Begging to Differ

John Hartman’s is an admirably proficient formulation and exemplification of an approach to psychohistory and in particular to group process in history that I, alas, find to be flawed many times over. Hartman himself acknowledges one relatively minor problem with it: “the jump from the small group to the large group.” To go major straight off, psychohistory is not “the application of depth psychology to history” in Hartman’s sense of reading clinical theories of psychology into history. Rather, it is a probing of historic behavior to uncover the mental mechanisms and motives behind it. For Hartman, “a systematic methodology of evidence in psychohistory” means a systematic alignment of psychohistory with human laboratory findings. He reserves such terms as “evidential” and “empirical” for clinical-type findings in psychology, which he thinks have informed psychohistory in the past and should inform it, albeit more advisedly, in the future. For

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the psychohistorian properly so-called, however, history itself is the sole “evidential basis” for psychohistory, and research into history is “empirical research” par excellence.

Group process in psychohistory means above all not personal interactions within historic groups, but how historic groups have acted on their own for purposes independent of their individual members’ aims and interests. The historical record is rich with empirical materials for inquiries in this line. As guides to historic mass movements or shared experiences, such as the barbarian migrations or the Black Death, or again to the long-term conduct of relatively stable historic groups, Hartman’s small groups artificially assembled for scheduled sessions in Michigan or South Florida yesterday or today have no evidential or even suggestive value as against the records of those mass doings or happenings themselves.

Personal interactions within groups do vary historically, and that variance is a fascinating subject. However, it belongs to historical anthropology rather than to historical group process. Historic cultures have indeed been marked by differing characteristic kinds and degrees of “hostility, affection, authority relations, and ego-state distress,” but also lots, lots else that can’t be guessed a priori. These are best studied directly in their historic context, as they have been studied again and again. How they change as a function of group process certainly can’t be extrapolated from scheduled observations on experimental small groups. Will such observations help us to understand, for instance, how come material acquisitiveness spread overnight in Spain with Franco’s death while status-consciousness practically vanished? Conversely, certain experiences or needs of a group can engender or promote paranoid myths among its members, so that this phenomenon does rightly enter into historical group process.

Hartman’s single reference to actual history in his paper is his assertion that his and Gibbard’s model of behavior within small groups is “compatible with … a homeostatic model in … the history of revolutions.” At this point of Hartman’s text I wondered: would not such a model be more reliable if it were derived from a comparative historic study of revolutions rather than from a statistical analysis of personal interactions within experimental campus groups in contemporary America? And lo, the next thing I saw was that Hartman and Gibbard had indeed based their model on just such a comparative historic study: Crane Brinton’s musty classic, The Anatomy of Revolution. Why, then, the prescription of a model rather than of broader and deeper looks into real revolutions?

Analogies from findings about groups tophases of child development have less than no evidential value, as Hartman indicates. But I would add that the history of childhood itself is no more a part or line of psychohistory than, say, the history of sex or the history of emotions. Historic facts about childhood, as about sex or emotions, are only raw data. Data can have their charm. But they enter into psychohistory on the individual or group level only insofar as they are shown to be causally relevant to given individual or group behavior in history.

I would answer Hartman’s concluding call for “a greater sophistication as to what constitutes evidence in psychohistory” with a simple reminder that “evidence in psychohistory” must needs be historical evidence. To argue from behavior in artificial small contemporary American groups to behavior in historic groups small or large is itself to argue by analogy. More fundamentally, it is to argue beside the point of group process as behavior by historic groups. Psychohistory’s job is to approach the motives and mechanisms involved in such behavior head-on.

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