The United States' Search for Security: A Psychotherapist's Viewpoint

The author endeavors to understand the United States' experienced need for more military defense in the same way as a psychotherapist would attempt to understand the actions of a patent already armed to 'overkill' capacity and yet intent on pursuing ever more and more efficient violent means of defense — despite the attendant increasing risk of self-maiming and even perhaps self-destruction. Analysis points to a rigid focus by the United States on the Soviet Union with an apparent lack of appreciation for the implications to itself of the limits of the earth's carrying capacity. The author suggests that this latter threat may play a major role in producing the country's deep feelings of victimization. The Government may lack a firm institutional base from which to have a broad perspective of all global trends and thus set the stage for a displacement of focus from ecological forces — little known, abstract, difficult to under stand — to the U.S.S.R., which is a more easily-defined, concrete, and hopefully more manageable target.