Teaching Undergraduates Psychohistory (article)

I have taught psychohistory to undergraduates at Albion College more years than not from 1977 to the present. Also, in 1980 I taught an undergraduate psychohistory course at UCLA. At Albion there has always been interest in the course from students in a wide variety of disciplines. It is certainly not for everyone since not only is its subject matter relatively arcane for undergraduates, it is an upper-division seminar that requires for admission at least junior standing or the permission of the instructor. It is also the only course in the History Department almost completely devoted to historiography. As such, the course for the most part attracts the most intellectually curious and capable among our

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students. It is also a course that marks a departure from the great bulk of material and perspective offered by the Department of Psychology at Albion, which is predictably nomothetic in its approach. The stance of most of my colleagues inside and outside the Department of History toward psychohistory and psychoanalysis is largely one of benign neglect. On the other hand, one of my fellow historians used my book of readings, Psycho/history (1987), for an honors seminar in the social sciences and I have been invited by a colleague in the Psychology Department to discuss my research on psychotherapy in the Third Reich to an infrequently offered History of Psychology course. The psychohistory seminar has also since 1995 met the college gender category requirement through its critical analysis of sexuality, primarily by means of Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). It took a bit of doing to achieve this status, because there was some concern among the members of the curriculum committee that the material would not be critical enough of essentialist assumptions about female sexuality in Freudian thought. But, in fact, recent psychoanalytic studies of gender in particular are quite exemplary in terms of their careful distinctions between biology and social construction — not to mention “destiny.”

Over the years I have assigned a wide variety of books and articles on the method of history, psychoanalysis, and psychohistory as well as works of psychohistory. One consistent feature of the course, adapted from the proseminar in psychohistory I took from Andrew Rolle at Occidental College in 1970, is an extensive methodological critique of a work of history or biography from a psychohistorical perspective. An important component of this assignment has always been my requirement that the students not indulge in their own psychohistorical analysis of the subject with the concomitant observation that such personal interpretation is to varying degrees inevitable and desirable. This ostensible pedagogical conundrum embodies one of the essential elements in our study of psychohistorical method: the importance of recognizing, controlling, and exploiting the historian’s subjective tie to, and concomitant insight into, his or her human subject matter. The emphasis in the assignment and in the course is on historical method while the students’ lack of theoretical or personal experience in psychoanalysis also requires that they not attempt their own psychohistorical interpretation per se. At the same time, however, the students must and will have the opportunity to feel what it is like to confront and interpret the lives of other human beings. The results have generally been good since the students, in the early — indeed, usually initial — stages of any knowledge of psychoanalytic thinking, are ready only to critique psychohistorical method as they find it in their chosen works. But in finding themselves exercising the type of insight peculiar to history and to psychoanalysis they drive home to themselves one of the chief instructional lessons of the seminar. Early on, I allowed students to critique non-psychohistorical works, but the increase in the number of psychohistorical studies has led me since 1988 to require a critique of a work of psychohistory. Since 1993 the seminar has systematically studied “post-Freudian” psychoanalytic theories from object relations to self psychology and, among other things, linked these discussions to issues surrounding the social construction of gender. The “Psychology of the Group in History” has also always been a part of the course and treatment of this subject too has benefited from the gradual increase in the number of works in the field (e.g., John Demos, Entertaining Satan [1982] and Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution [1992]).

The chief educational value of psychohistory, particularly for students who will have no other exposure to the field, has to do with the knowledge of the importance of the unconscious and emotion in history and of empathy in the historian. The students should learn something about what it is to listen to history, to “resonate” the way a psychoanalyst does in the transference, and to understand, as with countertransference in psychoanalysis, the role and limits of retrodiction in history. These matters are particularly important in the context of a liberal arts education since they touch on fundamental issues in the nature and method of the humanities and the social sciences. For American upper middle class students in particular, moreover, such thinking is also an important corrective to the often-naive cultural assumption of the conscious glories of individual enterprise and easy social indulgence. The world has been and is, because of the often-murky motives of the people in it, a dangerous and conflict-ridden place. Any understanding of history or of the present demands a more sophisticated comprehension of the many dynamics of the human mind in their interaction with the social environment.

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Very few of our students at Albion go on to graduate study in history and none of those who have attended graduate school has taken a field in psychohistory. One student was inspired to go on for advanced training in history as a result of having taken my seminar in psychohistory, but the graduate school he chose to attend — like most — had no course offerings in psychohistory. So this particular interest of his received no further, formal cultivation. If psychohistory is to maintain its place within the discipline of history, not only must it continue to be taught at the undergraduate level, it must be formally represented in graduate programs of history. The older — the original — generation of psychohistorians in the United States must strive to make sure that their positions are filled with young scholars who have been, or are willing to be, trained in psychohistory. The “demand side” of students, therefore, comes from undergraduate programs, as I did from Occidental College, and the “supply side” of instructors must be generated in the graduate schools, preferably in conjunction with local psychoanalytic institutes.

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