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Volume 104

Number 3

Fall 2018

Journal of the

WASHINGTON

ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

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ISSN 0043-0439 Issued Quarterly at Washington DC

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Volume 104

Number 3

Fall 2018

Journal of the

WASHINGTON

ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Editor's Comments S. Howard

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ISSN 0043-0439 Issued Quarterly at Washington DC

Spring 2018

EDITOR’S COMMENTS

Presenting the 2018 Fall issue of the Journal of the Washington Academy

of Sciences.

For this issue we have two papers. The first discusses the intricacies

inherit in a standard physics problem for students. Let us drop a ball through

a hole in the Earth. How long will it take to reach the other end? Simple?

Well maybe or maybe not. The second paper is about the impact

authoritarian regimes have on the capacity to think and act critically.

Therapists routinely deal with the results of this impact.

The Journal is the official organ of the Academy. Please consider

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reviews.

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(wasjournal(Qwashacadscl.org) comments on papers, suggestions for

articles, and ideas for what you would like to see in the Journal. We are a

peer reviewed journal and need volunteer reviewers. If you would like to be

on our reviewer list please send email to the above address and include your

specialty.

Sethanne Howard

Washington Academy of Sciences

Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences

Editor Sethanne Howard

showard@washacadscl.org

Board of Discipline Editors

iil

The Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences has an |1-member

Board of Discipline Editors representing many scientific and technical

fields. The members of the Board of Discipline Editors are affiliated with a

variety of scientific institutions in the Washington area and beyond —

government agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and

Technology (NIST); universities such as Georgetown; and professional

associations such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

(IEEE).

Anthropology Emanuela Appetiti

Astronomy Sethanne Howard

Biology/Biophysics Eugenie Mielczarek

Botany Mark Holland

Chemistry Deana Jaber

Environmental Natural

Sciences Terrell Erickson

Health

History of Medicine

Robin Stombler

Alain Touwaide

Operations Research Michael Katehakis

Science Education Jim Egenrieder

Systems Science Elizabeth Corona

Spring 2018

eappetiti@hotmail.com

sethanneh@msn.com

mielczar@physics.gmu.edu

maholland@salisbury.edu

djaber@marymount.edu

terrell.ericksonl @wdc.nsda.gov

rstombler@auburnstrat.com

atouwaide@hotmail.com

mnk@rci.rutgers.edu

jim@deepwater.org

elizabethcorona@gmail.com

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Falling through the Earth

Gene Byrd

University of Alabama (retired)

Abstract

One of the problems inflicted on students in introductory physics courses

involves an imaginary hole drilled through the center of the Earth. An observer

on the surface drops a rock which proceeds to accelerate down the hole

through the center of the Earth. There is a deceleration after the rock passes

through the center and it just barely makes it to be momentarily at rest at the

other end. The total trip is estimated to be about 42 minutes. Of course, the

tube should be a vacuum to remove air resistance to the object’s free fall erc.

This paper describes angular momentum/energy complications to the problem

as it is usually written. There is a chain of recent articles exploring this

problem but with no mention of such objections.

Introduction

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS INFLICTED on students in introductory physics

courses, dating back to Isaac Newton, involves an imaginary hole drilled

from the observer on the surface through the center of the Earth. Then the

observer drops a rock which proceeds to fall down the hole through the

center of the Earth. How long does it take before the rock pops up to another

observer at the other end of the hole? Now the student has to calculate the

gravitational acceleration at each point (at radius r) of the journey due to the

mass interior to the rock at each r. Of course, there is a deceleration after

the rock passes through the center and it just barely makes it to be

momentarily at rest at the other end. And the tube should be a vacuum to

remove air resistance to the object’s free fall.

While at a faculty meeting discussing how entering students had not

solved this problem on a departmental qualifying exam, I thought of some

objections to the problem as it is usually written. I dismissed any further

action thinking that these objections would be well known to those who

have thought more deeply about this problem. At the instigation of your

kind editor asking about ideas for an article, | decided to explore published

research about this “hole in the Earth” problem. To my surprise, there is a

chain of recent articles exploring this problem but with no mention of my

objections. This article is a brief review of some aspects of this interesting

problem including effects of the complications.

