From History to Psychohistory: A Personal Journey Revisited

Since I recently published a short piece in ​Clio’s Psyche​ (Vol. 25, no. 2, 178-183) on my external road to psychohistory, I thought for the current project it might be helpful to recount something of my early inner road to psychohistory. It was the spring of 1978. I was preparing the program for the first Annual Convention of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) and teaching history and psychohistory full-time. I was also putting the finishing touches to an essay called, “From History to Psychohistory: A Personal Journey.”

A surge of academic attacks on psychohistory—beyond the normal range—prompted me to want to know what internal demons were suddenly driving my colleagues to furies of passionate denunciation. Could such an exploration illuminate my own tortured journey to psychohistory? What in the study of the past was too precious to give up? What in psychohistory was too frightening to accept?

For clues, I turned to the words of the critics themselves, looked to my experiences in academia as an undergraduate, graduate student, and faculty member, and drew upon the long, difficult years I’d spent struggling with the ambivalences and ambiguities of my own resistance. Disciplined subjectivity was my method.

“From History to Psychohistory” appeared in the summer 1978 ​Journal of Psychohistory​ (Volume 6, no. 1, 1-65), in time to be read by participants at the first IPA Convention. I hoped discussion of some reasons for the surging criticisms could help others struggling with similar issues.

My essay started with two questions: what drew people to academia and why did some become historians? There are obvious answers. I was less interested in what was obvious than in hidden emotions and fantasies. Psychohistory was prompting me to look for denied and disguised motives behind career choice and to consider that all research, regardless of its intrinsic intellectual merits, ultimately derived from deep personal needs. This meant the criticisms of psychohistory could be used as a kind of blank screen, a

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projective test to begin to get at some of the unconscious motives behind the attacks of “rational” and rationalizing historians.

I turned first to historian Kenneth Lynn’s short essay, “History’s Reckless Psychologizing” in the widely-read ​The Chronicle of Higher Education ​(January 16, 1978), wherein Lynn denounced our enterprise as “vulgar psychological determinism,” calling it “a cancer metastasizing through the whole body of the historical profession.”

Most psychohistorians considered Lynn’s article harmless. Being called a “cancer” did not seem harmless to me. I speculated that for Lynn psychohistory was feeling like a matter of life and death. I soon learned how seriously his essay was being viewed by readers of the Chronicle​ ​when I was told by one of my students, then working on a psychohistorical essay, that a colleague of mine had phoned him about Lynn’s polemic, mentioning Lynn was “a professor at a big university,” noting how controversial the field was, and citing Lynn’s use of the word “cancer.” In a classic case of projection he warned, “The psychohistorians won’t let you write what you want to.” Many approving letters published in later ​editions of The Chronicle ​suggested these were widely shared views.

What did someone calling it a “cancer” mean about my own tortured inner road to psychohistory? To move from historian-self to a psychohistorical-self was not a simple matter of placing psychology alongside a body of traditional ways of thinking, just one more tool added to the other tools of historical research. There were dangers. One had to give up the historian-identity with its many built-in defenses. What was history if not the study of wars, pestilence, betrayal, injustice, torture, and inhumanity, on a massive scale? Historians go there with the assurance that history’s built-in interior defenses will keep them feeling reasonably safe while rationalizing that our studies might make the present world a little better off.

Doing history is to study the denied brutality of the repressed-self; the split off not-me psychohistory, by contrast, means accepting irrationality, fantasy, and emotions, abandoning the rational man model. Surely, denying emotions allows historians to defensively escape the problems of the present in order to study the horrors of the past. No wonder Lynn was speaking of “cancers.” Embracing psychohistory meant a kind of death, of having to look

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into the tip of cosmic terror.

There was a second consequence. The notion that emotions and irrationality are central to history inevitably meant the need to rewrite studies hitherto thought “definitive.” For some, this meant opportunity. For others it represented another kind of death. If psychohistory requires rewriting past narratives, the symbolic “babies” historians had given “birth” to could not live beyond one generation, an end to symbolic immortality.

To make matters worse, the “death threat” came largely from a younger generation. “Oedipal conflict” meant the established self-appointed guardians of history’s sacred precincts were compelled to reject their youthful competitors. “Fathers” had to denounce psychohistory until it died a symbolic death. This was achieved in fantasy several years ago when the American Historical Association (AHA) chose to no longer list psychohistory as a historical specialty, while the compulsive striving by psychohistorians to be valued by their historical “fathers” was something the psychodynamic rules of traumatic reenactment could never let happen, dooming psychohistorians to a fruitless quest for “parental” approval.

Here was a clue to the academic group fantasy where father figures loomed large. Proof was everywhere. Few women were historians. Academic structures were male-dominated hierarchies recapitulating the patriarchal families of most people’s childhoods. Think of the stereotype of the pipe-smoking, sherry-sipping, tweed bedecked Ivy-League professor. I thought now of my choosing graduate school mentors who mirrored an idealized academic search for a good father, gravitating to rigorous scholars, older men close to retirement, kindly, slightly built, white-haired fatherly Geppetto types (nor was it lost on me how that made me into a wooden puppet via Disney, longing to become a real live boy).

