From a recent New Yorker story on Freudian psychoanalysis in China:
I asked what problems he sees most often among his patients. He answered, “If a grandfather, for example, was criti- cized and abused in the social upheaval of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, then he couldn’t take care of his child, so the child was raised in a chaotic situation and had to develop defensive ways to cope.” In that way, the Cultural Revolution can produce marital or family problems that trickle down to a third generation. “From my point of view, the upheaval never ended,” he said. “It repeats within the family.”
The son of a political dissident and a psychologist, I am biased towards a psychological understanding of political life. Nonetheless, there is ample scholarship, from Aristotle to Shakespeare, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Michel Foucault, that suggests so much of what we do in our formal political lives is articulated through our personal lives.
We spend a great deal of time considering what that means in terms of the lives of our leaders – are they good parents? are they good children? – and yet the implications are greater when one considers the lives of the populace, of pundits and audiences. In a time of Mama Grizzly and Father Coughlin Beck, a little more Shakespeare might go a long way.