Fall 2018

The Earth is assumed to be a homogeneous sphere of matter so the

acceleration is just the gravitational constant, G, times the interior mass (

4 ra

3a * density , p) divided by 7° to form the law of gravity. The mass

exterior to the rock does not contribute to the gravitational acceleration.

Dividing by r’, we see that the net acceleration is proportional to radius.

This, of course, is the force law for the harmonic oscillator. Starting from

rest the travel time to the other side is 42 minutes.

Recent Discussion

The revival of the topic recently had to do with the proposition that

Earth tunnels could be used in a global, fast transportation system of trains

(Cooper 1966). Beyond reviewing that a tube drilled straight through the

Earth along its diameter would take 42 minutes to fall through, Cooper

showed that a straight tube connecting any two surface points could be

traversed by a falling object in the same amount of time, independent of

distance, and the time could be made shorter with a more efficient path.

In theory a system of trains could travel along minimum-time chord-

like tunnels connecting points on Earth. Somewhat grandiosely, Cooper

(1966) proposes “By crisscrossing our planet with frictionless subterranean

passages man could achieve rapid intercontinental travel comparable in

transit time with that of the space vehicle but with no expenditure of energy

for locomotion.” A text book explanation and historical literature review is

given by Kot (2014).

Of course, for the “straight through” problem, modern knowledge

of the Earth’s hot partially molten center would require walls of an

incredibly strong thermally insulating material. Even the shallow chord-like

tunnels would present extreme engineering problems.

More recently the discussion was reviewed and mathematically

extended by Kotz (2013) adding new a “wrinkle” to the overly idealized

original problem. Klotz notes that the Earth is now known to increase in

density as one goes into toward the center. Such an increase would change

the gravitational force variation with radius and thus change the time

required for the trip. It turns out the rock 1s zipping along at such a rate that

by the time it reaches the half-way point to the center the interior density

peak structure near the core is not an important contribution to the time. The

net result is that the travel time is changed to 38 minutes. Finally, Seel

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(2018) included relativity in the calculations, so someday one might fall into

other more extreme astronomical objects besides the Earth.

In popular culture an otherwise undistinguished 2012 sequel to the

movie, Total Recall, features an elaborate free fall transportation system

using a tunnel from one side of the Earth to the other. To see a video of this

search YouTube for Total Recall The Fall. It is interesting to critique the

physics of this movie.

Energy and Angular Momentum Conservation

In my literature search I was intrigued to see that the complications

I had thought about were not mentioned. So, they are presented here.

Fundamental physics might mean that the poor rock might not make it

through to the other side at all!

What could stop the rock? Conservation of angular momentum and

energy could. Drilling the hole at any point on the Earth other than the north

and south poles would mean that it has a sideways speed relative to the

center of the Earth (even if it is held totally steady before dropping). The

gravitational force as it falls 1s always toward the center (a “central force”).

That means the total angular momentum of the falling rock is conserved as

it approaches the center. The initial sideways speed, vi, when dropped, is

multiplied by the Earth’s radius, vi to give the angular momentum. As the

rock gets closer to the center the sideways speed greatly increases since the

radial distance to the center 1s so much smaller.

Thus, when falling down a narrow hole the magnified sideways

speed of the rock would result in its banging against the walls of the hole

with serious consequences for the rock. See Figure 1. What if we used an

amazingly bouncy superball with similar material for the wall? The ball

would bounce back and forth as it descends but it still could not reach the

center!

Fall 2018

Figure | —Schematic path (oval and arrow) of a ball falling into 0.5 unit wide hole from the

surface of a uniform density gravitating sphere with an initial transverse speed of 1.2

parallel to the surface. The surface of the sphere is a solid circle. The edges of the hole are

shown as dashed lines. The acceleration = 8 r, the harmonic oscillator law for the uniform

sphere. Note that the width is insufficient for the ball to make it straight past the center.

