Psychohistory and the Historians: 1970-2015

Psychological history refers to the scholarly work appearing in print and scholarly conferences from about 1970 on. The first reaction of historians to this new direction was enthusiastic acceptance. For those who took part in those heady days, the early ’70s looked like psychohistory’s Golden Era.

Since then, the relationship between history and psychohistory has gone through several phases. It was not long before critical attacks began, soon massive waves of them. At first those early criticisms were respectful, collegial, and sometimes intellectually acute. Some were fun. A caption-less cartoon appeared in The New Yorker showing a door labelled, “Psychohistory Ward.”

More impassioned arguments soon arrived as well, some heated, some angry, some cruel and demeaning. They came from everywhere: scholarly journals, comments at conferences, and even one’s own university. “Hey, psycho,” yelled one of my colleagues every time we passed in the hall (until I put a stop to it). Psychohistory triggered anger, as witnessed by the barbed commentaries of Jacques Barzun in Clio and the Doctors: History, Psycho-History and Quanto-History (1974) and David Stannard in Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (1980).

Wanting to be polite, most psychohistorians met these first critical assaults with respectful replies. We were looking to be legitimized by the “Big Daddies.” William Langer’s name was often invoked. A well-known Harvard University historian, Langer had said in his 1957 presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA) that an “iron curtain” separated psychology from history. He asked historians to integrate psychology and psychoanalysis in their work. References to Langer did little to legitimize psychohistory though, since most historians had long ago written off Langer’s address as coming from someone who had already lost his mind.

Sometimes psychohistorians brought the wrath of historians down upon themselves, defensively blaming historians for being “too defensive.” One self-defeating example was Lloyd deMause’s essay, “The Independence of Psychohistory,” published in his Jour-

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nal of Psychohistory in 1975, wherein he asserted psychohistory was a science and called historians astrologers.

Things weren’t all bad. An uneasy truce—a kind of grudging acceptance—emerged between historians and psychological historians in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Meetings were held, journals published, books appeared. Even the AHA allowed a panel or two at its conventions. Still, most members agreed with Columbia University historian Michael Marrus: “Leave motivation to the psychologists.” They did so, never citing the relevant findings of psychiatrists Bessel van der Kolk, Jerrold Post, or Vamik Volkan.

On the other hand, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has had a long and distinguished career. He proudly proclaims himself a “psychohistorian.” Judging by the number of times his book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986) has appeared in the bibliographies of studies on Nazism, it seems historians regard him as the most respectable of all psychohistorically-oriented scholars. Yet, despite his reputation, a New York Times book reviewer can call his work “psychobabble.” The sad truth is that while The Nazi Doctors sometimes appears in historians’ bibliographies, Lifton’s findings almost never show up in their narratives.

At the very moment when the most vocal critics were denouncing psychohistory, they were working a subtle sleight of hand behind the scenes to sneak psychology in through the back door. Sir Ian Kershaw is a good example. His two-volume Hitler biography has been widely praised. It is superb history but also openly anti-psychological and filled with denial. Early on Kershaw denounces psychohistory as too speculative. He introduces the word “psycho-historians” by breaking the offending thing at the hyphen, keeping it from contaminating his text by quarantining it in quotation marks. Then, while accepting that Hitler’s father, Alois, was a distant and abusive father who beat his son, Kershaw discounts the extensive scientific literature on the consequences of child abuse: “What the legacy for all this was for the way Adolf’s character developed,” he says, “must remain a matter of speculation” (Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, 1998, 11, 13). No sooner does he inform his readers that he wouldn’t be doing any psychology than he says of Hitler:

It takes little to imagine that his later patronizing contempt for the submissiveness of women, the

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thirst for dominance (and imagery of the Leader as stern authoritarian father figure), the inability to form deep personal relationships, his corresponding cold brutality towards humankind, and—not least—the capacity for hatred so profound that it must have reflected an immeasurable undercurrent of self-hatred concealed in the extreme narcissism that was its counterpoint must surely have had its roots in the subliminal influences of the young Adolf’s family circumstances (Hubris, 13).

This sounds like psychological history to me.

While historians were expropriating psychology without owning up to it, a new campaign was brewing in another quarter: the pretense that psychohistory didn’t exist at all. Preeminent here was the New York Review of Books (NYRB). The late Barbara Epstein, co-founder and co-editor of the Review, was a longtime friend of neurologist and psychohistorian Mary Coleman. At one of their periodic luncheon meetings, Epstein told Dr. Coleman, “Under no circumstances will any psychohistory ever be reviewed in the NYRB” (personal communication from Mary Coleman).

