapter of this book is adapted from a lecture written by theologian James L. Kelley, one of the world's foremost authorities on Fr. John's work.

Recent research suggests that older people who lack adequate social support can experience inordinate shame. The present writing examined the life and work of legendary musician, poet, and painter Don Van Vliet (1941-2010), better known as Captain Beefheart. In the late 1970's, after having already released a series of critically-acclaimed but low-selling albums, Van Vliet was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Recent shame research was paired with psychoanalytic insights to shed light on Van Vliet's successful transition to life as a respected painter. A qualitative research schema, featuring a hermeneutical-interpretative paradigm and a psychobiographical approach, was employed. The chapter concluded that the subject's infusing into his art his lifelong feeling of shame over American society's unconcern with environmentalism, animal rights, and women's rights allowed him to overcome a history of personal and professional adversity.

This, the first of two interviews conducted with Audrey deChanenedes, was conducted via email 9 February, 2023. The second interview, which was also an email exchange, was completed 23 February, 2023, and is also reproduced herein. Becker’s dissatisfactions with Steely Dan’s touring situation are discussed, as are his troubled relationships with his parents and sister.

Academic instructor, editor, reviewer, and writer with over a decade's experience in the publishing worlds of psychiatry, history, theology, and vocational studies. Dedicated to bringing together minds from diverse fields, backgrounds, and nationalities to produce innovative research supported by top tier academic publishers.

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is one of the most significant political thinkers of the twentieth century. The following is a translation of the famed jurist’s tribute to sociologist and philosopher Hans Freyer (1887-1969). In the short piece, which appeared in the newspaper Christ und Welt in 1957, Schmitt touches on his notion of the katechon. Of further interest to Schmitt scholars is his formulation therein of what might be termed his “inimicos habeo, ergo sum”: “I have enemies, therefore I am.”

Academic instructor, editor, reviewer, and writer with over a decade's experience in the publishing worlds of psychiatry, history, theology, and vocational studies. Dedicated to bringing together minds from diverse fields, backgrounds, and nationalities to produce innovative research supported by top tier academic publishers.

The chapter uses the methods of psychobiography and object relations theory to conduct a single-case study of the life and loves of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003). Leni’s childhood home was dominated by her father, who had to be cajoled, and sometimes outright deceived, into supporting his daughter’s desire to enter a career in the performing arts. Unfortunately, Leni’s success was often her worst enemy: Just as she evaded her father Albert’s censorious glance, so did she avoid the barbs of German film critics by gaining Adolph Hitler as her patron until the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. At this time, Leni lost not only her marriage and her film career, but even her sanity, if only for a short time. The chapter shows, through a Fairbairnian analysis, how Leni adapted to the disaster that was her early career by reinventing herself as a photographer of African tribes. Also, in her romantic life, she changed tacks. Compared with her late-in-life companion Horst Kettner, Leni’s early romances were relatively shallow because her counterpart was either too involved in promoting her career (Harry Sokal) or too far removed from her working life (Peter Jacob).

Dr. Hyland's paper on Neo-Idealist theories of consciousness is reviewed. The paper is praised for its style and message, though reservations are expressed about its assumption that Spinozistic monism can yield a therapy appropriate for religious traditionalists.

Both Leonardo Da Vinci and musician Scott Walker grew up without a strong paternal presence, and both seem to have had neuroses connected to their creative drives later in life. A psychobiographical consideration of both subjects concludes that one contributing cause to their artistic difficulties lies in their compromised preoedipal development, which led Leonardo into procrastination and Walker into dissolution.

In the final pages of Menninger, Dr. Friedman paints a picture of an aging Karl, a man who remained an enigma until the very end. By turns irascible and serene, the great man would show signs of having come to terms with his dwindling influence upon the Clinic’s affairs, only to launch suddenly into an angry tirade against his grandson Roy’s leadership (Friedman, Menninger, pp. 349-350). Because Dr. Friedman has an enviable ability to control the unfolding of his often complex narrative, we as readers are able to gather insights into the inner dispositions of each of the major players in the historical drama—Flo, Charles, Karl, and Will—and to marvel as the author enriches the picture by sprinkling evaluative comments into descriptions of the interactions between his historical dramatis personae. Is Menninger a psychobiography? In the broadest sense, certainly. However, I am tempted to proclaim this, the first panel in Dr. Friedman’s triptych of psychological biographies, a bridge between psychobiography (with its bold juxtaposition of theory to life history) and classical biography (with its austere attention to source material and its lighter evaluative touch).