The initial location is a small dark disk. Several subsequent collisions with the wall are

shown as small multipoint stars with arrows between. The oval paths that the ball would

follow if it was unimpeded are shown for the initial path and then after each collision.

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Instead, the ball would reach a minimum distance from the center as

determined by the initial angular momentum and conservation of energy. It

would then start receding from the center, Our superball would bang-bang-

bang against the sides to close approach then start receding back up the hole.

The person who dropped the ball would be surprised to see the ball reappear

at the top of the hole where it was dropped about 42 minutes before! A

person at the other end would be disappointed with no ball appearing. The

minimum distance determination is described at the end of the mathematical

Appendix I.

What if one dropped the ball at a hole drilled from the North to South

Pole? The point to remember is that any sideways perturbation is magnified

upon approach to the Earth’s center. Even if the Earth were perfectly

spherical and the ball had no initial velocity, there could still be problems.

Technically, the Earth’s Moon would have to be eliminated since the two

orbit one another. In addition there are tidal effects from the Sun.

Getting Past the Center

Because of dissipation a bouncing ball could wind up going through

the center but with decreasing amplitude, never getting back to the surface.

Another alternative would get past the center to reach the other side with no

collisions against the walls. As described in the mathematical Appendix I,

if we assume a narrow shaft, a ball with an initial sideways speed of only

2.5 millimeters per second will be stopped and bounce back at a distance

from the center of 2 m. This is about the speed of a slowly crawling snail.

One could get the ball to fall through by making the hole sufficiently wide,

over 2 m for our example. One would have to be really careful to minimize

the initial angular momentum velocity and make the hole sufficiently wide.

See Figure 2 for an exaggerated example.

Conclusions

It is not likely that such a tunnel will ever be constructed in the near

future, but the concept serves a useful teaching role in introductory physics.

Aside from considering how specify a problem, we see that students can not

only discover the harmonic oscillator equation but also study conservation

of angular momentum and energy in a slightly perturbed system. Students

could discuss elaborations. What if the ball was instead a bullet exactly

filling the hole with friction-free lubrication? If the bullet had a passenger

compartment, what would the passenger feel after entering during the trip?

Fall 2018

References

Cooper, P. W. 1966 “Through the Earth in Forty Minutes” American

Journal of Physics 34, 68 (1966); https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1972773

Alexander R. Klotz 2013 “The Gravity Tunnel in a Non-Uniform Earth”

http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1342v1

Also see this article in Discover magazine for a popular discussion of

Klotz’s work

http://discovermagazine.com/2016/nov/journey-through-the-center-of-the-

earth

Kot, M. 2014, A First Course in the Calculus of Variations, American

Mathematical Society pp 5, 18. A link is

https://books.google.com/books?id=UBi8BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA5&dq

=scientificYo20american%20tunnel%20trains%20through%20the%20e

arth&pg=PA6#v=onepage&q=scientific%20american”%20tunnel%20tr

ains%20through%20the%20earth& f=false

Seel, M., 2018, “The relativistic gravity train,’ European Journal of

Physics, 39, Number 3

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Mathematical Appendix

Conservation of angular momentum and conservation of energy can assure

that the dropped rock or ball even with a small initial transverse velocity

will not make it through the center of the Earth. The hole should be small

compared to the size of the Earth. Indicate with the subscript “m’ the

variable’s value at minimum distance from the center reached by the ball in

the shaft. The subscript “7” indicates the initial variable value. At any point

the force per unit mass, f= the gravitational constant, G, times the interior

4 )

mass, ia x density, 9) /7’.

At closest approach to the center, the purely transverse speed is vm and the

kinetic energy per unit mass, KEm is =v. When the ball is released at the

surface, KEm >> KEiso we can drop KEj. We do the same for r° >> r-

The change in the kinetic energy, moving from the initial value of r to the

minimum value of r:

Io SS

—yo-=y =v

i Se i ae

= | far = G=mp| rdr

= 2G 1p(13 -2)= 565m

Recall that angular momentum is conserved between the initial and closest

approach. vr,=v,r,. Solving for v,, and substituting in the KE change

above, we obtain:

=, i{ G22 |

The ball will not be able to cross this minimum distance as it bounces its

way toward the center. Upon reaching the minimum the ball then recedes

and, with no dissipation, will go outward to the initial radial distance.

