Editors Lair 27

Sorrowfully, we start with a necessarily anonymous and moving letter from a psychoanalytic colleague in Iran. In this very contemporary vein through the issue Jerry S. Piven follows with an arch exploration of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult and adds a corrective element to especially the recently departed Robert J. Lifton's explanation of its appalling psychological seductiveness. Readers ultimately can decide whether Buddhism got a bad rap, as Piven argues, or Lifton does here. Nietzsche, for example, notoriously has taken the blame for inciting malefactors ranging from Leopold and Loeb to Adolf Hitler, and, no, it's not all the philosopher's fault.

Daniel Zartz then invokes Simone Weil as a jump-off point into important speculations on the human need for roots, for tradition (though not for its own sake), and what this evident need means and is worth psychoanalytically. What is our neoliberal realm besides a system for generating uprootedness? Almost seamlessly following an essay on tradition is Chris Joaniddis’ piece on “Woke Culture,” building somewhat on Lasch's Culture of Narcisissm, and pointedly asking how it came to be “that an attempt to include the excluded and the marginalized, ends up in an ideological certainty that, by definition, excludes the deviant.” In so doing Joannidis points out several acute and troubling ironies. Judith M. Hughes casts a cold and psychoanalytic eye on the making of memories of the Holocaust over the decades and their implications for the Middle East today. And one cannot get more contemporaneous than when Lutz Goetzmann offers an insightful Žižekian probe into the Hades-like psyche of Elon Musk and his (our opinion) mad ‘wired brain’ project, a piece which hopefully will help guide us out of such emetic spaces again.

In our Treats and Treatments section, reserved for downright intriguing pieces that do not fit the standard parameters of articles, Adam Shechter provides provocative thoughts on the therapeutic process that should int