Daniel Benveniste’s Libido, Culture and Consciousness is an attempt to flesh out Freud’s underdeveloped notion that psychosexual stages originated with our ancestors’ traumatic prehistoric experiences. Though Freud wrote about his “phylogenetic fantasy” (this term deriving from the title editors gave to an English translation of one of Freud’s unpublished papers) throughout his later life, it is in 1914’s Totem and Taboo that we find the fullest expression of his idea that humans inherit memory traces of their forebears’ traumatic experiences. The 1914 work spoke of a “primal horde” that was lorded over by an alpha male, a “primal father” who kept all the women to himself and subjugated or drove away the weaker males in the group. These disinherited sons banded together, killed and ate their father, and agreed to cooperate to forge a society that was gentler and more equitable. However, the repressed guilt over the patricide influenced the creation of totemism and exogamy, practices that defined the fraternal society that succeeded the primal horde. As Benveniste summarizes Freud in Totem, “The two principal taboos of totemism are the taboo against harming the totem and the taboo against sexual relations within the clan” (p. 18). Freud has, in effect, linked a stage in human history with a psychosexual stage (phallic), a cultural practice (exogamy) and a myth/religious ritual (totemism/totemic feast). Libido, Culture, and Consciousness wishes to extend this kind of analogue-catena into each of Freud’s psychosexual stages, and also into suitably adapted versions of each of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages.

The present psychobiography took up the three main psychoanalytic conceptions of love to illuminate the psychological development of famed experimental writer William Seward Burroughs (1914–1997). The study found evidence of all three concepts of love in the subject’s life strategies: (1) Love as cathexis was present in Burroughs’ fascination with centipedes and other vermin that appeared in his dreams and which symbolised, in part, his terror over early childhood traumas as well as his concomitant struggle to integrate sex with intimacy. (2) Love as eroto-philiac fusion was observed in Burroughs’ unstable and even exploitative relationships with others. This tendency was most salient in Burroughs’ abortive attempts to seduce straight men, as well as in his failed efforts to be a traditional husband and father. (3) Reparative love became the subject’s primary mode of interaction late in life. The study showed that, in his declining years, Burroughs was able to overcome partially the maladaptive strategies of his early life through his numerous pet cats, upon whom he projected aspects of his past romantic partners and friends.

Past leadership research has accorded African women leaders far too little attention. This chapter seeks to redress the imbalance through a psychobiography of a prominent woman leader from Ethiopia, Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu. Aside from its examination of the African-Ethiopian perspective on leadership, this single case study will be guided by Jung’s heroine archetype, as well as by the design leadership approach. The chapter provides insights into intra- as well as inter-psychological qualities in business leadership in a selected woman leader. It contributes to the existing body of psychobiographical research on women leaders by addressing the void in life span research through its dual theoretical grounding, which spans the psychological (Jung’s archetypes) and the social (leadership theory). The research methodology is qualitative, using a hermeneutical-interpretative paradigm and a psychobiographical approach. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations for future research and practice for women in leadership in Africa are offered.

Though Charles Baudelaire often has been named as the quintessential modern poet, few scholars have been able to shed light on the poet’s religious beliefs as they relate to his art and life. A psychobiographical examination of the subject with a Kleinian emphasis found that Baudelaire forged a personal space for meaning making via his notion of “sacred prostitution”, according to which the human being in his finitude relates to the divine through aesthetic productivity and pious praxis, the goal being expiation of sins, or, in Klein’s language, reparation. The chapter traces how Baudelaire’s familial and professional struggles were partially solved through his attempts to forge a dynamic equilibrium between such classic religio-philosophical binaries as conventional-unconventional and intimacy-aloofness.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), who suffered a variety of illnesses
throughout his life, offers admirers of his paintings an example of an artist
who incorporated a pandemic into his art. By analyzing his paintings
related to the 1918 Pandemic, we can see the artist’s ability to turn his
past into a more positive view of life.

Innovative musician, producer and songwriter Walter Becker (1950-2017) wielded humor to distance himself from a traumatic childhood and to bind himself to a peer group that shared his skewed, wry worldview. Following years of struggle at the fringes of the music business, Becker achieved worldwide success as co-founder of the platinum-selling band Steely Dan. By the end of the 1970s, however, Steely Dan was defunct, and Becker retreated to the Polynesian-American subculture of Maui, Hawaii, where he continued to write and record songs that tackled the orientalist theme of "East meets West" in his inimitable droll style. This chapter takes up Eysenck's psychology of humor as well as various social theorists' assessments of Romantic irony as spectacles through which to view Walter Becker's lifelong struggle to bend his potentially ego-diminishing sardonicism into positive relations with self and others.

In Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813–1855) philosophical psychology, love is not a feeling or a shared mental state per sé; instead, love is a self-relation that is grounded in a unified and transcendent principle beyond self and society. This chapter seeks, through a Kleinian psychobiography of Kierkegaard, to sketch an outline of a psychology of love beyond the paradigm of persons-in-relation, which is dominant in social science research today. We will draw upon Søren Kierkegaard’s troubled relationship with his father Michael Kierkegaard to illustrate just how the transcendent function of the superego in Freud, which was taken over somewhat by the overarching concept of phantasy in Kleinian thought, can be seen as a gesture toward radical transcendence. In our concluding remarks, we will touch upon Donald W. Winnicott’s “non-communicating self” as a perhaps unconscious elaboration of Freud’s transcendent primal father.

The German word Raum is unzerstörbar [incorruptible]. Before anyone spoke it, it was. It retained its force even when it was deposed in favor of Zeit and "duration" in the Lebensphilosophie of Bergson that was so highly fashionable some fifty years ago, and became the epitome of all things lifeless and mechanical. Its overuse will not cause it to perish. The word will retain its essence [Kern]. Though it be proclaimed loudly in every one of life's marketplaces, and though it be pursued through the entire globe's archives, it will nonetheless find asylum. Dum clamant tacet. Popular or unpopular, fashionable or unfashionable, honored or reviled, it remains an Ur-word and thus integral in its innermost essence. Moreover, our meditation on its phonetic characteristics can only amplify its power, even while preserving its arcanum.

The now-dominant medical model of psychiatry has recently been challenged by the postpsychiatry movement. However, the former discounts the agential or subjective aspect of the human being; the latter misses the axiological aspect. A new model is proposed - the Transcendent Meaning Model (TMM) - that nests the individual person within the social (the interperson), and the social within the transcendent or ideological. The study concludes that TMM, with its integration of the personal, the social and the religious-ideological with the material, is a viable blueprint for a future psychiatry that can address some of the current model’s vulnerabilities.

The study examines Hans Eysenck's (1916-1997) “multicomponent view of humor” (Gibson, 2019: 61). First, Eysenck's earliest theory of personality, which follows a long tradition in the history of psychology of importing metaphysical and cultural schemas into research programs, is outlined. These traditional schema importations, the study demonstrates, use empirical observation and mathematical analysis to derive a small set of categories that turns out not to differ substantively from the three mental faculties recognized at least since the time of Plato, and which-it could be argued-have not been altered meaningfully since. Second, the study addresses the possibility that Eysenck, like Plato, Kant, Wundt, and others, either consciously or unconsciously fell back on what might be termed the Western Trifunctional schema of psychosocial order. The study concludes that Eysenck, from the beginning of his Galtonian training under Cyril Burt, saw himself as continuing an age-old tradition of dividing humanity into a triplicity based upon a subjective-objective axis of mental orientation (this binary leading directly to cognitive, conative, and vocational types that match the poles and midpoint of the axis). This triple division of society is shown to be based upon a trio of characteristic or ideal virtues or strengths that correspond to each of the three societal orders (Eysenck, 1947: 106).

Throughout Donald Fagen’s life, he used the concept of bohemianism to position himself vis-à-vis his family, peers, and the mainstream culture as a whole. A psychobiographical examination of the subject with an object relations emphasis found that Fagen used his role as a successful musician to confer on himself a sense of legitimacy and to distance himself from the strictures of conventional, “bourgeois” existence. However, by the end of the first phase of his band Steely Dan’s recording career, Fagen found himself in a musical, romantic, and social dead end, his bohemianism’s promise of self-contained aesthetic completion being revealed as a mistaking of the ideal for the real. This chapter shows that Fagen recovered meaning in life, and thus a multilayered positivity, through psychotherapy, which led to the singer’s reentry into the worlds of music, family, and friendship by tempering the perfectionism and isolationism concealed within his bohemian self-image. Ironically, Fagen’s reality principle gained in strength as he loosened his grip on his mistaken self-identification as a bohemian; Fagen’s self-reformulation late in life allowed him to turn a category error about the artist’s role in modernity into a positive adaptation to a society that requires an adult to play multiple, often contradictory, roles.

