Comments on Crossroads and the IPA

I have reread in one sitting all the papers of my co-presenters and the observations of commentators. So many points move in so many directions as to leave my head reeling. I am confused and wonder: Does my confusion mirror the confusion of psychohistory at the crossroads? I think so.

Nearly half a century on, psychohistory is still—astonishingly—trying to find its identity. Is it a “field” or an “approach”? The answer, of course, is both. Rejected as a sub-field by historians, psychohistory is accepted as a subfield by political psychologists. No matter what the bulk of historians think, it stands as a subfield of history, too, and is also an approach that can be used across disciplines as a methodology offering different fields ways to think more deeply about meanings and motives.

Judging from the history of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA), psychohistory at the crossroads is not having a midlife crisis; the themes of identity and acceptance have been ongoing issues from day one. Group-process analysts Alice Eichholz and John Hartman proposed at the very first IPA convention in 1978 that the central group fantasy embraced by its 120 participants

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was “bar-mitzvah boy in a suit.”

It has been 38 years and it appears the IPA is still trying to find acceptance, still stuck—at least in part—in the uncertainties and confusions of adolescence. After all these years, the first theme of this year’s group-fantasy analysis at the end of the first day of the 2015 IPA convention was: Would the group survive another year? We have been asking that question for 38 years. Somehow we live on to meet again next year. The overall Crossroads Symposium seems to me to be part of this ongoing fear. Not only will psychohistory survive, how will it survive? And in what form?

Training programs are admirable and desirable. One thing that motivates Ken Fuchsman’s proposal is not only psychohistory’s continued existence, but an effort to find a solution for the continuing problem of maintaining standards of scholarship, a problem which has beset our enterprise from the beginning. Ken is quite right in quoting Arthur Marwick because some psychohistorians work backwards from theory towards cherry-picked evidence that fits. By contrast, those trained in traditional historiography always start with a critical analysis of large numbers of authenticated documents, moving from documents to interpretations, not the other way around. Too many psychohistorical works are also prone to make too much of too little, seizing a single behavior as proof of a grand design. These points have been made many times and presumably a professional training program would mitigate these trends.

In fact, past IPA conventions have actively worked to offset these negatives. Colleagues Lee Shneidman, Mel Kalfus, Bernard Flicker, Peter Petschauer, Robert Rousselle, Rudolph Binion, Jacques Szaluta, Paul Elovitz, along with myself, all trained historians, worked many panels over many years in informal efforts to raise consciousness about the rigors of historical scholarship, a main goal of Ken’s proposal.

I am uncertain, however, if the implementation of his proposal would attract more people to psychohistory since the main obstacle to enlarging membership, as some commentators have said, is the lack of available jobs. There are no professional openings; no one is hiring psychohistorians. People attracted to the approach are driven almost entirely by personal motives, intent on greater self-understanding and deeper insight.

There is clearly more to psychohistory than the International Psychohistorical Association, ironically named since it has never

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met abroad and only once in 38 tries has it met outside of New York City. While psychohistory may be practiced in other parts of the world (why was the robust Gesellshaft für Psychohistoristorie und Politische Psychologie not included in Simms’ list?), the fact is that the United States—ethnocentric bias acknowledged—remains the world’s center for psychohistorical research.

As a founding member, first convention chair, and twice president of the IPA, I know something about the organization’s history and its place in psychohistory’s past and present. Since the Crossroads papers under discussion were presented at the International Psychoanalytic Association conference in 2015, and because a number of commentators have used the IPA as a way of approaching several issues, I think it appropriate to offer a few more thoughts on it.

I have always considered my friend and colleague Jay Gonen one of psychohistory’s leading practitioners, not only for his pioneering work on Zionism but for his many other writings, especially “The Israeli Illusion of Omnipotence following the Six-Day War” (Journal of Psychohistory, Fall 1978), and his excellent 2003 book, The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler’s Utopian Barbarism. A faithful longtime supporter of the IPA, Jay was also present at its beginnings. He has attended more than a score of consecutive conventions. His comments need to be taken seriously, not dismissed as an example of “recent deMause bashing.”