Here is an example of the initial transverse minimum velocity resulting in a

given closest approach distance r,,=2m. From the equation above we

obtain

Fall 2018

1/2

fon

y, =| ——

NEM

Substituting

M gay, =5-972X10" kg, 7, =6.378X10° m and G=6.674x10"' mks

gives v, = 0.002477 m/s. This is about the speed of a slowly crawling snail.

Bio

Gene G. Byrd is a professor emeritus in astronomy of the University of

Alabama. He has authored several books and even more professional papers

in dynamics of galaxies and lately in dark energy.

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IME als

Set

Figure 2 —Schematic path of a ball falling into 1 unit wide hole from the surface of a

uniform density gravitating sphere with an initial transverse speed of 1.2 parallel to the

surface. The surface of the sphere is a solid circle. The edges of the hole are shown as

dashed lines. The acceleration = 8 r, the harmonic oscillator law for the uniform sphere.

Note that the width is sufficient for the ball to make it past the center.

Fall 2018

Washington Academy of Sciences

The Impact of Authoritarian Regimes on the Capacity

to Think and Act Critically’

Carlos E. Sluzki, MD

George Washington University

Abstract

The progression of political powers toward authoritarianism orients a sizable

segment of the population not only toward obedience but toward denial of the

oppressive nature of their submission, the beginning of a slippery slope that

starts with experiencing the imposed nature of the oppressive rules to then

adopting them a-critically to finally denying both the internal and external

evidence of their existence. To prevent that loss of freedom of thought, speech,

and action it becomes imperative, when totalitarianism in any of its versions

looms on the political and personal horizon, to preserve the critical capacity to

speak and to rebel against any oppressive injunction in order to prevent a self-

censoring conceptual and pragmatic adaptive constriction, with dire ethical

implications. It is equally important to help those already caught in a self-

censoring worldview to recover the words and the capacity to think and act

critically lost in their previous experiences.

Introduction

LAST YEAR A SWEET OLD LADY, Brunhilde Pomsel, died in Munich at the

age of 106. She was an ordinary person who in her youth had joined the

cheering crowd in Berlin that brought Hitler to power in 1933. Soon after

she obtained a position as a clerk in the government bureaucracy, and, more

by happenstance than by intent, ended up becoming the personal secretary

to Joseph Goebbels, minister of Propaganda of the Nazi regime. She would

answer his phone, take dictation, record his remarks, and even alter German

casualty accounts so that Goebbels could present to Hitler a falsely rosy

picture of the progress of the war.

After the conflagration she lived anonymously for most of her life

until discovered a few years ago by a journalist and filmmaker, who

interviewed her and recorded her musings. Among her comments “I didn’t

| Summary and elaboration of a keynote presentation delivered at the 25" Congress of the

International Family Therapy Association, Malaga, Spain, March 2017. The full text

appeared in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 38(3): 398-404,

20175

Fall 2018

know, we didn’t know anything on the matter of the Jews (in reference to

the Holocaust, the assassination of six million Jews by the Nazi regime).

We knew about Buchenwald (one of the hundreds of Nazi

concentration/extermination camps, this one located near Weimar, in

Germany), but I thought it was an intermediary rehabilitation camp and then

the Jews would be transported to and relocated in the Sudetenland.” (The

Washington Post, 2017; parenthesis by the author of this article. )

I believe her, in the sense that I believe in her having fallen into the

trap of an official discourse that mandated selective perception and a-critical

thinking that punished dissent. Resonating with Goldenhagen’s (1997)

powerful indictment against the protestation of ex post facto ignorance of

atrocities of the regime by the ordinary German citizen during that period,

I believe that a part of the civilian population in Germany and Austria, living

under a repressive regime and exposed only to the official discourse — that

obfuscated the “final solution” agenda while maligning its victims, among

many externalizations, omissions and distortions — simply managed not to

know what they didn’t want to know, a sometimes willful, frequently

unconscious ignorance that allowed them only to confirm their beliefs and

black out the rest. We can do horrible things to our minds when we are under

the dome of authoritarian, totalitarian regimes.