The now-dominant medical model of psychiatry has recently been challenged by the post-psychiatry movement. However, the former discounts the agential or subjective aspect of the human being; the latter misses the axiological aspect. A new model is proposed-the Transcendent Meaning Model (TMM)-that nests the individual person within the social (the interperson), and the social within the transcendent or ideological. The study concludes that TMM, with its integration of the personal, the social and the religious-ideological with the material, is a viable blueprint for a future psychiatry that can address some of the current model's vulnerabilities.

Following Ernst Haeckel and many other fin-de-siecle scientists, Freud conceived mankind's oldest ancestor to be an urmetazoan, or "first animal," a microorganism whose primary organ was its stomach. This primeval organ began as a simple concavity formed by a tensing of cell fibers near the surface of the urganism (this latter term, the present author's coinage, is introduced in place of the less inclusive and more unwieldy urmetazoan; the term also has the advantage of underscoring the first animal's primary activity or urge, which is to eat or otherwise penetrate the membranes of other protists). As the urganism evolved, its primal gastraea developed first into a mouth, next into an anus, and finally, into an armlike or penile appendage that served as a channel or conduit through which food, waste and genetic material passed. Both Freud's ego-libido theory as well as his life instinct-death instinct binary can be interpreted in terms of the Bölschean dividing-melding dichotomy outlined in the essay's opening paragraphs. Divisive love, for Freud, is associated with the maintenance of the organismic boundary or skin by deflecting environmental stimuli and satisfying internal drives that goad the organism into fleeting sexual or consumptive activity; unitive or boundary-dissolving love, on the other hand, Freud saw as an expression of the death instinct, and as such was a denial of the need for a conduit or bridge between self and other.

In 1978, Jim Jones and over 900 of his followers perished in what has been called "The Jonestown Massacre." This study uses methods of psychobiography and object relations theory to account for Jones' lifelong ambivalence toward those to whom he acted as caregiver. The author proposes a psychological schema he names "nurture failure" to account for Jim Jones' style of leadership, which mixed solicitude with violence in the context of a religious organization that promised to right all of society's wrongs. The means by which this utopia was to be brought about became more and more extreme until the infamous murder/suicide shattered the dream for good. The study's findings expand our understanding of the motivational dynamics that undergird religious leaders' often Januslike relations to their followers.

Vico's genealogy of human knowledge has a great relevance to contemporary debates in the areas of politics, theology and sexuality. Apart from the seemingly ineluctable binary of liberal individualism versus conservative communalism, Vico models a politics based upon his understanding of the rhetoric of topics, in which meso-level identities and a plurality of motivations become so enmeshed that dichotomy-straddling trajectories leap out to the attuned observer. On the theological front, Vico reminds us just how fluid and tractable Roman Catholic theology was in the early modern period, when Descartes' and Spinoza's terms could still be taken over and reanimated without fear of a Thomist orthodox backlash. But, perhaps the most striking area in which Vico contributes is sexuality. In an era in which Enlightenment hubris has led to anathemas being hurled at traditional Christian teachings on sexuality, it is jarring to encounter Vico's typological reading of salvation history as a deliverance from phallic self-worship that, if unchecked, could precipitate a reversion to the carnal apeiron of the Age of Gods.

In these pages we suggest that Jim Jones' brand of paranormal socialism was not as off-the-wall as it may at first seem once it is placed in the context of socialism's pre-Marx manifestations. In fact, it could be said that Jim Jones was truer to Marx's early, more "Romantic" theory of alienation than was Engel's The Holy Family or Lenin's Materialism and Empirico-Criticism. However, this article undertakes a narrower task: to compare the Romantic socialism of Pierre Leroux, Charles Fourier, and Pierre-Simon Ballanche to that of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple ideology. The conclusion is reached that early French socialism presaged Jim Jones' teachings on sexuality, reincarnation, and social reorganization.

This monograph examines the ur-myth of the Cosmic Man in ancient Indic, Greek, and Chinese texts. In the Vedic sources, Purusa is the primal man, bound on the wheel of space and time as the passive creation of a force beyond himself. But also, somehow, Purusa is a self-creator. In the process of stretching out his own bodily frame, Purusa creates a world that constitutes, if our hypothesis is correct, an extension of the duality of mind and body that ancient holy men discovered within their own chant-regulated breaths (as we see reflected in the texts they have bequeathed to us). We propose this proto-existential psychology, found not only in the Vedas and later Śrutis, but also in Greek, Chinese, and European mythic material, as the source of the Cosmic Man mythos, with its concomitant theme of microcosm-macrocosm and its articulation of the Promethean sufferer who triumphs precisely through his extension in the face of limit-situations. Purusa's route is circuitous, and the circuit's contour is imaged within the impassioned sage. Thus commences man's mythmaking; but whence the key to this newly-intuited labyrinth? Is there an answer to the travails and groans of an Atlas, whose load is his psyche, indeed, his world?