A particularly egregious example was how the NYRB treated the late historian Peter Gay’s multi-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, in which the Review referred to Gay as a “cultural historian,” ignoring his having written a biography of Freud using Freud’s own theories, training as a psychoanalyst, writing a book called Freud for Historians (1985), and calling himself a “psychoanalytically-informed historian” for much of his career.

Of course, today psychological history goes beyond classic psychoanalysis and draws on all of psychology. Still, the Review not only barred psychohistory from its pages, but also launched an active anti-psychological, anti-psychoanalytic campaign by periodically publishing the anti-psychological rants of Frederick Crews. (Crews once denounced Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery as feminist propaganda.) Whatever the individual causes behind Crews’ rants (a failed analyst perhaps?), by publishing them and pretending psychohistory doesn’t exist, the NYRB has done a disservice to both scholarship and the general public. None of this shows up in Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary on the Review called The 50 Year Argument (2014).

During these years the American Historical Review (AHR)

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refused to review prominent historian Rudolph Binion’s books on the grounds that they weren’t history (personal communication from Rudolph Binion). Binion was one of the many, including myself, who dropped their AHA membership. That left no one to advocate for psychological history in the AHA.

Just nine months ago, the editor of the American Historical Review reminded the profession that: “Historians have long been allergic to psychological explanations” (AHA Perspectives, December 2014, 19). While correct on the face of it, this is a misleading metaphor. Historians are not “allergic” at all. One can avoid peanuts and take medications to mitigate the effects of allergies.

The current phase of history’s relationship with psychohistory does not reflect reasoned intellectual discourse, though most historians would claim it does. It is irrational to denounce thousands of articles and books without having examined them. Among historians today we have one part elitist snobbism, one part revulsion to insight, and one part murderous rage. The self-appointed guardians of history’s sacred precincts are after nothing less than psychohistory’s complete annihilation.

This has been so for quite some time. A few years ago, historian and psychoanalyst Jacques Szaluta buttonholed the editor of the American Historical Review at an AHA convention and asked him if the Review would be publishing any psychohistory. The editor, backing away, mumbled something about “we don’t publish that stuff in the AHR” (personal communication from Jacques Szaluta). The history profession seems to attract individuals terrified of their feelings and frightened of insight. As Louis Armstrong once said, “There are some people that if they don’t know, you just can’t tell them.”

Nevertheless, we might want to take comfort from the newly published Cambridge University Press volume, Psychology and History (2014). In their conclusion the editors take a cue from the chapter written by Paul Elovitz to argue that psychohistory has “ended up marginalized by both mainstream psychology and mainstream history” but has “survived in spite of this, and thrived on the periphery of both disciplines” (293). This is not the fantasy historians have concocted for themselves. To the American Historical Association, as for the AHR, psychological history is not marginalized; it no longer exists. The heresy, cast aside, is a dead end that didn’t pan out. It is to be erased from memory, buried without cer-

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emony, history’s forgotten bastard child.

Sounds extreme? Here are some facts.

The AHA presents itself as a big tent scholarly organization proudly announcing it welcomes all kinds of historical scholarship. The AHA publishes a taxonomy of historical areas of interest, including more than 665 officially sanctioned specializations. Despite their claims of inclusion, it did not recognize one sub-field: psychohistory. After spending many years on the official list, it was dropped from the AHA’s taxonomy several years ago.

I lobbied the AHA president for its restoration, citing thousands of books, flourishing journals, robust scholarly organizations, and large college-class enrollments. She assured me psychohistory would be reinstated. Four years later, it has not happened. Nor is it likely to happen.

Five months ago, historian Lynn Hunt reiterated the AHA’s party line. Hunt is the author of a psychologically-oriented history, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), the chief author of a widely used college textbook, a past president of the AHA, and Distinguished Research Professor and Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History Emerita at UCLA. Her words carry weight. In the December 2014 AHR, Hunt declared “the demise of psychohistory.” The “iron curtain” mentioned by Langer in his 1957 presidential address “remains standing.” The “few attempts to build up a subfield of psychohistory,” she announces, have “collapsed under the weight of its [own] presuppositions” (AHR, Vol. 119, No. 5, December 2014, 1587).

The culprit behind these suppositions was of course the “false” ideas of psychoanalysis. The hidden message is clear: with Freud now safely dead and buried, historians can sleep soundly in the comfortable knowledge that psychohistory lies buried in the coffin with him.

The thing is, we’re still here. Who knows how long it will last? There is always the possibility of revival. Pendulums do swing back. Judith Herman reminds us that trauma needs rediscovering every generation.

My guess is that someone out there with a strong will for self-discovery and a desire to understand what moves beneath the surface will find ways to keep psychological history alive. I hope so. For now, we have today. That should be enough.

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