Bruce E. Levine writes and speaks widely on how society, culture, politics and psychology intersect. His latest book is Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian―Strategies, Tools, and Models (2018). Earlier books include: Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (2011); Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (2007); and Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and a World Gone Crazy (2003).
A practicing clinical psychologist often at odds with the mainstream of his profession, he is a regular contributor to Salon, CounterPunch, AlterNet, Truthout, TakePart, Z Magazine, OpEdNews, and the Huffington Post. His articles and interviews have been published in the New York Times, Skeptic, Adbusters, The Ecologist, High Times, and numerous other magazines, and he has contributed chapters to The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2011), Writing without Formula (2009), Perspectives on Diseases and Disorders: Depression (2009), and Alternatives beyond Psychiatry (2007).
Dr. Levine is on the editorial advisory board of the journal Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, and he is on the medical and scientific advisory board of the National Center for Youth Law. He is also an editorial advisor for the Icarus Project/Freedom Center Harm Reduction Guide to Coming off Psychiatric Drugs. A longtime activist in the mental health treatment reform movement, he is a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, the International Society for Ethical Psychology & Psychiatry, and MindFreedom. Dr. Levine has presented talks and workshops to diverse organizations throughout North America.
Bruce E. Levine was born in 1956, grew up in Rockaway in New York City, graduated from Queens College of the City University of New York, and received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Cincinnati. He currently lives in Cincinnati.
Comments
Useful intro gauging complicity Crimes of State\Profession
Very much appreciated this morning's chat with guest Bruce Levine on the always current barometer of resistance and gauging our society's complicity in Crimes of State\Profession.
I hope you, Paul, will pursue these subjects as serious as gravity or the grave, especially in light of last evening's State of the Union balderdash that sounded like it had a canned applause and chant soundtrack. Who among our elected officials could\would shower this most unpopular selection of the Electoral College with a Roman Coloseum chanting round after round of "U-S-A..U-S-A"? It sounded like some hellish chorus of affirmation for the misrepresentations, lies and balderdash of this least subtle of wannabe authoritarian Presidents?
I especially appreciated your guest's wise cautionary on trying to assign some pathology from the profession's diagnostic playbook to our Symptom In Chief. President Trump (as a President Hillary Clinton would have been) is acting first and foremost willfully. His own ignorance is willful and any attempt to layer it over with diagnostic speculation plays into his self-interested skills at evading accountability and responsibility for his elevation of self-interest to a privileged place above and beyond the considerations of the Public Interest. I refer to President Trump, even to our Blue State 'good guy' senior senator Ron Wyden, as Symptom in Chief because this privileging of their Private Interests over the Public Interest reflects the longstanding electoral tastes of our nation, state and even most of our cities and counties.
Dr Levine answered one of your well-informed caller's references to two professional psychologists who founded an intriguing alternative political group based in New York City and state that was labeled a cult of personality at the time circa 1970's, 80's, 90's and aughts by a number of alternative press journalists who looked into their group dynamics. Namely the charismatic Lenora Fulani and her psycho-therapeutic and political mentor Fred Newman linked to the early far-left leaning years of eventual far-right leaning Democratic Party Presidential primary candidate Lyndon LaRouche (whose cult leader bona fides are easier to assess).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenora_Fulani
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/26/nyregion/strange-can-t-begin-describe...
I'm hoping you can explore further the New Alliance Party and any legacy of their activity as either a political organization and\or cult. I found myself learning quite a lot and being genuinely helped in clarifying my own grass-roots activism and resistance to the authority of corrupt institutions and their leaders adapted to the opportunism that makes Neo-Liberal\Conswervative Politics tic tock.
I recognize shady characters can do good work apart from their own opportunistic and self-interested or egotistical career pursuits and actions. U. of Tube has for free perusal 2 episodes of the Public Access early cable TV program of Drs Fulani and Newman hosting a peer-reviewed and personally influential political scientist who's kind of fallen out of discussion and fashion, Ric Rorty. Yet Rorty has left behind books that continue to serve as a foundation for strategizing activists identifying as progressive.
These 2 half hour dialogues on tactical politics with Rorty seem useful to US all. Hope you can analyze the analysts and address the Political Pragmatism as studied and practiced by Prof Rorty, who despite clearly lacking the charisma of his hosts here in these 2 U. of Tube clips archived, has left behind books and recorded lectures and talks that could be as relevant to US as street leader\turned current parliamentary and government reform leader Pashinyan is relevant to Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora of 20th Century genocide survivors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1qEsGcQeqw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvrh0ZgCp8
Keep on doing Paul and Dr Levine!
If the good doctor is sourced again perhaps the questions of American Psychiatric and Psychological Associations complicity in the Washington-contracted torturers of the US invasion of Iraq in and after 2003 traced to the mercenarial private psychology enterprise conducted out of Spokane that has since fallen down the memory hole after never rising much above foot-note status in the recent history of our national lives via the work of local and regional Spokane Spokesman investigative journalists Shawn Vestal and colleagues that was sourced a few years back in a couple of NY TIMES and WASH POST cover stories long after the revelations of institutionalized torture via water-boarding and other taught techniques and training supplied by enterprising professional psychologists Mitchell and Jessen:
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/may/09/shawn-vestal-the-spokane-to...
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/may/26/shawn-vestal-torture-book-b...
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/dec/10/shawn-vestal-80-million-pai...
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/nov/18/fairchilds-torture-ties-ext...
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters & Shifters
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