Aesop's fable “Momus the Fault-Finder” is shown to reflect Dumézil's theory of Indo-European Trifunctionality in its depiction of Zeus', Poseidon's and Athena's triad of “beautiful” creations. Momus' criticisms of the three gifts are indirect expressions of the manner in which the three functions interact to constitute an ordered whole.

Family, school, church, community—each and all failed to nurture the innocent boy Jim Jones. Through various formative experiences, Jones realized that, though he could not depend upon anyone to fulfill his needs, another path lay open to him: through the power of his own thought, he could ignore his own deprivation while meeting the needs of others. This article explores how Jim Jones translated his own quasi-religious experiences early in life into socio-religious doctrines that he later used in founding Peoples Temple.

Man’s colossal quest for self-deification has today reached an impasse. By alienating the human person and transforming him into a mere number and a nameless cog in a complex, impersonal and uncontrollable machine, the drive for self-deification leads the world toward alienation and annihilation. The idol to which man has sacrificed his personhood purposes to devour the entire human race. Faced with this terrible possibility, the Church vigorously reiterates, in an unwavering manner, its eternal teaching of the deification of man in Christ. Deification is not accomplished by annihilating the person; deification is brought about by man's total realization as the image of God, by which is revealed infinite and unlimited truth, without beginning and without end, of the life and of the being of God.

Historians Leo Kelley and James L. Kelley continue their discussion of the ins-and-outs of the younger Kelley's theories of "amniotic light" and "Indo-European homogenesis." The elder Kelley tries to pin down his younger, though no less cagey and elusive, counterpart. Easier said than done when the topic is the 9/11 mythos and its connections with Big Apple ecumenism.

Jim Jones's ideas of sexual initiation are linked in this article to his idiosyncratic “socialism” and to the ancient Gnostics' teachings on sexuality. It is concluded that Jim Jones's idea that sexual abuse brings submerged aspects of the human personality to the surface and thereby brings about the salvation of the abused is presaged in the doctrines of the Gnostic Carpocratians and Cainites.

This essay opens with a sketch of the Christological and Trinitarian aspects of Father John Romanides's presentation of Orthodox spirituality, all in an effort to grasp more fully the relevance the Greek-American theologian's formulation of Orthodox creationism. First we will consider the problem of understanding creation as it existed before the Fall from our fallen present; it is this problem that union with Christ in His Church solves. What is the fall of man, and what is within man that makes possible his redemption from corruption? We will close out our study by outlining the Orthodox view of the relation of the created to the uncreated.

This third installment in Romanity Press's “Breaks and Links” series is an answer to Greek theologian Pantelis Kalaitzidis's critique of Father John Romanides and Christos Yannaras in his 2013 article “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology.” The present essay argues that while Kalaitzidis's critique of Yannaras's quasi-phyletist “logos” concept is apt (as far as it goes), his attempt to discredit Father John Romanides's work as phyletistic and even racist is not grounded in any of the Greek-American theologian's published works. The essay counters Kalaitzidis's claims by offering an account of Father John's teachings about race and the “threefold path of purification, illumination and glorification” of man which is the healing of his noetic energy.

This bibliography was compiled by James L. Kelley in 2008 with the title "A Chrono-Bibliography of Christos Yannaras" and was uploaded to scribd.com at that time (It was also emailed to various Patristics scholars in 2008, one of whom helped me with correcting some of the Greek typesetting). Much to my delight, the editors at Alhambra Press saw fit to include it in this important collection of Prof. Yannaras' works.

This study opens with a consideration of the dialectical theologies of Paul Tillich and Karl Barth. These two theologians have been incalculably influential in modern theology; they set many trends for today’s Christian thinker. Both men, we have hoped to show, not only shared a concern with dialectic; Tillich and Barth developed two variations of the type of dialectic of opposition that Joseph Farrell’s early theological work critiqued so thoroughly.
The essay’s latter part examines the emergence of dialectic in the philosophies of Anaximander and Parmenides. It is hoped that the continuity between these initial formulations in Ancient Greece and the thoughts of both the Christian Gnostics and their modern counterparts are made apparent by this piece.

