Psychological and Historical Dialogue

Review of Christian Tileagă and Jovan Byford’s Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations, Foreword by Kenneth J. Gergen (Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-1-107-03431-0, hardcover, 324 pages, $99.

The aim of this anthology is to stimulate dialogue between history and psychology. It succeeds admirably. The editors divide 13 chapters into three parts (plus a solid Introduction and outstanding Conclusion). “Theoretical Dialogues”—five essays—focuses on general theoretical matters, though they often contain practical suggestions. Two “empirical dialogues” sections—four chapters

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each—focus on “doing,” though they contain theoretical overviews. This mix of theory with empirical case studies is one of the strengths of the volume.

The aim of this anthology is to stimulate dialogue between history and psychology. It succeeds admirably. The editors divide 13 chapters into three parts (plus a solid Introduction and outstanding Conclusion). “Theoretical Dialogues”—five essays—focuses on general theoretical matters, though they often contain practical suggestions. Two “empirical dialogues” sections—four chapters each—focus on “doing,” though they contain theoretical overviews. This mix of theory with empirical case studies is one of the strengths of the volume.

Topics range from the promise and problems of interdisciplinary study to matters of history and memory, neurobiology, identity, emotions, foreign policy, self-esteem, stereotypes, and prejudice. Footnotes, located conveniently at the bottom of each page, are comprehensive and include citations from pertinent periodical literature as well as significant books. They provide valuable overviews.

The contributors’ erudition is uniformly impressive, their expertise balanced equally between history and psychology, with most of the psychologists coming from social psychology. Judging from the amount of marginalia I left on nearly every page, each chapter deserves extended comment. I often felt that particular chapters, sometimes the book as a whole, deserved full symposia on their own. Space limitations here require me to focus on a couple of chapters with special relevance to psychohistory.

I particularly liked historian Joan W. Scott’s “The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History.” (See the interview with Professor Scott in this issue on page 178.) In this chapter, published earlier as an essay in History & Theory, Scott, a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, finds many points of commonality and “seeming” commonality between history and psychoanalysis. She invokes familiar names: William Langer, Peter Loewenberg, and John Demos; she cites a neglected essay by intellectual historian Frank Manuel in a 1971 issue of Daedalus. She shows how psychohistory, along with the historians of the 1970s, worked to make itself compatible with mainstream history by abandoning the centrality of sexuality, replacing it with issues of power. She discusses British historian Lyndal Roper’s recent use of “a dynamic model of the unconscious” to understand Western civilization’s early-modern witch craze, concluding, nevertheless, that despite some areas of overlap, psychoanalysis and history cling to separate boundaries (60).

There “is no easy resolution to this lack of fit between the disciplines,” she concludes, suggesting that the study of fantasies may be one way of beginning to bridge the gap. (Of course, psychohistorians have been studying fantasies for decades). Scott proposes counterintuitively that it may be the very lack of fit that

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“provides the ground for continued conversation and debate.” Indeed, “Recognizing these limits can have the paradoxical effect not of securing boundaries but of loosening them,” thus opening the way to creative collaborative work (63).

My guess is that Scott’s ideas will come as news to most historians who are even more intent on closing ranks against psychologically-oriented history while maintaining the fiction that they are open to all approaches. The recent decision by the American Historical Association to remove psychohistory as a historical specialty has reinforced the official barrier between disciplines, though it has not dulled the optimism of historian and psychoanalyst Paul Elovitz.

In “The Success and Obstacles to the Interdisciplinary Marriage of Psychology and History,” Elovitz, a professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey and editor of this journal, offers up one of the stronger chapters of the book. (Author’s note: Elovitz thanks this reviewer as one of the readers of an earlier version of his chapter.) His essay, an outstanding overview, is a must read starting-point for any comprehensive grasp of psychohistory’s history. Especially helpful are his references to neglected early pioneers such as Preserved Smith (also noted by Scott), James Harvey Robinson, neurologist Leon Pierce Clark, historian Harry Elmer Barnes, Freud’s flawed histories, and a number of early analysts who tried their hand at applied psychoanalysis. Prominent practitioners who later joined the “interdisciplinary marriage” are treated judiciously. An especially valuable part of the chapter covers the history of psychohistorical organizations and publications, many still going strong.

Elovitz’ chapter builds a convincing case for psychohistory’s moderate but continuing success. The book’s editors correctly assert in their conclusion that though it “ended up marginalized by both mainstream psychology and mainstream history,” psychohistory has “survived in spite of this, and thrived on the periphery of both disciplines” (293).

This will surprise historian Rob Boddice. His chapter, “The Affective Turn: Historicizing the Emotions,” considers the last volume of Peter Gay’s five volume Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (published 1984-1998) to be psychohistory’s last gasp, calling Gay himself “a rare survivor of a defunct sub-discipline” (149).

Considering Elovitz’s chapter, this raises the question of

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how much psychohistory Boddice has actually read and makes one question if Boddice, who teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin), has ever heard of the Gesellschaft für Psychohistorie und Politische Psychologie.

Attempts by historians to validate the history of emotions such as Boddice’s are a positive sign, yet his essay falls into the same trap as other recent efforts (see the lengthy dialogue in the December 2012 issue of the American Historical Review) where historians have over-intellectualized, focused on method, and done what amounts to intellectual history by studying historical ideas about emotions rather than the emotions themselves, all the while pretending that both psychoanalysis and psychohistory don’t exist.

Nevertheless, I am glad the editors included this chapter in the book. Essays such as this have to be counted as part of the interdisciplinary dialogue since they illustrate what can go badly wrong when scholars miss the point or make egregious errors (Boddice writes about Darwin without ever mentioning the work of psychiatrist and psychohistorian Ralph Colp) and can reveal hidden resistances to the very dialogues we are supposed to be serving.

Two other chapters deserve special mention: Mark Knights’ “Historical Stereotypes and Histories of Stereotypes” with its illustrations and analyses of late 18^th and early 19^th century British cartoons and Cathie Carmichael’s “Psychology, the Viennese Legacy and the Construction of Identity in the Former Yugoslavia,” which shows how psychology was misused to build and reinforce ethnic hatreds in the Croatian-Serbian-Muslim conflicts of the 1990s.

In sum, this book is fascinating, inspiring, provocative, frustrating, annoying, and anger-provoking. In other words, totally engaging. It is strongly recommended for anyone involved in interdisciplinary study and is a must read for those approaching psychological history from either history or psychology.

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