Envious and Deceived: How Classical Education and Psychoanalysis Could Have Saved Us
Throughout his life, J. J. Penniman has immersed himself in humanist education. As an amateur Classics scholar, he has sung Homer in the original Greek to both public and scholarly audiences, lectured at the Classical Association of New England Summer Institute, and published an original translation of an anciently debated passage in Plato’s Timaeus for The Classical Journal. As a psychoanalyst, now in his 46th year of practice, he has published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and the Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis. He trained psychology interns and psychiatric residents in psychoanalytic therapy for thirty years. In a lighter vein, the author, as a middling bridge player, produced a feuilleton for The Daily Bulletin, the newspaper of the American Contract Bridge League Championships. He also devotes two hours weekly to math. Penniman and his wife live in the shadows of New Hampshire’s Presidential Range.
We’re trapped in a dying habitat—all 8.2 billion of us. Why did we do this to ourselves? Envious and Deceived: How Classical Education and Psychoanalysis Could Have Saved Us is a study of society’s suicide. It shows how humanity’s envy and self-deception let it destroy our habitat by overpopulation. Classical Education and Psychoanalysis were meant to curtail self-deception. But we rejected both institutions because they imposed tensions, stresses, or anxieties intolerable to a critical mass of society. Without those mentors, the culture could indulge its denial of deadly realities. The deadliest reality, the most anthrocidal, was overshoot – humanity’s explosion into a behemoth bio-economic system far too large for the earth to sustain.
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