This article explores the impact of L. Ron Hubbard's family relations on his religious philosophy, particular attention being given to the Xenu doctrine and its "R6" christology. The possibility that Hubbard was abused as a child is examined, as is the Scientology founder's probable mental disorders. ERRATUM: "Gerry Anderson" in footnote 1 should be "Gerry Armstrong."

This essay's briefer first part examines the influence of theosophy on Philip Sherrard's presentation of man's experience of the sacred, while the lengthier last section analyzes Sherrard's astute critique of the much-maligned “Western civilization.” Though his early embrace of German Romantic aesthetics led Sherrard to the gravest of errors in his teachings about God, man and creation, his insightful account of Western theological and cultural decline shows him to be, if not an important Orthodox writer, at least a noteworthy anti-Western polemicist.

This short piece hopes to shed some much-needed light on the teachings of Jim Jones by applying the psychobiographical theory of nurture failure to the troubled religious leader's early years. The essay concludes  that hiding behind Jones' psychopathy was a childhood of abuse and neglect punctuated by occasional pulses of idealistic rhetoric from his mother. This combination became lethal once the child Jones began to think of himself as a messiah whose task was to save humanity from limitations that could be attributed either to a deficiency in the environment or to a deficiency in the wills of his followers.

This paper explores the Gnoseo-hermetic roots of the NOI's doctrine of God/man/nature's self-creation as a bindu of luminous semen out of an original Ungrund of apeironic Blackness. Parallels to ancient Gnostic and modern occult practices are noted.

Singer-songwriter Elvis Costello (1954-) rose above professional controversy and personal foibles to become one of the world's most beloved performers. Following a trio of critically-acclaimed albums in the late seventies that rocketed him to stardom in his native U.K., Elvis failed to break the American market in the wake of controversial statements he made during a drunken incident that led much of the U.S. rock press to pan him. The later phases of Costello's career saw him embrace his situation by giving up on superstardom, instead releasing a series of stylistically diverse albums that reflected his less commercial, and more personally meaningful, influences. This chapter utilized both the emotion research of Matthew Ratcliffe as well as object relations theory to trace Costello's long journey to professional and personal fulfillment; it concluded that the subject's taking control of his musical fate was mirrored in his gradual emotional recalibration. That is, Elvis found the answer to his personal and professional missteps by reorienting his affective life. The Angry Young Man of his early recordings gave way to the more sensitive torch singer of his mature years, and the chapter linked this path both to Ratcliffe's notion of an affect world as well as to the theme of emotional reordering featured in object relations theory.

Recent research suggests that older people who lack adequate social support can experience inordinate shame. The present writing examined the life and work of legendary musician, poet, and painter Don Van Vliet (1941-2010), better known as Captain Beefheart. In the late 1970's, after having already released a series of critically-acclaimed but low-selling albums, Van Vliet was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Recent shame research was paired with psychoanalytic insights to shed light on Van Vliet's successful transition to life as a respected painter. A qualitative research schema, featuring a hermeneutical-interpretative paradigm and a psychobiographical approach, was employed. The chapter concluded that the subject's infusing into his art his lifelong feeling of shame over American society's unconcern with environmentalism, animal rights, and women's rights allowed him to overcome a history of personal and professional adversity.

The present psychobiography took up the three main psychoanalytic conceptions of love to illuminate the psychological development of famed experimental writer William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997). The study found evidence of all three concepts of love in the subject’s life strategies: (1) Love as cathexis was present in Burroughs’ fascination with centipedes and other vermin that appeared in his dreams and which symbolized, in part, his terror over early childhood traumas as well as his concomitant struggle to integrate sex with intimacy. (2) Love as eroto-philiac fusion was observed in Burroughs’ unstable and even exploitative relationships with others. This tendency was most salient in Burroughs’ abortive attempts to seduce straight men, as well as in his failed efforts to be a traditional husband and father. (3) Reparative love became the subject’s primary mode of interaction late in life. The study showed that, in his declining years, Burroughs was able to overcome partially the maladaptive strategies of his early life through his numerous pet cats, upon whom he projected aspects of his past romantic partners and friends. Though Burroughs may not have found an optimal fusion of eros and friendship in his life, the study concludes that he nevertheless was able to find solace and generate insight through his life as an artist and writer. The latter afforded Burroughs an inner circle of devoted friends as well as a worldwide audience. Indeed, Burroughs came to view love as both a diachronic process of “contact” via mourning and remembrance as well as a synchronic, Dionysiac dissolution of boundaries, or what Burroughs termed a “schlup.”

