The Origins of My Psychohistorical Scholarship

I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the first of two sons and two daughters. My mother believed that parental permissiveness “spoils” children and my father told her to prevent the dangerous Oedipus complex by refraining from kissing the children and other expressions of affection. My two younger sisters and I minimized our parental affiliations by reading many books and by

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friendships outside the family. Our parents were authoritarian, but fortunately, they were ethical, prosperous, and in favor of self-reliance by adults. I therefore tried to attain adulthood as soon as possible.

History was a prominent part of my early learning, leading me to initially plan to become a historian. My first four years in elementary school were in a private school for children whose parents had the means to provide an elite education. The teachers exceeded my parents in permissiveness. Ancient Greek history was emphasized. The Book of Knowledge, a Christmas gift in my childhood, contained 20 volumes of articles on various topics. I especially enjoyed the articles on British history and governmental leaders. I gladly learned about the British transition from a powerful monarchy to a parliamentary democracy. In my Episcopalian boarding school in Concord, grades 9-10 featured courses covering ancient to modern European history. Grades 11-12 included an excellent course on contemporary public affairs soon after World War II.

My interest in psychology had an earlier origin. My father had a PhD in psychology and taught courses at Tufts College in eastern Massachusetts. In the autumn of 1939, when I was nine years old, I heard him discussing with a group of other adults the death of Sigmund Freud. A year or two afterward, I read in a magazine that Hitler was the leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (initials NSDAP in German). I remember my father’s reply when I asked him what that party’s name meant. “Some people use words to inform and educate. Other people use words to confuse and mislead. This is a good example of the latter purpose.” In 1942 he had enrolled as a student in Tufts Medical School to become a psychiatrist.

In my first two undergraduate college years at Harvard, I majored in history, intending to become a professor and researcher on British history. As a freshman, I became interested in Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History, which then included six of its ultimate 12 volumes. It described the rise, peak, and decline of diverse civilizations. A classmate directed me to Pieter Geyl, Toynbee’s Dutch historian critic, who argued that each civilization has a unique history and was therefore not subject to Toynbee’s theory of challenge and response. I realized that the task of historians is primarily to describe rather than explain.

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During the summer before my junior year in college, I attended lectures at Boston University by a South African psychologist. Contrary to most historians, he eloquently sought to explain human behavior. I changed my major to social relations, which combined social psychology, abnormal psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology. In my junior and senior undergraduate years, I read some of Sigmund Freud’s books, especially admiring The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). I had a Freudian psychoanalysis during most of my years in graduate school; my analyst said that my principal defense mechanism was isolation. I prevented becoming overwhelmed by anxiety by isolating myself from my problems and isolating different areas of my life from each other. Perhaps this is related to my remaining a bachelor.

After my doctoral degree in 1957, my father and I together wrote eight articles that were published in psychology and psychiatry journals. Relevant to traumatic experiences in early childhood was “Dependency in Adult Patients Following Early Childhood Bereavement” in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (1965). In Nature (1969, 1971), we reported that psychiatric illness was more frequent in “the baby of the family” and elsewhere we found that hospitalization for alcoholism was more frequent for the last of four or more children.

My interest in history induced me to apply my research to birth order in the childhood family of presidents of the United States. My article, “Birth Order and Paternal Namesake as Predictors of Affiliation With Predecessor by Presidents of The United States,” was in the first volume (number 2) of Political Psychology (1979). Most of the presidents were in the first half of a large family of four or more children. In a majority of families, either the future president or a brother was given the same first name as the father.

Two psychohistories of President Wilson that I value are quite informative and consistent with each other. Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House (1956) by Alexander and Juliette George focuses on the close friendship and subsequent accusation of betrayal by Wilson. Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (1966) by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt explains in detail his pattern of success, failure, and relationships. I have chosen to write various articles, rather than a book, on the presidents.

In 1978, I became a member of both the International

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Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA). I attended the first IPA meeting without proposing a paper and found Jacques Szaluta’s excellent psychobiography of French Marshal Petain to be memorable. I was struck by Lloyd deMause’s comment that contrary to most presidential mothers, President Eisenhower’s mother was preponderantly cheerful and Ike was smiling in an early picture. Her husband earned barely enough money to sustain the family, in which Ike was the third of seven sons.

After not attending the second and perhaps third IPA meetings, a letter from Paul Elovitz induced me to attend again and since then I attended and presented papers at subsequent annual meetings. This reflects my nearly lifelong desire to contribute to both psychology and history. I served as vice-president of the IPA and stepped into the presidency when Jay Gonen resigned for reasons of health.

Clio’s Psyche published in their September issue (2000) an interview of me by Paul H. Elovitz and Bob Lentz. Much of the dialogue was about the forthcoming presidential election between Republican George W. Bush and Democratic Vice President Al Gore. I have worked to apply psychohistory to all the subsequent Democratic and Republican nominees for president of the United States. I have also had a strong interest in the psychology of taxation; however, most of my IPA colleagues appear to avoid the topic of taxation.

For many years I have contributed to cross-cultural research, including analyses of customs in a world sample of 186 preindustrial societies. Psychological adaptations include type of marriage, which is polygyny in more than half of these societies, organization of communities, sources of food, commerce or warfare with nearby societies, and type of government. Historical changes of the societies are not adequately studied because the information is usually based on a book by a single ethnographer on a single community during a limited span of months or years.

A different cultural sample consists of the approximately 200 members of the United Nations. Features of their government, economy, resources, and environment are reported each year in the World Almanac, which is available at a low price. One of the topics is health. Each nation reports on the average life expectancy at birth in tenths of years, separately for males and females. I have

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recently recorded this and other quantitative information in the World Almanac of 2003 and 2018. The interval of 15 years provides a measure of historical change.

In both years, life expectancy was almost always several years longer for females than for males. For both genders, life expectancy was almost always several years longer in 2018 than in 2003. Therefore, life expectancy was predominantly longer for females in both years and predominantly longer in the more recent year for both genders.

Further examination of the life expectancies reveals that several nations in northeastern Europe have an unusually longer average life expectancy for females, more than 10 years. These nations include Russia, Poland, and Estonia. In these nations, alcohol consumption is unusually high by men. Most women drink less or abstain. I infer that the larger amount of alcohol consumption by men shortens their life expectancy. About 30 of my 280 publications have been on cross-cultural subjects.

My life revolves around scholarship. I am a fellow or member of a large number of professional organizations, presenting papers at numerous conferences throughout each year. I have also served as president of three non-psychohistorical groups. Most of my research and published writing have not been on psychohistory. My salary from the University of Pittsburgh, 1963-2001, was mostly for research on the behavior of albino rats. The research was supported by grants from the federal government. For ten of those years, 1967-1977, my salary was paid by a Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. I also taught pharmacology, physiology, and biostatistics. With a colleague I wrote the two volume book, Actions of Alcohol (1970), and I subsequently wrote articles about causes and prevention of alcoholism. With Alice Schlegel I wrote Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry (1991) and numerous articles.

I hope that my most important contributions to psychohistory are in the future. I would like to expand the analysis of life expectancy of males and females and other measures, and apply it to the members of the United Nations. Other potential projects include differential personal names of males and females, choices between empathy and self-focus in responses to emotional communications by a specified other person, and optimal sources of government revenues. I plan to continue my research and publications

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on presidents and birth order.

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