Persona: Psychodynamic and Sociological Dimensions of a Project on US Activism and Political Violence

Abstract

In 1985, I began a series of interviews with Judy Clark, a 1960s radical serving a 75-year to life prison sentence. Over three decades, the project evolved into a four-nation, longitudinal study of clandestine organizations, political violence, and New Left protest. This self-reflexive narrative essay revisits the study’s psychodynamic origins, and illustrates how fantasy was a motivational force in selecting the research subject. It uses the psychoanalytic concept of “splitting” to explain how Clark and the cohort of women engaged in insurgency politics tried to balance the irreconcilable demands of their obligations as a revolutionary and their personal lives as wives, daughters, and mothers. It describes how processes of transference and counter-transference operated in building a transformative relationship between Clark and myself through which Clark began to address this “split” and nurture parts of a “new” self. Finally, the essay reveals how disciplinary pressures and incentives within academic sociology and, more specifically, in the field of social movement research, suppressed—but could not erase—the psychodynamic dimensions of the study.