Worrisome Times

I wish to add a personal vignette. In 1983 three months after the first

democratically elected government replaced a dictatorial military junta in

Argentina, I was scheduled to deliver a keynote at a family therapy congress

in that country. Given the momentous occasion, instead of talking about the

subject that I had originally submitted for the program (something about

family and schizophrenia, I believe), I presented and discussed a moving

and politically charged family consultation I had conducted several years

before with a family victimized by the prior dictatorship, including the

disappearance of two of its members, a minuscule part of the 15,000 to

30,000 desaparecidos abducted, tortured, and killed during the “dirty war”

unleashed by that bloody regime. As the presentation progressed (it became

clear during the discussion that followed it), a sizable number of the 500

mental health professionals who constituted the audience reacted with

extreme alarm. Their first thoughts were “Carlos is crazy! He is putting us

all at risk!” and their first reaction was to locate the exit doors of the

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2 }

conference hall “just in case,” see whether other attendants were starting to

leave in order to do the same, and so on. It took some time for them to

realize that they were reacting to a peril that was no longer there, a remnant

of having lived under a mantle of a repression that had already ended. In the

discussion that followed the presentation that realization generated an

outpour of emotions —many colleagues were crying in a mixture of guilt and

relief, and the discussion became a confessional of sins of omission, needs

to repair and, indeed, of disclosures by many colleagues who almost

subversively had helped families dismembered in one way or the other by

the prior regime (for a detailed discussion of that interview and its multiple

effects, cf. Sluzki 1990, 1997).

Another, even more personal, vignette is in order. A couple of

months ago, while e-mailing a note to a friend at my home office in DC, I

discovered myself worrying about whether it would be safe for me to write

an anti-Trump political comment by e-mail. Please notice: I am a U.S.

citizen, a pacifist, I have lived in the U.S. for 46 years, taught in American

academic venues for decades, et cetera... but I am not US-born, and

therefore I am, literally speaking, a foreigner. What if some agency of the

administration is scanning all emails and confectioning a list of people

deemed contrary to the regime? Would my family or I be in danger at all?

Could my citizenship be revoked and I be expelled from the U.S.? Was I

being paranoid, or could this until recently not too long ago gentle if not

indifferent governmental apparatus really turn against me?

However, a second-level layer of concerns, triggered by that

moment of doubts (of paranoia?), alarmed me more: What if I yielded to

those concerns and began to self-censor my own emails, and then my phone

conversations, and then my conversations with others, “just in case’?

Would I have continued to slide in that slippery slope and cease talking

about politically risky subjects first in public, then with friends, and finally

with anybody, and then, just as an almost unavoidable follow up effect,

censor my thoughts, and, just to clamp the precaution, deny my perceptions,

beginning not to see or hear things that are there to be seen and heard and

induce outrage?

The polarizing discourses and embedded threats for critical thinking

of authoritarian governments aim at undermining our participation in

society as free political beings and as professionals: They destabilize if not

Fall 2018

erode the values that are the core of our autonomy and solidarity, obfuscate

our critical capacity, and contaminate with mistrust our relational world.

These are worrisome times. Far right, ethnic-nationalist, populist,

racist, sexist, anti-immigrants, anti-abortion rights, anti-ecological, anti-free

speech, post-facts (post-truth!), authoritarian candidates and governments

are gaining strength world-wide. We are facing a world being progressively

seized by charismatic leaders who may not yet be tyrants with a simplified

polarizing discourse capable of perpetrating enormous evil. And, even

while many of these ideologies didn’t triumph electorally — as happened in

some European countries — the effect of their rise has been that majority of

the center parties have moved several inches toward social intolerance, as a

way of capturing a portion of the electorate attracted by those polarizing

discourses.

