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I am moved by the generous introduction we have just heard, but know that I must resist the temptation to believe it. My way of doing that is to turn to an avocation of mine, the creation of ostensibly humorous bird cartoons. So I would like to respond with what I consider my existential classic: A small, enthusiastic bird looks up and says, excitedly, “All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling, I am me!” And an older, bigger, more jaundiced bird looks down at him and says, “You were wrong.”
I'm delighted to be speaking to you, to this group, at this time, in this place. What I would like to do this morning is to take you along a few paths of my work, including newer reflections that connect with our agitated and dangerous world. My title, “Owning Reality,” is my organizing principle. The title suggests not only the predatory behavior I have studied but my active opposition to that behavior. That opposition is in keeping with a long-standing effort to combine scholarship and activism. In some traditions it is held that scholarship and activism must remain entirely separate, and ne'er the twain shall meet. I think the opposite is true. Scholarship is rendered meaningful by activism, and activism is significantly informed by scholarship. Both need to be undertaken with discipline.
The imaginative arena of these studies is the interaction of psychology and history. Here psychoanalysis has been crucial for me but in a somewhat complicated way. Early psychoanalytic forays into history, beginning with Freud, could reduce it either to prehistory, as in Totem and