Both Leonardo Da Vinci and musician Scott Walker grew up without a strong paternal presence, and both seem to have had neuroses connected to their creative drives later in life. A psychobiographical consideration of both subjects concludes that one contributing cause to both men’s artistic difficulties lay in their compromised preoedipal development, which led Leonardo into procrastination and Walker into dissolution.

In the final pages of Menninger, Dr. Friedman paints a picture of an aging Karl, a man who remained an enigma until the very end. By turns irascible and serene, the great man would show signs of having come to terms with his dwindling influence upon the Clinic’s affairs, only to launch suddenly into an angry tirade against his grandson Roy’s leadership (Friedman, Menninger, pp. 349-350). Because Dr. Friedman has an enviable ability to control the unfolding of his often complex narrative, we as readers are able to gather insights into the inner dispositions of each of the major players in the historical drama—Flo, Charles, Karl, and Will—and to marvel as the author enriches the picture by sprinkling evaluative comments into descriptions of the interactions between his historical dramatis personae. Is Menninger a psychobiography? In the broadest sense, certainly. However, I am tempted to proclaim this, the first panel in Dr. Friedman’s triptych of psychological biographies, a bridge between psychobiography (with its bold juxtaposition of theory to life history) and classical biography (with its austere attention to source material and its lighter evaluative touch).

This translation of Carl Schmitt's "Der Spiegel" will bring home to the Anglophone world the full range of the famous jurist's ouevre. Schmitt is known mostly for his efforts in political theory, but the picture is limited without a window into his youthful musings. This piece is just such a portal. In fact, it is a "mirror" into Schmitt's philosophical likes and dislikes. Often, when a writer tries on an unaccustomed hat, his deeper convictions and more searching moves come into view. Thus it is with "Der Spiegel." The critical notes I have provided will help the reader find a context for the piece.

A thinker such as Hans Freyer, so salient in a line inaugurated by Hegel, has to endure the most intense hostility [intersivster Feindschaft]. This is because another line, one that also begins with Hegel, ends with Lenin and Stalin, and this line claims a monopoly on Hegel interpretation, which for them has become a source of their intellectual prestige, indeed, of their historical legitimization. Here the struggle to lay claim to Hegel spills out beyond the schoolroom and enters the realm of historical forces. Arthur Rimbaud’s words apply here: The struggle of Spirits [Geister] is as brutal as the bloodiest battle. Nietzsche, in a fit of rage, declaimed: Hegel is the great delayer on Germany’s path to atheism. Every hastener of this path, however, will be of one mind regarding a man like Hans Freyer, who writes in his works about the katechon of 2nd Thessalonians, which is the force that temporarily restrains the diabolical power, along with the most egregious accelerators along the route to the abyss [Abgrund].

The Spanish Flu was only one short episode in a long line of illnesses for Edvard Munch (1863-1944), but it gives us an example of an artist who incorporated a pandemic into his art, and, once we relate his paintings about the 1918 Pandemic to his central works, we see just how this greatest of Norwegian artists used his creative work to frame his own past into a more positive, or at least consoling, view of life.

The chapter uses the methods of psychobiography and object relations theory to conduct a single-case study of the life and loves of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003). Leni's childhood home was dominated by her father, who had to be cajoled, and sometimes outright deceived, into supporting his daughter's desire to enter a career in the performing arts. Unfortunately, Leni's success was often her worst enemy: Just as she evaded her father Albert's censorious glance, so did she avoid the barbs of German film critics by gaining Adolf Hitler as her patron until the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. At this time, Leni lost not only her marriage and her film career, but even her sanity, if only for a short time. The chapter shows, through a Fairbairnian analysis, how Leni adapted to the disaster that was her early career by reinventing herself as a photographer of African tribes. Also, in her romantic life, she changed tacks. Compared with her late-in-life companion Horst Kettner, Leni's early romances were relatively shallow either because her counterpart was too involved in promoting her career (Harry Sokal) or too far removed from her working life (Peter Jacob).