It is all largely fantasy, of course. Think about the contradiction between the notion of the caring, nurturing alma mater run by intensely competitive, often vicious patriarchs. In addition, there was plenty of reenacted sibling rivalry to go around.

In graduate school we soon learned to be suspicious of others and hold our next research project close to the vest. We also learned never to give public praise to a colleague. Reviewing a book for the AHA required the obligation to unfairly mention what the author ​didn’t ​write about. To praise the work of a rival was to

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lose points. To lose points was to never get to Harvard.

Soon the new criticisms of psychohistory were being acted out in the halls of ivy. My 1978 essay was written in tandem with a surprise threat to my teaching career. Shortly after the publication of an earlier paper on Jimmy Carter I was informed by my administration that my full-time tenured position was in danger. I was required to defend the “legitimacy” of psychohistory, and told “psychohistory won’t save him.” (As it happened, I went on to enjoy an unbroken 50 year college teaching career.)

That 1978 essay also wanted to say something about the group fantasies of psychohistorians. For clues, I looked to a fall 1977 conference at Adelphi University. The Adelphi conference was held to honor Erik Erikson. Erikson himself fell ill and couldn’t attend. Arrangements were made for him to address us via telephone from Boston. Before he spoke, one of his former students invoked Erikson’s presence from a lectern on the Adelphi stage. He began his introduction with Old Testament stories, then described how the light from a table lamp used to pass around and through Erikson’s white hair as he spoke from his chair during home seminars. With that, Erikson’s disembodied voice boomed from the loud speakers. We were being addressed by Moses, halo intact. The conference went on idealizing Erikson to near deification.

I began to think of other defensive attractions lurking in historical study. The need for standard scholarly forms still exerted power over me. I guiltily addressed readers of my 1978 essay: “You have already noted the missing elaborate scholarly apparatus, massive footnoting and other paraphernalia. For me such accoutrements provide familiar terrain and a protective umbrella.” I confessed: “I am frankly uncomfortable without them.”

Despite using disciplined subjectivity in the essay, I clung to my suspicions about psychohistory. Part of me remained convinced “there is no place for self-revelation in scholarship, that such ‘displays’ are ‘vulgar’ and no more than… self-indulgence” (1978). This revealed once more how historical scholarship is actually designed to separate the self from the subject of study, that it is a “continuous defensive process of self-fragmentation into rational and affective halves meant to keep the emotions at bay.” It was no accident that my writing often quoted Freud’s ​Totem and Taboo​ (1955), arguing that psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, offers “the

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advantage of establishing an unexpected correlation between groups of phenomena that have hitherto been disconnected,” namely, emotions (141).

Most historians were working on a defensive flight from the self. Psychohistory was an effort at self-discovery and emotional integration. Yet, it took a long time for me to realize my long intellectual struggle with psychohistory was nothing less than the working through of a more complete emotional embrace of my own psychotherapy; Pinocchio becoming a real live boy.

Nevertheless, doubts remained. As I approached the end of that 1978 essay, my ambiguities resurfaced once more, taking the form of an internal debate between the illusions of scholarly comprehensive permanence and the need to accept the contradictory realities of impermanence and contingency. I wrote:

The old ghosts are upon me once more. I feel like apologizing…. have almost just bought the self-critical judgement that would have ​negated in a second the entire work of several months​, that this essay is not valid because it is not empirical.​ ​ That historian self still does not wholly trust the psychohistorical-self. The reality is, what could be ​more​ empirical than my own self process in describing the journey from history to psychohistory?

The essay, like history itself, became obsessed by the fantasy of completeness. By contrast, psychohistory is based on the reality of tentativeness. Though it is historical orthodoxy for historians to ​claim ​adherence to the historicism of Carl Becker’s Everyman His Own Historian (1935),​ many unconsciously cling to the fantasy that definitive accounts are still possible. This preserves the notion that objective history can exist without emotion, each generation not having to write history anew to meet its own intrapsychic needs.

I closed that 1978 essay by revealing: “My inner state matches an empty room. I feel inadequate, as if the essay has not been satisfactorily complete…. It needs more material, needs to be longer pondered, carefully revised and rewritten over… several months…. a fantasy, one of the infinite varieties of the infantile ideal of perfection… omnipotent comprehensiveness,” ending:

The essay, describing process, is itself

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process, and cannot be neatly concluded. The new tumbles in with relentless pressure, tomorrow’s essay… is a slightly different matter, words altered, sentences excised, orders changed, issues attenuated, themes annexed. Like the institutionalized group-fantasies it tries to catch hold of, the essay speeds away shifting and changing, its author in the flux and flow of new movements from tomorrow. There still remains too much unfinished business. But that uncertainty is also psychohistory, an instrument which picks up our unfinished business and lets us live with it.

Consequently, I must stop here: the second sentence in the third paragraph is already beginning to look as if it might need a little extra work.

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