I am not referring just to the trend toward dismantlement of social

entitlements or even the assault on truth, e.g., the blatant use of “alternative

facts.” Truthfulness has never been counted among the most salient

political virtues. To quote Hannah Arendt (from a superb essay titled “Lying

in Politics: Reflection on the Pentagon Papers,” [1971a], also included in an

insightful and increasingly timely collection of essays on politics, violence,

civil disobedience [Arendt, 1971b]): “Lies have always been regarded as

justifiable tools in political dealings.” (197 1a, p.30) In her 1963 inquiry into

how totalitarian tyrants take hold of people, Hannah Arendt writes: “The

essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every

bureaucracy, is to make mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of

men, and thus to dehumanize them.” That is the core of what that author

called “the banality of evil”, a banality epitomized by Adolf Eichmann, a

bureaucrat at the center of the development and efficient functioning of the

“final solution”, who embodied “the dilemma between the unspeakable

horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who

perpetrated them.” (Arendt, 1963, p.94)

Governments moving toward totalitarianism expect the citizenry to

believe and inhabit the worldview embedded in the official discourse —

regardless of their being based on unfulfillable promises and unsustainable

distortions — and enforce the adoption of that view through the double-

edged sword of rewards and punishment. However, this compliance

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endangers if not destroys our ability to be agents of our own lives by

contributing to the undermining of our capacity for critical thinking.

In consonance with not-so-veiled threats of punishment for dissent,

official discourses tend to be semantically ambiguous: what is asserted

doesn’t have a base in facts; contradictions and omissions within a given

discourse are not clarified but obfuscated; and negative traits and all blame

is externalized into the ubiquitous “Other.” This ambiguity reduces the

critical capacity of whoever is at the receiving end of those messages” and

increases compliance. In other words, fear activates the down and dirty

cognitive navigational system called Type I, the quick, defensive,

automatic, stereotypical way of thinking, to the detriment of the slower

Type II, the more pondering, complex style of cognition required for critical

thinking and retaining curiosity --instead of the quick answers that evade

inquiry and sound choices, to sustain concentration instead of dispersion

(Kahneman, 2011). Fear — a trigger of Type I mode of thinking — leads to

the worst kind of blindness: when “we don’t see that we don’t see” (von

Foerster, 1982).

It merits being noted that, in the short-run, totalitarian discourses

elicit in a segment of the audience fervor and elation, just as black-and-

white realities resolve doubts, externalize evil, enhance hope, and facilitate

a-critical affiliation. This happens through an acceptance of descriptions of

reality where social and existential violence is disassociated from the

collective self of the faithful and externalized in evil third parties.* In turn,

in the long run, the oppressive discourse cements in a substantial sector of

the general population selective perceptual inattention, disassociations,

memory distortions (cf. Langer, 1991), restricted lives, and emotional

2 Echoes of the communicational set known as the “double blind,” an interactional trap

that, when pervasive, elicit pathological responses: contradictory injunctions (at

different logical levels) (e.g., “Believe me, even if I am a liar”) that require enactment

and cannot be simply dismissed, that are elicited by a valued source placed in a position

of power, from whom the subject cannot request or obtain a clarification of the

contradiction or is punished for attempts to do so; nor can he simply leave the field

(Bateson, Jackson Haley & Weakland, 1956; cf. also Sluzki & Ransom, 1976)

3 This externalization of responsibility also appears frequently in the discourse of rapist,

torturers, perpetrators of domestic and even random violence, uttered while enacting the

violence with the effect of mystifying agency by blaming the victim for the violence

they are suffering: “You were looking for this”, “You made me do it”, ef cetera (Sluzki,

1993).

Fall 2018

blindness or guilt. Families become plagued with secrets, silences, social

isolation and trans-generational splits, and communities become polarized.

In the specific sector of the population to which the author belongs,

namely, therapists of one sort or another (psychiatrist, psychologists,

counselors), the risk of immersion into the worldview espoused by the

totalitarian discourse is a development of blind spots, a distorted capacity

for empathy or resonance, a skew toward decontextualization and

pathologizing (defining impacts of, or rebellion against, oppression as

deviant), becoming, by commission or omission, a cog in the repressive

social machine at the service of the authoritarian regime (Sluzki, 1997).