Though Charles Baudelaire often has been named as the quintessential modern poet, few scholars have been able to shed light on the poet’s religious beliefs as they relate to his art and life. A psychobiographical examination of the subject with a Kleinian emphasis found that Baudelaire forged a personal space for meaning making via his notion of “sacred prostitution”, according to which the human being in his finitude relates to the divine through aesthetic productivity and pious praxis, the goal being expiation of sins, or, in Klein’s language, reparation. The chapter traces how Baudelaire’s familial and professional struggles were partially solved through his attempts to forge a dynamic equilibrium between such classic religio-philosophical binaries as conventional-unconventional and intimacy-aloofness.

Innovative musician, producer and songwriter Walter Becker (1950-2017) wielded humor to distance himself from a traumatic childhood and to bind himself to a peer group that shared his skewed, wry worldview. Following years of struggle at the fringes of the music business, Becker achieved worldwide success as co-founder of the platinum-selling band Steely Dan. By the end of the 1970s, however, Steely Dan was defunct, and Becker retreated to the Polynesian-American subculture of Maui, Hawaii, where he continued to write and record songs that tackled the orientalist theme of "East meets West" in his inimitable droll style. This chapter takes up Eysenck's psychology of humor as well as various social theorists' assessments of Romantic irony as spectacles through which to view Walter Becker's lifelong struggle to bend his potentially ego-diminishing sardonicism into positive relations with self and others. Positive Psychology 2.0 (PP2) will be called upon to frame the chapter's discussion section, in which it is concluded that Becker was able to mitigate the self-other corrosion that emanated from his hipster-satirist persona by integrating into his art the more earnest, sincere sentiments that sprang from life on his Maui estate, where sustained interaction with family, friends, and artistic collaborators reflected his embrace of a slow-paced, pastoral culture that the Manhattan-born bohemian had earlier dismissed as shallow and vacuous.

As both Schwab (2016a) and Giang (2013) have noted, each industrial revolution has eliminated or drastically altered a host of common occupations. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is qualitatively different, however, in that it not only obviates entire job sectors but also requires workers to embrace and internalize an entirely new vocational culture (Kessler, 2017). Shifts in work culture certainly occurred in the past, such as the Enclosure Movement in England (Neeson, 1993; Marx, 1967: 717-733) and Fordism in the United States (Hounshell, 1984; Polanyi, 1944), but these movements did not splice directly into each and every person's life as does the 4IR, which is intertwined with the technological innovations that saturate the global population's personal choices as well as its work paths (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Ford, 2015; Pew Research Center, 2018). This study, while averring that the 4IR world will reward those holding terminal degrees from the highest-tier universities, nonetheless warns that holding a doctorate will not guarantee success in the future workforce (Johannessen, 2019: 22). Instead of clinging to a profession that has customarily provided high income and security, such as engineer or lawyer, the 4IR worker, or entreployee, should raid the entrepreneurial toolkit, grafting the strategies and mindsets found therein onto their own self-managed “company of one” (Jarvis, 2019). Ripe for such an appropriation would be the “effectuation process”, which in the entrepreneurial lexicon refers to the fulfillment of work tasks using the materials, contacts, and information at hand, rather than first picturing a goal and only afterward devising means to achieve that end (Hisrich, Peters, & Shepherd, 2017: 9).

Benveniste’s book is an attempt to flesh out Freud’s underdeveloped notion that psychosexual stages originated with our ancestors’ traumatic prehistoric experiences.  Though Freud wrote about his “phylogenetic fantasy” (this term deriving from the title editors gave to an English translation of one of Freud’s unpublished papers) throughout his later life, it is in 1914’s Totem and Taboo that we find the fullest expression of his idea that humans inherit memory traces of their forebears’ traumatic experiences.  The 1914 work spoke of a “primal horde” that was lorded over by an alpha male, a “primal father” who kept all the women to himself and subjugated or drove away all of the weaker males in the group.  These disinherited sons banded together, killed and ate their father, and agreed to cooperate to forge a society that was gentler and more equitable. However, the repressed guilt over the patricide influenced the creation of totemism and exogamy, practices that defined the fraternal society that succeeded the primal horde.  As Benveniste summarizes Freud in Totem, “The two principal taboos of totemism are the taboo against harming the totem and the taboo against sexual relations within the clan” (p. 18).  Freud has, in effect, linked a stage in human history with a psychosexual stage (phallic), a cultural practice (exogamy) and a myth/religious ritual (totemism/totemic feast).  Libido, Culture, and Consciousness wishes to extend this kind of analogue-catena into each of Freud’s psychosexual stages, and also into suitably adapted versions of each of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages.