On Being a Psychohistorian

I’m a physician, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and psychohistorian. I’m a professor at three medical schools (Medicine and Osteopathy at Michigan State, Medicine at Wayne State) and have published over 100 scientific articles. However, this tells little of who I am personally, how I became a psychohistorian, and what I read is that I consider important in my transformation to a psychohistorian.

The following are personal factors I consider important in my development in this special vocation. My mother was of Hungarian Jewish ex­traction. I was always interested in the complicated

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and fascinating history and background of both sides of my family. Though my family was not religious, they practiced a moderate form of Judaism. My father was an atheist and so was I from age 12. However, at age 16 I taught the history of the ancient Fertile Crescent in a Jewish Sunday school.

My father, Alfred Breiner, was an Austrian Jew, who was a linguist and fluent in all the major European languages, including classical Latin and Greek. As a young man he left home and wandered about Europe and North Africa, eventually coming to the U.S. When the U.S entered WWI he enlisted in the Rainbow Division (NY) and soon became an interpreter and translator for General Pershing. Prior to WWII he was an active anti-Nazi and helped many people (both Jew and Christian) to escape from the Nazis. He was senior interpreter/translator (with the rank of General) at the first Nuremberg Trial. When I saw him there, he would not show me or even tell me about the pictures and documents about the German-run concentration camps that he was studying and translating, as it would be “too upsetting” for his son (even though I had been a combat infantryman in France, Belgium, and Germany).

After the war I returned to college as a premed student ­ and to my first awakening to the distorted history that I had been taught. Purely by accident I took an “easy course^” on Latin American history and learned the truth of some of the unfair and dishonest things my country had done in this geographic area. Though I continued on to medical school, I took an additional study at a separate university in Henry George economics. Not only in medical school but also in my personal pleasure reading, was the history of medicine, psychology, and, most importantly, psychoanalysis. When I began my formal training in psychoanalysis, my extensive reading and study of Freud included a fascination with Moses and Monotheism and his study of the sculpture of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. These were my first psycho­historical studies, and have since been a major influence on my studies of history.

The other books that I have read along the way that have been an influence are: Penguin Is­land, Candide, Gargantua, Decameron, History of the Jews, Arab Mind, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and, of course, the material on child­hood by Lloyd deMause and Philip Aries. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is the most insightful historical writer I have read. You can open at random any of the books of the set and find wonderful quotable comments with in­sight. I should not leave out my studies of Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.

However, the most important training to be a psychohistorian is personal psychoanalytic therapy and training, and an inquiring mind that doubts the non-psychological understanding of historical events.

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