When living bombarded by an official discourse that challenges

reality, threatens dissent, and foments polarization, how do we preserve our

integrity as individuals and as social advocates; how do we retain our ability

to maintain and help others maintain or regain mindfulness, critical thinking

and responsible social insertion? And do we do it while meeting anger with

compassion, intolerance with tolerance, fanaticism with empathy and social

responsibility? The ethical and pragmatic challenge is clear: To be alert to

the insidious effects of the messages of repressive regimes, to catch self-

censoring constrictions by the tail, preserve self-reflection in our capacity

to think critically and maintain our freedom to act accordingly. Ultimately

we help individuals, families, and communities recover words and agency

and challenge narratives that polarize blaming the “Other” and pathologize

or punish disobedience. All this entails retaining and promoting

mindfulness and also maintaining active conversations...like the one

starting here.

Conclusion

In conclusion there are five key points to remember.

Five Key Points

¢ The default adaptive mode of submission to an oppressive authority,

either by option (e.g., welcoming a leader that promises order after a

period of chaos), by fear of the consequences if confronted (e.g.,

threats of prison, torture, disappearance, or merely imperiled job

security) or by indifference, leads to a progressive desensitization

and ultimately silencing and blindness to any contradictory evidence.

Washington Academy of Sciences

* This process of surrender of agency buries themes and vocabularies

that may contradict that submission. Acts of governmental violence

and acts of dissent are erased from perception and from conversation.

* It is our responsibility as citizens (and those who are therapists, as

therapists) to defend the integrity of our language and of our mind

and our capacity to critically confront oppression (for us and for our

patients), so as to counter submission to authoritarianism.

* And when working with people emerging from a period of individual

or collective submission to an authoritarian leadership, it behooves

us to help them actively to recover their words as a way of regaining

a world where agentic power is the rule and not the privileged official

discourse.

References

Arendt, H (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

New York: Viking Press

Arendt, H (1971): Lying in Politics: Reflection on the Pentagon Papers.

New York Review of Books, 18 November, p.30

Arendt H. (1971). Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil

Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution. New

York: Harvest Books.

Bateson, G; Jackson DD; Haley J. & Weakland, JH (1956): Toward a theory

of schizophrenia. Behavioral Sciences, 1:251-64; also, in Bateson, G

(1972): Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, Ballantine.

v.Foerster, H (1982). To Know and To Let Know: An Applied Theory of

Knowledge, Canadian Library Journal 39, pp. 277-282.

Goldhagen, D.J (1997. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans

and the Holocaust. New Y ork: Vintage Books,

Kahneman D (2011). Think Fast, Think Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux.

Langer, LL (1991). Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New

Haven: Yale University Press

Fall 2018

Sluzki, CE (1990). Disappeared: Semantic and Somatic Effects of Political

Repression in a Family Seeking Therapy. Family Process, 29(2): 131-

143. An expanded version appeared as chapter in. Sluzki CE (2014):

Presence of the Absent: Therapy with Families with Ghosts. New York:

Routledge.

Sluzki, CE (1993). Toward a general model of family and political

victimization. Psychiatry, 56: 178-187. Also as a chapter in D. F.

Schnitman (Ed.). New Paradigms, Culture and Subjectivity, New Y ork:

Hampton Press, 2001.

Sluzki, CE (1997). Rekindling the experience of freedom: From the

personal to the collective...and back. Human Systems, 8(3-4):225-238.

Sluzki, CE & Ransom D (1976): Double Bind; The Foundation of the

Interactional Approach to the Family. New York, Grune & Stratton.

The Washington Post (2017). Obituary. Brunhilde Pomsel, 106. January 30,

p. B4.

Bio

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, George Washington University Medical

School Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Washington

D.C., USA; Professor Emeritus, Global and Community Health and of

Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Arlington VA,

U.S.A.; Fellow, Washington Academy of Sciences. (csluzki@gmu.edu)

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