Books Shaping Psychohistorians: Comments by Binion, Loewenberg, and Strozier

Rudolph Binion, Brandeis University

I came to psychohistory in the 1960s through my efforts to make sense of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s rich life fraught with pathology. No work in the field itself led me to it; toiling in

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isolation, I was unaware even that such a field already existed. The writings that were my strongest inspirations are an unlikely set.

Freud’s works top the list: I read them all. Almost as eye-opening for me as Freud’s searchlights into our irrational human depths were Ibsen’s. And for method my master was Henri Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (1955). When I graduated from biographic to group studies later along, I drew support from three equally disparate sources: The Bacchae by Euripides, with its stark model of the group unconscious in action; Durkheim’s Suicide, with its elegant theoretical construction of shared consciousness; and, above all, that locus classicus for group psychodynamics in history, The Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche.

If no works of psychohistory proper pointed my scholarly way, that is because I came to the field in its infancy while teaching intellectual and cultural history. But then, psychohistory is hardly out of its infancy even now, and I would urge its young votaries to look back to such classics as have guided my own hand.

Peter Loewenberg, UCLA

If I had to choose one early book that excited me, it would be one I encountered in graduate school, Black Ship to Hell (1962), by the late Brigid Brophy. It is a wonderful psychoanalytically-inspired lithe, intelligent culture critique of modern social rationalizations and self-deceptions, including the language of foreign policy and the prelude to World War I. I knew that the assumptions of the diplomatic history I was learning were superficial and that she was right — there was a lot more to going to war than naval races and telegrams between Berlin and Vienna. She was particularly strong on music, adored Mozart (about whom she wrote a book), and did clever psychodynamic things with “Don Giovanni.” I immediately read all of her works I could lay my hands on, including essays in the Times Literary Supplement, and discovered that, among other things, she was a fervent animal rights anti-vivisectionist and author of Hackenfeller’s Ape (1964).

For later work, I would name four articles, one each from psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology, and two from history:

• Ernest Schachtel, “On Childhood Memory Amnesia,” in his book, Metamorphosis (1959).
• James A. Boon, “Between the Wars in Bali — Reading the Relics,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., History Of Anthropology, vol. 4, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others (1986): pp. 218-247.
• Jonathan Steinberg, “The Copenhagen Complex,” Journal of Contemporary History, I:3 (1966): pp. 23-46.
• Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Southern Road to Appomattox,” in The Imperiled Union (1980): pp. 246-269.

Charles B. Strozier, CUNY Graduate School

The most important book in my psychohistorical life was Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1958). I took Erikson’s course at Harvard in the fall of 1965 and it changed my life. I read Young Man Luther then and decided that was what my interest in history was all about. Later, I read Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth (1969) which is a more moving, if somewhat less elegant, book. In the 1970s I taught Gandhi’s Truth in almost every course that I taught and over a ten-year period read it at least a dozen times. It was reading Gandhi’s Truth that led me into the theory of nonviolence and my own struggles with food and vegetarianism. I think the next book on my list would be Lifton’s Nazi Doctors (1986). Finally, I would mention Geoffrey Ward’s first volume on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Before the Trumpet (1985). It is a model of a historian using psychology completely unobtrusively.

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NB: We want to thank these leading psychohistorians for contributing to this issue and Professor David Beisel for his suggestion that we list the books shaping their thought as a separate feature. The formative books of Peter Petschauer, this issue’s “Distinguished Psychohistorian,” are given in the interview.