Repeat Performances

Rudolph Binion, the author of my all-time favorite psychohistorical essay, “Repeat Performance: Leopold III and Belgian Neutrality” (1969), has also produced path-breaking book-length studies on Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple (1968) and on Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism (Hitler Among the Germans, 1976). His literary essays in Sounding the Classics (1997), his work on late Nineteenth-century European demography, his recent essay on the psychological repercussions of the Black Death in Western Civilization, and his little gem on Bismarck in a recent Clio’s Psyche are also models of the best scholarship psychological history has to offer.

The range of psychohistorical subjects he has tackled over the last four decades is impressive. He has moved from detailed psychobiography to the group processes at work in several kinds of groups. He’s written importantly on psychohistorical method. This time out he returns to psychobiography while putting the Pétain-de Gaulle connection into a group-psychohistorical setting.

Although some readers may take it for granted, I think it’s important to take special note of this aspect of his essay since there’s been a tendency among psychobiographers to focus only, or primarily, on individuals to the exclusion of group psychological factors. In these studies, the psychobiographical subject is either presented “naked”—without historical referents at all, or is plunked down into a historical milieu that is indeed historical but not psychohistorical, or not psychohistorical enough. (Waite’s study of Hitler, The Psychopathic God, so valuable in many other ways, is a case in point.)

Hence, an unmentioned subtext in all of Binion’s work—I find it there implicitly—is to insist, rightly, that psychobiography must be located in group-psychohistorical, not just historical contexts, which he does again in “De Gaulle as Pétain,” (De Gaulle is driven for personal reasons as much as “France” is driven by its own related, but separate, group reasons, the two connecting on the historical stage.)

The other, more important dimension of Binion’s work is, of course, his abiding emphasis on the centrality of trauma, specifically adult trauma, which ties together his studies of diverse topics and has been the mainstay of his pioneering research. It is interestingly and convincingly developed again in “De Gaulle as Pétain,” not from theory, but—as he, and all historians rightly insist—by emerging from the documentary evidence. The overt and subtle connections he finds in the sources, and how he weaves them together with repetitions and causes, is to me is the most compelling part of his work.

Of course, it’s not just trauma that counts—historians without psychology constantly misuse the term—but it is the possibility of the traumatic event leading to eventual traumatic reliving, or continued relivings, as Binion shows again in this essay. It’s what makes trauma important to history. It shows up particularly convincingly in its consequences.

Psychohistorians have for years asserted that by emphasizing the irrational, the emotional, and the unconscious, psychohistory’s main goal has been to deepen and enlarge the understanding of human motivation, namely the “Why?” of history. I suggest that this focus on motivation may have accidentally led us to think too much of causes, too little of consequences. Perhaps we should consider the possibility—I also find it implicit in Binion’s essay—that we begin to stress consequences as much as causes, that, in fact, they’re crucial to proving our psychohistorical case.

Statements about cause are traditionally based on what historical persons have said, and, for psychohistorians, on the dreams, fantasies, and fears we find explicitly and implicitly buried in the historical documents. But these should not be our only sources for corroborating evidence. Outcomes matter too.

For most historians without psychology, outcomes are the result of conscious planning, or

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conscious planning run amuck, or unforeseen circumstances, or blunders by ill-informed or stupid leaders, never the result of unconscious intent.

To make our psychohistorical case, we need more often and self-consciously to point to consequences, including the contradictions between what people say and what they’re actually doing, between the reasons they give for what they’re doing, and what actually “happens” to them when they do it. Those with insight know that people sometimes get what they unconsciously wish for even when they don’t know they want it or don’t believe they’re doing anything to get it.

It’s as hard for non-psychological historians as for any psychologically defensive person to believe that people, groups as well as individuals, sometimes arrange the world so that things turn out the way they say they don’t want them to turn out. Because it is sometimes impossible to conclusively prove unconscious wishes from available documentary evidence focused on causes, it is possible to argue that the proof of an unconscious process also comes from outcomes, especially when the repetitions producing those outcomes lead to self-defeating or self-destructive behavior. If we can help others to see in this way, the corroborating sources available to historians for understanding unconscious processes can multiply exponentially. Hence, the proof for traumatic reliving—seeing the outcomes of behavior as the result of unconsciously driven tendencies—serves a purpose in Binion’s current essay beyond the immediate needs of that essay.

