The Humane Use of Space

Peter Petschauer’s Human Space is a rewardingly reflective yet apprehensive book. He is a man of intellectual gifts matched by sensitivity, trying honestly to make sense of his own experience; there is little comfort in it. It is good that a historian can stand apart from his profession enough to consider his personal part in it, and try to sum up what living in America on the verge of the millennium means to him. The theme of space and how humans inhabit it is a device capacious enough for the great diversity of topics Petschauer addresses. The organizing theme is how he survived the rigors of a World War II European childhood to migrate to the United States, where he became a highly effective professor of history and administrator at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. The book is not an autobiography but a set of reflections on the prospect for a just and decent social order in his adopted country.

Petschauer’s interest in psychohistory arose from reconstructions of his own childhood “abandonment” by his German parents when they left him for reasons of safety with an unrelated family in the village of Afers in northern Italy. (His insightful commentary on Lloyd deMause’s theory of the abandoning mode of childrearing appeared in The Journal of Psychohistory Volume 13 (2) Fall 1985.) Through the kindness of strangers, Petschauer and his brother spent the war in a remote and very traditional farming community, entirely different from the New York City he was to enter as a student. Cultural difference and extensive travel, including many returns to Afers, give Petschauer a vantage point on contemporary America; though no Swiftian satirist, he is a sort of Gulliver surveying the pretentious, misled, and alarming features of contemporary America.

What Petschauer sees is not reassuring. He rightly fears America’s gun culture and predicts violence on an unmanageable scale unless the history and dynamics of ethnic violence in other parts of the world are understood (p. 157). Economic and social justice in America are deteriorating as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” These are common enough concerns, but Petschauer brings to his concern the cogency of an ability to compare societies.

A liberal humanist in the best tradition of American higher education, Petschauer’s disquiet shows most strongly in comments on the sector of life he knows best: academic departments especially departments of history. If there is hope of students’ understanding the dynamics of groups contending along ethnic and economic rifts in society, and if persecutions and tyrannies are to be understood for their uselessness in solving real social problems, it must be through the insights of historians. The historians best equipped to see into the dynamics of justice and conflict are those equipped with psychological, as well as historical, techniques. Petschauer would like to see more cross-disciplinary work, but he despairs of it because of rivalrous territoriality and personal

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mistrust amongst professional historians. I found the remarks on the failures in writing and teaching history (starting on page 88) to be the most compelling in the book. My own frustrating (and damaging) experience of trying to introduce psychobiography into the study of the life and writings of Bertrand Russell backs up what Petschauer has to say. I only wish that he had developed his comments further, along the lines of Peter Loewenberg’s brilliant essay, “Love and Hate in the Academy” (in Decoding the Past, 1984). Loewenberg wrote: “The fact that academics are intellectuals complicates the problem. They use elegant rationalizations to block real communication” (p. 77).

The best solution to defensive over-intellectualization among academics would be graduate seminars on psychodynamic theory, together with personal analysis; but that is what the most disordered personalities in university departments most fear. Perhaps the psychodynamics of academic endeavor are so dangerous that they cannot be directly approached except by a prepared few. We may need to demythologize, even satirize the pretensions of intellect alone, to solve interpersonal and social problems. If academe could be seen as Swift’s ridiculous flying island of Laputa with its philosophers, men of science, historians, and projectors, a new start, taking unconscious motives and wishes into account, might be made.

Yes, I had hoped that Petschauer’s book would be more psychological, more a plea for the best hope we have to discover the unconscious in its everyday guises. I thought he missed opportunities, as in the instance of starting with fundamentals in his idea of space. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (in Playing and Reality, 1971) could have helped. Winnicott shows how the space between an infant and its mother’s breasts is eventually occupied by a “transitional object,” a mouthed blanket edge or toy. He writes: “The intermediate area to which I am referring is that area that is allowed to the infant between primary creativity and objective perception based on reality testing” (p. 11). How we originally fill spaces, gaps and openings confident in our creativity or fearful of its failure has a lot to do with the social values we come to hold and the politics we profess. Variables in child rearing, the minutiae of the history of childhood in any society, are fundamental to assessing how forgiving or punitive, how accepting or rejecting of other persons, a nation or any of its subgroups is likely to be.

Peter Petschauer throws important new light on the failures of American society to realize its ideals, skillfully using a comparative method. His book is an example for other historians to vent their misgivings about the profession as ameliorative for society. In his assessment of America, Petschauer says little about sex, gender, and their confusions, nor does he explore the obviously fraught topic of divorce. It is perhaps ungrateful to ask the author of an already worthwhile book to examine more deeply motivations in respect of relations with women. Our discontents run deep, with fear, avoidance, and patronizing of women a highly troubled, imperfectly understood area of academic life and much beyond.

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