Methodology and Subjectivity in Psychohistory

Review Essays on Paul H. Elovitz, The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), ISBN 978-1-138-58749-6, 138 pages, paperback, $38.95, hardbound, $140.

In approaching Paul Elovitz’ important The Making of Psychohistory, I deal primarily with two issues, questions of methodology and matters of subjectivity. Critics have charged psychohistorians with playing fast and loose with the evidence, of wild specula-

Page 178

tion, distorting documents, of using too little evidence or no evidence at all. Paul makes it clear: the critics have sometimes been right. It has been troubling.

I was trained in the school of 19^th-century Teutonic historiography. I chose the words “Teutonic historiography” deliberately. By them I mean to convey a feeling of being old-fashioned, ponderous, restricted, and rigidly academic—in the worst sense of the term. The method nevertheless reflects a certain way of proceeding, which has stood the test of time for 200 years.

Teutonic historiography means achieving exhaustive mastery of the secondary scholarship before research into the primary sources can begin. It means critical analysis of primary sources and being ruthlessly scrupulous about sources. Nothing’s perfect in this world, of course, and sad to say those goals aren’t always met, even in scholarship in general. This includes psychohistory—though there are thousands of psychohistorical books and articles that do meet the highest scholarly standards.

As Paul’s book shows, things haven’t been perfect in the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) either. We did maintain a space—the annual convention—where our interdisciplinary scholarship could have a hearing. That (and meeting friends) at least was my personal rationalization for continuing to be part of this organization despite some serious reservations over the years.

Reading Paul’s book has helped me remember something we’ve all forgotten: that IPA membership in the early days included not just the usual run of historians, political scientists, and anthropologists, but also counted activists, art historians, physicians, politicians, writers, poets, and artists, including filmmakers, dancers, and the multi-talented, such as playwright, composer, musician, and performance artist Jill Kroesen.

Paul has said that one of his goals in writing the book was to encourage others to write their own histories of psychohistory. That certainly happened to me, spontaneously, as I read through his pages, remembering many forgotten things, and learning many new things I did not know. That trip down memory lane comes at a particularly opportune time for me, helping that life-review process of the so-called “Golden Years,” even, as in my case I approach my 80^th year. Paul’s book is liberating in that it reaffirms one’s faith in the method of disciplined subjectivity, which distinguished psychohistorians Larry Friedman and Chuck Strozier have written about so

Page 179

eloquently in the pages of the journal Clio’s Psyche.

My personal interest in psychological history came early on in my college years. I don’t know why. As a three-year Navy veteran, I didn’t know I was still very much wet behind the ears when I asked my freshman history professor if he knew of any histories with a psychological bent. After consulting with a few colleagues, the only study they could come up with—this was 1958—was the Alexander and Juliette George book on Woodrow Wilson. That summer I bought two books at Manhattan’s Nassau Street Bookshop: Alfred Vagts’ A History of Militarism (1937) and Theodor Reik’s Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst (1948). I soon learned from my history professors that history and psychology weren’t supposed to mix, a prohibition which lasted through graduate school.

Only after hearing papers by Rudolph Binion on Hitler at an American Historical Association (AHA) convention and reading Peter Loewenberg’s remarkable “Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort” (in The American Historical Review)—both in 1970—did I begin to think psychological history might be possible after all. As a newly-minted PhD, I asked Rudy, “How do you do this stuff?” So alien had psychology become during my graduate years. The Journal of Psychohistory and The Psychohistory Review came into being. I attended summer workshops sponsored by The Institute for Psychohistory. I began my own massive long-term immersion in the psychological literature. Psychohistory was breaking out everywhere. Could I make a contribution?

One issue was disciplined subjectivity. It informed one of my own early efforts in a long essay I wrote back in 1978, which appeared in The Journal of Psychohistory’s Special Convention Issue, which was celebrating the IPA’s first convention. That essay, not without its faults and hard edges (I’d write a different one today), was called “From History to Psychohistory: A Personal Journey.” It recounted my difficult path through the thickets of my own resistance, the emotional and intellectual struggle to accept the very possibility of doing psychohistory. It was written after three years of agonized dialogue with myself in the first years of my analysis.

