Introduction to Cultural Perspectives

This section contains three pieces that pack a punch.

Shirley Tung’s compelling essay, License to Kill, builds to a crescendo as she recounts her relationship to guns and the men who use them, beginning in childhood. As she grows up and gun violence begins to dominate the culture, we read of Tung’s changing perceptions and affective responses. When Tung becomes a therapist, we accompany her to sessions where she confronts patients who are threatening, activating a traumatic challenge, “that had simmered unnamed beneath my professional veneer (and) broke through the levee.”

Sarah Abel’s essay, a timely contribution, is her effort to process the rupture in a friendship provoked by the sequelae of her friend’s daughter being instructed to serve Nazi customers in her job as a waitress at a local diner in a small town. In the context of the steep rise of anti-Semitism and the catastrophic events of the Hamas attack in Israel in 2023 and the Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney, Abel examines the psychic splits in herself that became evident in feeling existentially threatened as a Jew. Fully claiming the Jewish identity that she minimized, split off and disconnected from was “a vulnerability I had learned to avoid.” Furthermore, Abel discusses her need for self-protection as a therapist in a small community, that she now, feelingly, understands, represented a withdrawal, concealing her inner distress. Having thought deeply about Jewish identity and antisemitism, Janna Sandmeyer adroitly discusses Abel’s essay and highlights each friend’s psychic vulnerability, mutual alienation and withdrawal into psychic splits. The intrusion of this Nazi event brought into bold relief the difference in each one’s “sociocultural situatedness,” and led to an intersubjective disjunction. Sandmeyer advocates engaging Anton Hart’s paradigm of radical openness as a path towards reparation and healing. Though seemingly counterintuitive, by each engaging in the challenging task of turning towards each