Psychohistory: Movement or Discipline?

An intellectual movement or field is not one distinct discipline with one scientific paradigm. A discipline may have one distinct paradigm or it may have five or six paradigms and still maintain a level of scientific unity. Also, applied work akin to standard forms of psychotherapy does not lend itself to one general meta-paradigm. Today the study of psychohistory does not so much rep-

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resent one discipline as one movement. Regardless of whether psychohistory moves in the direction of a discipline or not it will still require a big tent because it does not have one paradigm. That would mean that psychohistorical work might be done by people who are not necessarily trained in psychohistory. I accept the fact that a big tent is more likely to serve my own needs. The key dividing line seems to be: Either maintain a very big tent or define the boundaries more clearly and create a professional identity that encompasses both scholarship and applied work but that has very explicit boundaries.

Establishing clear intellectual boundaries does not necessarily mean having one and only one framework or meta-paradigm. Once the decision has been made to not introduce supernatural phenomena into a science, the next major level of theorizing is that of the meta-paradigms. It was once thought a science will by definition have only one paradigm. But there are social sciences where that is not the case, as in my field of sociology. In sociological theory today there are five meta-paradigms: structuralist, interactionist, critical, feminist, and postmodernist. The five do not communicate well with one another and it is well understood that sociology is not one discipline but a “multi-disciplinary” approach. Contemporary neo-classical economics is the only social science that is unified around one meta-paradigm: marginal utility theory and the Austrian school approach. Economics has one meta-paradigm, for the most part, but sociology, which does not, is nevertheless still often considered a discipline as well.

In psychohistory there is not just one meta-paradigm. There are around six different meta-paradigms. Therefore, psychohistory is not all that different from sociology or psychology. But why are the American Sociological Association (ASA) or the American Psychological Association (APA) able to mount conferences with more than 8,000 people presenting papers while the International Psychohistorical Association rarely attracts more than a few hundred people? I think the key is academic employment. Members of the ASA are almost all employed as sociologists. Members of the APA are almost all employed as psychologists. However, there are very few job opportunities for freshly minted PhD’s in psychohistory. All of that points to a “movement” rather than a discipline, or even interdiscipline in the strict sense. That would have to be improved.

It has been my experience following the Google Listserv

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of Clio’s Psyche for about three years that the same fundamental issues are discussed and debated (sometimes heatedly) over and over again, with seemingly very little general delineation of clear disciplinary boundaries. It is not so much a case of five or six different meta-paradigms competing against one another. It is more a matter of people continually starting from scratch and bringing all kinds of extraneous matters into the discussion. Sometimes there may be an argument by authority where the views of Freud, Lloyd deMause, Charles B. Strozier, Vamik Volkan, or another famous thinker are seen as the key to solving a dispute. No one thinker has the same kind of authority in psychohistory that Karl Marx has for critical theorists in sociology or that Dorothy Smith has for feminist sociologists.

A clear decision is required. If a decision is made to no longer accept the notion of a big tent approach and have a cluster of meta-paradigms, then that has to be articulated. Specific jobs should then be made available. Since professionalization is not likely, a strategy for the next decade might be to better articulate the six meta-paradigms. What would it mean to be a Freudian rather than, say, a Liftonian psychohistorian?

For those of us who are not professional psychohistorians, scholarly or applied, it would mean being excluded to some extent, but for psychohistorians who view the psychohistorical approach as their main identity as a scholar and/or therapist, it is not possible to maintain both paths at the same time without a considerable degree of frustration. My own meta-paradigmatic position in sociological theory and methodology is interpretive sociology and I feel the main authority should be Max Weber, but there are others in the same discipline who have other candidates in mind for the key thinker associated with interpretive sociology, as opposed to structuralist, critical, feminist, and postmodernist sociology. My own interpretive sociology has been based on Max Weber and Randall Collins. If a decision is made that psychohistory is clearly not a discipline, then articulation of six meta-paradigms would allow for greater clarity. But as a “field” or “movement,” psychohistory would still not be all that different from contemporary sociology or psychology.

The key is employment possibilities. Today PhD students who are involved in interdisciplinary programs often find that solid employment possibilities tend to be available primarily to those who have degrees in one discipline. Despite all of the virtues of a

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movement or interdisciplinary approach, it is nevertheless still the case that employment opportunities are often limited to people with degrees clearly designated as part of one discipline, from anthropology to zoology. My own work on theory and methodology has attempted to refine the ways in which we discuss sociology as one discipline. Psychohistorians will definitely have to make some clear choices if the movement or discipline is going to prosper in the future.

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