As has been said many times, let us acknowledge that deMause has indeed done much for psychohistory and for the International Psychohistorical Association. But Gonen’s anecdote touches on an aspect of the IPA that has been swept under the rug for decades, just one example among hundreds of examples of behaviors privately discussed that have driven people away over the years and needlessly diminished our numbers. A true history of the IPA would have to recount the many slights, false starts, and humiliations that have sabotaged the group’s full potential. Assessing “psychohistory at the crossroads” needs to acknowledge these past events and finally guard against repeating them in the future.

In some respects, the IPA looks suspiciously like a cult. To the extent to which that is true, I can personally attest to the vigorous efforts of many who have worked continuously over the years to change that aspect of the culture. Change has proven difficult, a true practical lesson in the persistent resistance of group-fantasy,

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though there have been a number of successes.

Part of the reason for this cult-like dimension is implicit in Paul Elovitz’ comparison of the history of psychohistory with the early history of psychoanalysis, an appropriate comparison considering the conscious efforts to imitate, one might even say re-create—in reality as well as fantasy—the history of early psychoanalysis as revealed in the words and actions of deMause, Caspar Schmidt, and Henry Ebel, a psychohistory of psychohistory yet to be written.

That the IPA, like early psychoanalysis, looks at times cult-like does not take away from its role as a place where people have convened to see and make friends, socialize with like-minded scholars, and give and hear stimulating papers not likely heard elsewhere. This is obvious. For many years it was what kept me involved and coming back until, like Jay, I finally grew disillusioned and withdrew from the organization. An appeal by Denis O’Keefe happily brought me back a few years ago. The past three conventions have been enjoyable, creative, and stimulating. For the first time in many years they have left me with a cautious optimism about psychohistory’s future.

Calls for new directions are always welcome. Denis O’Keefe has quietly developed what I think may prove to be a significant area of future research with his yet unpublished in-depth studies of the unconscious, self-defeating, and potentially destructive fantasies molding social policy in the United States, including the ways in which the structures and internal contradictions of those policies sabotage outcomes. He is almost single-handedly inventing a new field of psychological study.

Much of the past and present research in psychohistory has focused on the pathological and the political. I too wish to see the addition of more work on adjustment, healing, creativity, and the arts. Still, some who call for studies of creativity and the arts have not done their homework, ignoring the work already done by Andrew Brink, Carol Ravenal, Danielle Knafo, Tom Artin, Susan Gregory, Henry Lawton, Jacques Szaluta, and Dan Dervin, especially his important and nearly forgotten study, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema (1985).

Psychoanalysis itself may be poised for a comeback. A major part of the anti-Freudian crusade of the last 30 years was centered on the assertion that psychoanalysis wasn’t “scientific.” All

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such discussions scrupulously ignored Fisher and Greenberg’s The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy (1977) and their companion volume The Scientific Evaluation of Freud’s Theories and Therapy: A Book of Readings (1978), which would have contradicted the critics. Today, some of Freud’s theories and observations are beginning to find physiological corroboration from the breakthrough findings of modern neuroscience. Some historians are even calling for the development of something called “neurohistory.”

I also know from discussions with a number of historians—Thomas Kohut for one—that some historians have come to believe enough psychological and psychoanalytic insight has found its way into the writings of historians as to make a special field of psychohistory irrelevant. Perhaps, though there are stirrings from history that a new field is emerging, or re-emerging, the history of emotions, albeit without mention of Freud, psychoanalysis, or psychohistory.

Some of this suggests psychohistory as a self-conscious field may be eroding, perhaps even disappearing. One commentator notes that psychohistory is being absorbed by psychobiography, becoming part of psychology. This is a plausible scenario, though I would hate to see the significant work done on group psychohistory, including the consequences of group trauma, abandoned in the process, unless sociology was ready to step in and absorb it.

When the IPA began, historians comprised 75% of its membership. Today, half a dozen to a dozen historians remain. Most convention presenters now come from psychology, psychotherapy, social work, or one or another of the social sciences. These numbers suggest that psychohistory at the crossroads may begin walking down several paths at once. Or, it just might happen that our approach may be absorbed into psychology entirely. That might not be such a bad thing.

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