The Political Is Personal: Benevolence and Sadism Are Learned at Home
Work-in-Progress Meeting with Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin
September 27, 2025 (10:30am-1pm EDT)
Virtual Live
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NB: Zoom link will be provided to you after you complete the RSVP form.
About This Presentation
We all like to think that we are rational creatures, who look at life and respond to political topics clearly and objectively. But the moral choices we make—no less than the political issues that outrage or inspire or blind us—are shaped by our family and our life experiences, as well the historical and socio-cultural worlds we inhabit. The family plays a massive role in who we are and what we become.
We flourish when we are loved and cherished by our caregivers and we are emotionally injured when we are abandoned, neglected, or maltreated. We learn, at home, to value and empathize with other people, or to treat them as if they are merely objects standing in the way of our own gratification.
When family life goes awry it can result in destructive fallout in which one makes other people feel and pay for one’s pain in the quest to get what one emotionally needs, or forge character and deepen one’s empathy and compassion.
Politicians, no less than public figures and ordinary citizens, are prey to the same familial influences and pressures. Politics is more personal than we realize.
Because most people, from pundits to ordinary citizens, all-too-often approach politics consciously and cognitively, the hidden emotional forces that shape it are all-too-often minimized. Politics, like history, also reflects the unconscious feelings of the people involved, leaders and citizens.
This presentation of a book-in-progress, like the book itself, is composed of two sections: the first illustrates the emotional costs and political consequences of destructive parenting; the second the benevolence, compassion, and altruism that occur in the context of healthy parent attunement. I will ground my theoretical suppositions with three brief psychobiographies — Shulamith Firestone, a visionary second generation feminist, who was driven crazy by a demeaning father and envious colleagues; George Atwood, an esteemed psychoanalyst who accessed the deepest sources of healing as a way of keeping a tie to his mother, a woman of remarkable love, who died when he was eight years old; and Monte Ullman, a visionary appreciator and interpreter of dreams, who went in a more benevolent and creative direction than his more cold, conventional, and critical parents.
Note from the Author:
What I am looking for from the participants is critical reflection on the material and suggestions for whom to include in the 2nd section of the book: Benevolence and Altruism are Learned at Home.
The selected chapters are presented below, via links. The order that the author would recommend you read them in is the following:
1) Giving Voice to the Voiceless
Read this chapter online HERE
2) The Oppressed Become the Despots
Read this chapter online HERE
3) Leave No One — Including Yourself — Behind
Read this chapter online HERE
4) Dreamers of the World Unite
Read this chapter online HERE
NB: Please do not distribute these pre-publication materials to those who are not registered for this meeting – thank you!
Short Bio of the Presenter:
Jeffrey B. Rubin, PhD, practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in New York City and North Salem, NY. He teaches at The Object Relations Institute of NY, The American Institute of Psychoanalysis, and the C. G. Jung Institute of NY. He is considered one of the leading integrators of the Western psychotherapeutic and eastern meditative traditions and is a Sensei in the Nyogen Senzaki and Soen Nakagawa Rinzai Zen lineage and the creator of meditative psychotherapy, a practice that he developed through insights gained from decades of study, teaching and trying to helping people flourish.
The author of eight books (Psychotherapy Case Studies: Escaping the Prison You Didn’t Know You Were In; Meditative Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Pathways to Healing and Transformation; A Psychoanalysis for Our Time; The Good Life; Psychotherapy and Buddhism; The Art of Flourishing; Meditative Psychotherapy; and Practicing Meditative Psychotherapy), he has taught at various psychoanalytic institutes, meditation and yoga centers, and lectured around the country and abroad on the integration of psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and meditation.
Dr. Rubin is most interested in a pluralistic psychoanalysis that respects the genuine insights and practices from each analytic tradition and draws on the best that has been thought and said from all psychoanalytic schools as well as history, art, literature, anthropology and anything that illuminates the human condition. His pioneering approach to therapy was described by Chip Brown in a 2009 NYT article as “Enlightenment Therapy.” More information is on Dr. Rubin’s website: https://www.drjeffreyrubin.com/. Contact Dr. Rubin by email at jeffreyrubinphd@gmail.com.