Overcoming Resistance to Comparative, Psychological, and Trauma History

History is a mystery filled with clues, far too many to fit

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neatly into any one box. They present historians with an enormous complexity, paradoxically one of the joys as well as frustrations of historical research. All of this is well known and widely accepted.

Most historians make a public point of saying they welcome all kinds of historical approaches, imagining themselves as Big Tent historians, when in practice, as every psychologically-oriented writer knows, my fellow historians almost universally condemn or ignore psychologically-informed historical writing. This too is well known.

All psychological writing is then an implicit invitation to historians to consider again the irrational and the unconscious. People outside the historical profession almost always see this psychological approach to history as an exemplary application of common sense and are surprised to learn that historians do not automatically include psychological considerations in their narratives.

What is at stake for historians here (it’s worth repeating) is their need to hold fast to two of the dogmas drummed into us in graduate school: that there are no lessons in history; and that history does not repeat itself. Each historical event, we were told, is unique.

Both dogmas can be seen as defenses against deep emotional understanding and have the effect of relegating “irrelevant” historical study to the dust bin. In addition, and despite the 30-year existence of a flourishing professional organization of comparative history, historians rarely do comparative work, focusing their research instead almost exclusively on narrow topics with limited timeframes. I was guided here by one of Freud’s statements that one of the advantages of psychoanalysis is to discover connections between things that have hitherto been unconnected.

One goal of my essay, as I think I made clear, was to demonstrate that blind spots are far more frequent in history than is usually acknowledged and to remind us once again that the presumptions and built-in indoctrination my fellow historians carry inside themselves means that historical understanding, and the way historians practice their craft, suffer from the repeated failure—one of their own blind spots—to include the irrational and the unconscious in their considerations. I can’t see why any respondent

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would object to this, and as I read their responses none have.

Objections predictably range across the spectrum. Some commentators find the whole notion of traumatic reliving at fault, others are willing to concede this or that historical example may be driven by a compulsion to relive, while other events, they claim, most assuredly are not. This or that event, they assert, is the result of rational considerations.

Of course, every event must be studied on its own terms, rational considerations—including the rationalizations offered by participants and later historians—understood as part of the whole picture. Still, psychological historians have to take a particularly hard-nosed approach to every event. We must insist that emotional outcomes count and that sometimes they are the ones that count the most.

Not all surprises in history are the result of unconscious intentions, of course: among historical groups and decision-makers, arrogance, ignorance and stupidity count too. But when several major U.S. diplomatic and military crises in the last half of the 20^th century are repeatedly accompanied by the experience of a collective surprise it seems only logical to consider that the need to experience surprise is one of the emotionally desired outcomes, especially when foreknowledge of conditions pointing to the likelihood of the event taking place are particularly widespread.

We must also insist that what is sold by participants and historians as a rational decision may in fact have an unconscious intention, or come in some way to feed a desired unconscious outcome. Rational psychological processes on one level do not necessarily exclude irrational motivation on another level, as some of the respondents seem to assert when they offer alternative explanations for what seems a clear repetitive pattern. Though there are always alternative explanations, it’s our job as psychological historians to disentangle the rational from the irrational, our own denial from the piece of reality we can see, and decide on the basis of the evidence which ones are connected to unconscious intentionality. Only careful and extensive immersion in the sources can do that.

It is also incumbent upon the trauma historian to produce massive documentary evidence in each case. To even begin to con-

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vince historians of the reality of individual and collective trauma requires extensive evidence documenting the emotional consequences of each specific trauma, providing sufficient evidence to show that the consequences of the trauma persist over time, and giving extensive evidence showing how, exactly, the trauma produced the historical event it eventually caused.

The present essay is broad in scope and long in chronology. My charge from the editor was to produce an essay of no more than 4,000 words that might serve to stimulate commentary for a symposium. While I am convinced that the repetitive pattern of diplomatic and military crises I have presented is real and needs considering, I imagined the essay as a modest thought-piece designed to stimulate discussion. Clearly, more evidence is needed for each assertion and will be forthcoming in the book-length study of the traumatic consequences of the Second World War, which I am currently completing.

Several respondents take me to task for what they see as my failure to distinguish different kinds of motives resulting in the denial that produces blind spots. I never intended for each example to be identical and thought different motives were sufficiently implicit in the Galland-Göring exchange and in the McNamara Westmoreland deception to indicate that some kinds of denial, and the production of blind spots in individual and even collective cases produced by them, are motivated by concerns about keeping one’s job or simply remaining in the leader’s favor. My mention of the younger Bush and Iraq was meant to move readers along to the phenomenon of the “What-I-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-me” position then on to the downright irrational denials and complete amnesia regarding Russia practiced in the deliberations of the AustroHungarian General Staff before 1914, which I assumed sufficiently set the stage for the rest of the article.

Issues of what is remembered in history and what is forgotten have been a major part of historical research for quite some time. Historians have built up an impressive literature on the subject over the past three decades or more. It seems obligatory for each and every study to ritualistically invoke the ideas of French scholar Maurice Holbwachs as a theoretical underpinning, which tends to guide the explanations of historians in the direction of ra-

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tional models. Though the word trauma appears in the writings of historians often enough—it’s invoked for stylistic reasons—as a causal factor in historical events, real trauma is nowhere to be found. The overlooked question of traumatic memory needs to find a place in the discussion here.

Nowhere do commentators invoke consideration of the neurological bases of traumatic memories. The role the of non-verbal nervous system, the amygdala, and the like, which though still far from being well understood are now much better understood through brain scans and other research techniques. Full discussion of what these findings are, details of the physiological realities of how and where traumatic memories are stored and how and when traumatic compulsions to act out are triggered, may serve to convince historians and some of the current symposium’s respondents that traumatic compulsive reenactments do in fact take place.

Some commentators also seem to mix-up the blind spots at work among individual leaders with those present among groups. Johnson and McNamara knew perfectly well what they were doing when they manipulated the Gulf of Tonkin incident into a pretext for enlarging the U.S. participation in the Vietnam War (though they pulled the wool over their own eyes to some extent in their rush to judgment). My intention here, as with the Cuban Missile Crisis, was to stress the surprise experienced by the U.S. population as a whole. This is the collective trauma reminiscent of Pearl Harbor trauma which everyone in the U.S. experienced in 1941 as a trauma—JFK included—even those in the know who expected an imminent attack that weekend. (Though Admiral Halsey and the crew of the Enterprise heard the radio communications as the attack took place, it did not prepare them in any way for the emotional shock of the massive devastation they saw as they steamed into Pearl the next day.)

It is always important to give credit where credit is due. It thus gives me great pleasure to remind readers of the pioneering role of the late Rudolph Binion in discovering and developing the notion and evidence for traumatic reliving in history, which he did so tellingly in different political and cultural contexts. It is also worth noting that when the notion of traumatic reliving is invoked at professional conferences on psychological history it is usually

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rejected out of hand as a historical cause, even (and perhaps especially) among psychologically sophisticated scholars.

The current exercise is no different and seems to have called forth long lists of the respondents’ own alternative theories, presumably the ones they have favored in their own work over the years; not that any of them are necessarily wrong, some of which might even causally compliment and interact with traumatic reenactments. Judging from the large number of thoughtful observations, one can hope that consideration of trauma as a causal agent is now significantly on the table, at least for psychological historians, one of the goals of my paper in the first place.

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