Part of the essay’s broader significance lies as well in the notion of contingency. It may seem paradoxical but can be argued that an understanding of traumatic reliving helps avoid the heavy hand of inevitability demanded by other kinds of psychohistorical models. While the compulsion to relive sets up a certain degree of determinism, flexibility is also possible. I don’t find this especially evident in Binion’s “De Gaulle as Pétain” as much as in his earlier Hitler work, where adult trauma and re-traumatization take place in a narrative framework historians would find more congenial.

I’m not a fan of the “What if?” school of history but do think counterfactuals may, at times, serve a purpose. For the psychological origins of Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism it’s possible to argue that: if Hitler’s father Alois wasn’t so much older than his mother Klara; if Alois didn’t have two children from an earlier marriage; if Klara had not suffered the traumatic loss of her three children to diphtheria within six weeks of one another; if Adolf didn’t then become the apple of her eye; if the deep symbiosis between them had been modified by a more normal separation-individuation; if Klara didn’t develop breast cancer; if Dr. Bloch hadn’t treated it with iodoform; if Klara did not suffer from an iodoform overdose; if Hitler did not sit continuously at the side of her death bed; if he had been prevented from symbiotically absorbing the symptoms of her iodoform overdose; if he did not re-experience the symptoms of that overdose when he was wounded by mustard gas attack in October 1918; if, upon his recovery, the traumatic news did not suddenly arrive that Germany had lost the war; and if Dr. Bloch was not a Jew, it’s possible to imagine that Hitler could have emerged from World War I as traumatized as any other veteran, but neither more nor less anti-Semitic than any other German. This complex chain of events appeals to the historian in me.

Other types of psychohistory dogmatically assert several simple Iron Laws of Psychohistory—having to do with group fantasy “cycles,” or conditionings of childhood, or speculations about fetal or birth traumas. They’re as unlikely to convince historians as they are unlikely to account for the role of contingency, which must be given a place in history if history is to reflect reality in any real sense.

This is not to diminish the compulsive need for trauma to be reenacted. Despite recent strivings in the Culture Wars to denounce, devalue, even destroy the very notion of trauma, its existence, and the existence of traumatic reliving can be proven phenomenologically. The evidence shows that trauma is not the same for all people at all times, but is important for some people at crucial times. History repeats itself, at least once in a while. Anything that moves us to a better understand why things happen needs to be included as part of history’s and psychological history’s methodological and conceptual framework.

I assume that some readers will wonder why I’ve spent time making what to them may be obvious, even mundane, comments. I’ve done so because, predictably, some of my fellow psychological histori-

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ans will be as reluctant as my fellow historians to put traumatic reliving at center stage since their understanding of the world is based on one or another of the psychological models which have served them well for a long time. These include biologically inherited, life-long aggressive impulses, the denial of death, symbolic immortality, the failure of good enough parenting, child abuse both physical and emotional, the universality of incest, rage against mommy, Oedipal conflicts, a failure to separate and individuate, pre-Oedipal conflicts, and the like.

I’m not sure that it’s only, or mainly, adult traumatic reliving which runs history, but after four decades of studying modern history and looking for psychological causes I think that traumatic reliving best explains the persistent phenomenon, in individuals and groups, which has become for me the central question of historical study: why people act in ways which bring about the very things they’re most trying to avoid.

It’s not a new question, certainly, and is familiar to all of us. It has many dimensions, and can be explained in several ways, traumatic reliving among them. Pronouncements that historical trauma studies are not psychohistory, that everything derives from the history of childhood, are not only ungenerous, but off the mark. Childhood history is important: I’ve said so many times and have shown links between historical childhoods and historical events in my own writing. But denouncing traumatic reliving from within the ranks of psychohistory is especially serious. It echoes charges from the larger culture, and it is clear that one reason for the denunciations of trauma in the larger post-9/11 world is precisely because we live in a post-9/11 world. Our media continually call the events of 9/11 traumatic while at the same time asserting that the notion of trauma is controversial, or completely bankrupt. By aiming at making trauma problematic at best, they feed our need for collective denial.

In a world presumably waging a “War Against Terror,” in a world in which people can bring about the very thing they most want to avoid, we no longer have the luxury of treating studies of traumatic reliving casually, or as mere intellectual games, or as simply another point of view. Nor do we have the luxury of declaring them neither historical nor psychohistorical. “De Gaulle as Pétain” adds another chapter to an illustrious body of work whose lessons we ignore at our peril.

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