Available now at a special rate: This extraordinary book (list $39.99) may be purchased NOW through Amazon at the very special price of $16.95. Click here for information on getting your personal copy. Paperback:   262 pages Publisher:   Library of Social Science Author:   Howard F. Stein Date of Publication:   May 14, 2013 List Price:   $39.99 ISBN-13:    978-0915042050 “Truly remarkable—an enduring contribution.” —Prof. John Connor, Dept. of Anthropology, California State University, Sacramento. “Howard Stein has one of the finest minds engaged in the study of culture in our time. He has the capacity to see straight through to the meaning of things, and to understand it and express it with precision--a quality people used to refer to as genius. This wide ranging book is a feast.” —Howard S. Schwartz, Professor of Organizational Behavior, Oakland University, author of Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay. “Howard Stein is one of the world’s most original thinkers in the human sciences.” —Robert Endleman, Ph.D., author of Psyche and Society “For anyone interested in anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethnicity, the family, or medicine, and for everyone who has admired, as I have, the insightful and original thinking of Howard Stein on these subjects, this volume will be an intellectual treat.” —Prof. Melford Spiro, Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego. About the Author: HOWARD F. STEIN is a psychological anthropologist and Professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. He is the author of fourteen books and over one hundred scholarly papers.

Psychogeography: The Human Body Becomes a Body Politic

The immune system within each human body acts to repel or eliminate entities identified as alien or not-self. So do nations defend themselves against enemies. In this ground-breaking book, Developmental Time, Cultural Space, Howard Stein presents  the concept of psychogeography: How the experience and perception of our bodies generates experiences and perceptions in the political and social world.

Boundaries

The issue of boundaries lies at the heart of psychogeography. Lakoff and Johnson identify the container as a basic structure of thought, giving rise to the idea of a “bounded inner space that is differentiated from what is outside.” Nations—like bodies—are containers that serve to clearly distinguish what is inside from what is outside. Nations defend themselves like bodies with an immune system: seeking to exclude or destroy people identified as foreign—other than the self.

Personal boundaries are imagined to be coextensive with the geopolitical boundaries of the group. What is going on “inside” one’s nation is experienced as if going on within one’s self. The fate of one’s own body becomes bound to the fate of the nation. Like a body under siege, prodigious efforts are undertaken in the name of “national defense.”

Developmental Time shows how international conflict grows out of the leap from the mind to society, based on the fantasy of society-as-body. Group members speak of society as a personified body politic from which they feel inseparable. Aggression is summoned to defend against enemies (both within and without) imagined as a threat to the life of this body. Territory is imagined in corporeal terms (Mark Neocleous): the nation-state seeks to secure its borders—its orifices and entry points—from infiltration and penetration.

Analysis of Metaphor

Stein presents analysis of metaphor as a technique allowing us to perceive how the body is externalized and projected into culture. Metaphors appear in political rhetoric: Nations are imagined to be sick or disintegrating or falling apart. Foreign policy revolves around “containing” enemies—so that they do not penetrate our borders. Military strategy requires rear cover—“protecting the rear.” Enemies are identified as viruses or bacteria: sources of a “disease within the body politic.”

According to Lakoff and Johnson, structures of our bodily experience “work their way up into abstract structures of thought.” Psychogeography asserts that bodily experience gives rise to political and cultural structures. The body and bodily fantasies are projected into political units. Nations become symbolic structures—doubles of the self—that we defend desperately, even at the cost of the lives of our actual bodies.

“O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain”

Nations are conceived as vast geographic spaces—with which we identify. Boundaries of the self expand to encompass a gigantic territory, conferring upon each citizen a colossal ego. Hitler exhorted his people: “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Human beings are small, vulnerable creatures. Yet when we project ourselves into a nation, we feel grand—omnipotent. Psychogeography reveals the dynamics of culture-creation: how human bodies become bodies politic.