Author, Political Psychologist, Psychoanalyst

About Stephen J. Ducat

author stephen ducat

I am an author, political psychologist, psychoanalyst, and former psychology professor in the School of Humanities at New College of California, where I taught courses in political psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and psychohistory. My doctorate is from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. I completed my psychoanalytic training at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and am a licensed psychologist in California and Oregon.

From the beginning of my career as a psychologist and writer, I have been ceaselessly plagued by what drives people to support autocrats and persecute out-groups, even at the cost of their material self-interest. My history of publications reflects those long-standing concerns. For several years, the political psychology blog I wrote for HuffPost took up those questions from various perspectives, one of which was selected for the anthology Race in William Shakespeare’s Othelloo (Greenhaven Press, 2012). A version of another appeared among a collection of essays in River of Fire: Commons, Crisis, and the Imagination (Pumping Station, 2016), along with contributions by Mike Davis and Rebecca Solnit.

My last book, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity (Beacon Press), was an exploration of the role of femiphobia, male fear of the feminine, in men's political behavior. Though published in 2005, it remains in print, enjoys an enthusiastic readership among the general public, and still finds a place on syllabi nationwide. My new Substack, Minding Politics, features wide-ranging essays on the psychology of public life. In my forthcoming book, Hatreds We Love: The Psychology of Political Tribalism in Post-Truth America, I examine an often-overlooked motive that sometimes can be more compelling than life itself – our psychological investment in group membership.

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