Every session in those first three years was filled with endless self-doubt as I explored the question of whether psychohistory was possible or not. One day the light bulb went on. “I just real-

Page 180

ized,” I said to Charles, “I don’t think I’ve been talking about psychohistory at all as much as I’ve been talking about doing psychotherapy.” “FINALLY,” Charles said. “I’ve been stifling yawns for three years!” “So,” in the words of Philip Roth, “now we can begin.”

Since then I have come to realize, as many before me, that one’s choice of research subject, even one’s field of study, is driven in part—sometimes exclusively—by an overt or hidden desire to resolve known, partly known, or unthought unknowns. Perhaps all scholarship is partly driven by personal need. It has been liberating. Not only do we continue to need traditional “Teutonic historiography,” but as “big tent” psychohistorians we can now also welcome insights from the eloquent simplicity of a single theoretical statement.

I was naïve. I grossly underestimated the power of resistance. Why were historians so dismissive? My therapist nailed it: “You’re telling people what they don’t want to hear and expecting them to be grateful for it.” Of course. Why did I nevertheless persist?

One night, over dinner with my best friend, I complained about psychohistory’s rejection by historians, expressing regrets that my career didn’t stay within the boundaries of traditional history. My friend said to me, “But it’s not you.” He was right.

Historians have been tricking us for years into having things two ways, publicly condemning psychohistory as they silently slip psychology into their work. Take Sir Ian Kershaw, for example. Recognized as one of the U.K.’s premier historians, Sir Ian is best known for his two-volume biography of Hitler. It is superb history and openly anti-psychological. Sir Ian denounces psychohistory as too speculative. He introduces the word “psycho-history” by castrating it at the hyphen. He keeps it from contaminating his text by quarantining it in quotation marks. He accepts the evidence of Hitler’s father as an abusive parent then denies that it played any role in Hitler’s later life. He informs readers he won’t be doing any psychology. He then writes:

It takes little to imagine that his [Hitler’s] later patronizing contempt for the submissiveness of women, the thirst for dominance (and imagery of the Leader as stern authoritarian father figure), the inability to form deep personal relationships, his corre-

Page 181

sponding cold brutality toward 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 (Hitler: Hubris, 13).

No psychology, indeed. The more practically minded among us might find this practice acceptable: formal psychology is at least finding its way into history. I find the practice dishonest. The self-appointed guardians of history’s sacred precincts have recently removed psychohistory from among the over 600 approved specializations recognized in the American Historical Association’s taxonomy of sub-fields. In today’s AHA, psychohistory no longer exists.

The AHA justifies psychohistory’s disappearance from its taxonomy on the grounds that only a handful of AHA members define themselves as psychohistorians, when in fact it is an outcome engineered by the long-term policies of the AHA itself. The editor of The American Historical Review proudly confesses the Review will never publish any psychohistory, while distinguished historian Rudy Binion told me the Review repeatedly refused to review any of his books on the grounds that “they weren’t history but psychology.” No wonder scores of historians have left the AHA: the AHA abandoned us.

Thus, when I look over my 50 years of involvement with psychohistory, I see today not only a desire for greater insight into the world and myself, but a parallel therapeutic process. Psychohistory is also an effort to resolve personal issues, a health-seeking quest for greater integration that in my case has been only partly successful.

I also see a darker, sadder side, one of bottomless reenactment. I see now my decades-long striving to get historians to take psychohistory seriously as a deeply personal matter. When we seek to achieve an unachievable outcome, and keep repeating the behavior, it suggests trauma.

The quest for the approval of historians has been going on for some time. Here I draw on Paul’s memories of the first IPA convention and John Hartman’s group-fantasy interpretation of the main fantasy being acted out by IPA members (as I remember it),

Page 182

the metaphor of Bas Mitzvah-boy in a suit whose leather jacket and motorcycle were waiting in the alleyway.

For me, the decades-long search for authenticity to get the approval of historians was personally frustrating and enervating. It was an endless, displaced traumatic reliving, a quest for my father’s approval that was never going to happen.

Paul’s book makes it clear that in reality that search has long been over. For more than a century now, and especially for the past half-century, tens of thousands of books and articles have produced an independent field of interdisciplinary study that no longer needs the benediction of history’s symbolic father-figures.

Let my fellow historians go on embracing the fantasy that the bastard child psychohistory is dead and buried. In reality, as Paul’s book, the work of so many at the International Psychohistorical Association, and so much else shows, our work continues.

Page 183