Psychohistory Forum

Clio’s Psyche

Call for Papers: The Psychoanalysis and Psychology of Fear

Special Issue, Spring 2023
Submissions due January 1, 2023

Dear Colleague,

For this Spring 2023 Special Issue of Clio’s Psyche, we welcome your submissions, especially personalized ones with psychoanalytic, psychological, and psychohistorical insights on FEAR, including the following subjects:

  • Why does fear abound in our personal lives, country, society, and world?
  • Why not write about fear in your life, and its ramifications, as is Clio’s editor?
  • How do we process fear rather than become immobilized by it or using it to go to war?
  • What are the gender differences in the processing of fear in the U.S. and elsewhere?
  • Is the enormous anxiety of our society of rapid technological change based upon our fears?
  • How do you deal with a patient’s anxiety and fear being so great that they may kill themselves?
  • Why are the culture wars (abortion, gay marriage, gender, etc.) based so much on fear of change?
  • In “gun crazy America,” do we unconsciously engender fear by encouraging gun ownership?
  • Are personal and societal enemies essential to maintain a national and individual identity?
  • Why did Bush, the younger, find it strange we lost the Soviet enemy and then he went to war?
  • Did the Soviet Union collapse because Gorbachev saw the U.S. as a model rather than enemy?
  • To what extent has the COVID-19 pandemic enlarged our fears and effected our behavior?
  • Why not write a comparative article on the impact of the Spanish Flu and the current pandemic?
  • How does fear related to hope, early childhood, and good/bad/troubled interpersonal relations?
  • Why not write an anxiety/fear-focused book review of a famous or important person?

We seek articles from 1,500-2,500 words—including your title, author name with affiliation, a 25-word abstract, 7-10 keywords, and your brief biography (3-4 sentences) ending in your email address.  Send documents in Microsoft Word (*docx or doc) format by January 1, 2023.  Several high-quality, extremely well written articles of up to 3,500 words may be accepted to serve as symposium articles if received by November 1, 2022.  We urge you to share this Call for Papers with colleagues and lists.

Fear dominates so much of our personal, political, and societal lives that we think it appropriate to focus on this basic emotion, which has so many ramifications.   Of course, as human beings, we incline to want to hide our fears from most around us if not ourselves, mostly finding societally acceptable ways of expressing them.  The sense that others share our fears seems to make them more palatable.  Does the aggrandizement of politicians, musicians, and leaders of all sorts serve as a way of escaping from our sense of vulnerability in a world in which there is so much to fear?  To what extent has the pandemic enlarged our fears?  Is the prevalence of escapism into media (TV, movies, games, social media, echo chambers of the like-minded) an attempt to escape from our fears?  It is our hope that in probing fear, we can be more realistic in dealing with and discourage escapism into alcohol, drugs, and other negative outlets.

Clio’s Psyche and the Psychohistory Forum:

It is the style of our scholarly quarterly to publish thought-provoking, clearly written articles usually based upon psychoanalytic/psychological insight and developed with examples from history, current events, and the human experience.  We are open to all psychological and psychohistorical approaches and prefer that articles be personalized, without psychoanalytic/psychological terminology or jargon.  At the moment, we are converting to a modified version of the latest APA citation system, which will have very few references and those overwhelmingly for direct quotes.  We emphasize good literary style without referring to authorities except when essential.  Indeed, we discourage citations except where there are quotations or they are otherwise essential.  Submissions the editors deem suitable are anonymously refereed in our double-blind system.  Once you have submitted your article, please do not make any further edits to the piece until we return it to you if necessary.

For those who are not familiar with our publication and its sponsor, Clio’s Psyche is in its 28th year of publication by the Psychohistory Forum, a 40-year-old organization of academics, therapists, and laypeople holding regular scholarly meetings in Manhattan, at international conventions, and virtually.  For information on our publication and back issues over a year old, go to our website at cliospsyche.org/archives.  Write me for information on how to join our group and read our print journal.

Sincerely yours,

Paul H. Elovitz, PhD, Historian, Research (and retired) Psychoanalyst, Professor at Ramapo College, Editor, Clio’s Psyche and author The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (Routledge, 2018)  E-mail: cliospsycheeditor@gmail.com

Inna Rozentsvit, MD, PhD, MBA, MSci; Associate Editor, Clio’s Psyche; Associate Director of the Psychohistory Forum; and Group Co-Leader of the Psychobiography Research and Publication Group of the Forum  Email: inna.rozentsvit@gmail.com