For the Second Volume of The Making of Psychohistory

Review Essays on Paul H. Elovitz, The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), ISBN 978-1-138-58749-6, 138 pages, paperback, $38.95, hardbound, $140.

Paul Elovitz has produced an indispensable history of the discipline of psychohistory. It is comprehensive, analytical, and fair-minded. Elovitz also has a strong point of view, vigorously and effectively presented, that psychohistory was, is, and should be

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its own “separate academic field” (6). While in a limited sense that remains the case today, it is also true that the “integration of psychoanalysis, and psychology generally, with the humanities and social sciences” (2) has allowed for the percolation of psychoanalytic and “psychohistorical” perspectives into the work of historians generally. Even a 2012 History and Theory article Elovitz cites as being hostile to the whole idea of a relationship between psychoanalysis and history, Joan Scott’s misleadingly titled “The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History,” in fact argues that there can—even must—be a productive relationship between the two fields.

Elovitz was at the center of psychohistory from the mid-1970s on. He knew—and knows—everybody in the field. This gives his account unsurpassed authority. He also makes sound choices when it comes to highlighting major psychohistorians. Like any selective list, of course, it can be criticized for both its omissions and its inclusions. It omits Erik Erikson for not being a good enough historian and for opposing psychohistory as a separate field of historical study. At the same time, it includes Lloyd deMause, who was an early and controversial proponent of psychohistory. One problem with deMause, as Elovitz concedes, was that he insisted on psychohistory as a predictive science dedicated to the betterment of humanity. I also think Elovitz somewhat understates the tremendous damage deMause did to the cause of psychohistory. His public prominence and commercial success made it much easier for orthodox historians to dismiss any and all psychohistory simply through derisive, reductionist reference to what they saw as the antics of someone—I heard and read this many times—they labeled as “Mickey deMause.” Here is where Elovitz’ closeness to psychohistory at its creation is somewhat of a disadvantage; as he admits, deMause was, among other things, “the person I knew best” (4). As Elovitz emphasizes, psychohistory has failed in being accepted as a subfield within the discipline of history.

It was not just the fault of Lloyd deMause and the resultant divisions created among psychohistorians. Part of this had to do not only with traditional—and even hidebound—resistance to new methods imported from outside the discipline. There also was and is the competition of other approaches and fields ever since, such as social history, cultural history, gender studies, the linguistic turn, and the like. Ongoing criticism of Freud and psychoanalysis

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inside and outside the academy, too, has had a negative effect on the willingness of historians to embrace psychohistory. It also had to do with the fact that most historians would be unwilling to undertake full psychoanalytic training and a personal analysis. The cost of this, of course, is less precise knowledge of psychoanalytic theory and method as well as less sensitivity to transference and countertransference in one’s own work.

For a second volume of The Making of Psychohistory I would recommend greater emphasis on those historians/psychohistorians who worked more generally within the discipline of history rather than emphasizing just those committed to Elovitz’ preference for an independent discipline or sovereign historical subfield of psychohistory. So while I have nowhere near the psychohistorical knowledge or experience that Elovitz has, I would put on my list three people whose work Elovitz mentions but does not highlight: John Demos, Fawn Brodie, and Thomas Kohut. Demos was a major influence among historians generally, mostly for his book Entertaining Satan (1982). Brodie (whose name is omitted from the index of The Making of Psychohistory) not only produced a masterful psychobiography of Richard Nixon (1981) that Elovitz praises, but a revealing psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson (1974) whose conclusion (later confirmed through DNA evidence) that Jefferson had fathered children through slave Sally Hemmings, enraged old white male Jefferson scholars.

Thomas Kohut, the son of psychoanalyst and founder of self-psychology Heinz Kohut, also deserves more mention and credit as someone who has worked effectively within the discipline of history to promote and practice psychoanalytically-informed history. This is particularly so with respect Kohut’s longstanding insistence that history is as essential to psychoanalysis as empathically-informed psychoanalytic observation is to history (“Psychohistory as History,” American Historical Review, 1986; Roger Frie, ed., History Flows Through Us, 2018). His two book-length studies, Wilhelm II and the Germans (1991) and A German Generation (2012), are based on his father’s psychoanalytic self-psychology. The first explores in new ways the psychodynamic relationship between leader and led. The second investigates the generational psychodynamics of loss and compensating identification with the collective Volk among young Germans from 1918 to and beyond 1945.

The other reservation I have about The Making of Psycho-

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history is, as well, a suggestion for the proposed second volume Elovitz intends to write. More attention should be paid to the different psychoanalytic orientations—or “schools”—that have played an important part in the evolution of psychohistorical research. This will, for example, allow closer consideration—and critique—of Joan Scott’s appreciation of Lyndal Roper’s Oedipus and the Devil (1994) and Witch Craze (2004). Scott’s basic argument is that most psychohistorians from the 1970s on have regarded psychoanalysis simply or largely as a new tool for the historian’s toolkit. In this, she focuses principally on American ego psychology, which she says undercuts an understanding of what she calls the “critical possibilities” (concerning, above all, body, desire, fantasy, sexuality, and gender) of the interaction of psycho-analysis and history. Whether or not one engages Scott’s argument specifically, a second volume of The Making of Psychohistory would do well to review and critique the psychohistorical literature in terms of the application of various models of psychoanalysis: i.e., orthodox drive psychology, ego psychology, object relations (from Melanie Klein through to Jacques Lacan), and self-psychology.

This would allow for comparative critique of the work of psychohistorians both on and off Elovitz’ list. For example, while Elovitz is correct in his characterization of Rudolph Binion as, among many other things, “brilliant, erudite… innovative, [and] inquisitive,” (60), he restricts criticism of Binion’s highly idiosyncratic approach to his “flawed” 1968 psychobiography of Lou Andreas-Salomé. But the same flaws mark Binion’s subsequent Hitler Among the Germans (1976), which Elovitz is content to call an “extraordinary… tour de force” that was often only “misinterpreted” (61). There is indeed erudition, painstaking research, and brilliance in this work, but the problems with it go far beyond susceptibility to misinterpretation. Binion’s attempt at connecting the individual to the group through his invention of “traumatic reliving” is bold but deeply problematic. This is especially so since verifying his conclusions requires literally (i.e., beyond thinking) feeling one’s way into Binion’s own subjective immersion in the primary material. There is no way to confirm his findings through external or objective measures of theory and evidence, only his tautological insistence that if you see things my way, you will agree with me.

Connected with greater attention to scholars working psychohistorically (in whole or in part) within the field of history

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should be attention paid to interdisciplinary works in political science, the social sciences, and history that are informed by depth psychological theory. There was—and is—a rich discourse in books and journals on (psycho)historical method, such as, for example, in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, founded in 1969. As for works of psychohistory, in my own field of modern European and German history, apart from scores of journal articles, there are many examples of books using one kind of psychohistorical method or another on a historical subject, including, among others: Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980); the second, revised edition of Otto Pflanze’s Bismarck and the Development of Germany (1990); Judith Hughes’ Emotion and High Politics (1983); Robert Pois’ Emil Nolde (1982); Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage (1970); Robert Tucker’s Stalin as Revolutionary (1973); Lewis Edinger’s Kurt Schumacher (1965); Frank Manuel’s A Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968); Richard Koenigsberg’s Hitler’s Ideology (1976); Helm Stierlin’s Adolf Hitler (1976); Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979); David Hunt’s Parents and Children in History (1970); Bruce Mazlish’s James and John Stuart Mill (1975); Fred Weinstein’s The Dynamics of Nazism (1980); Travis Crosby’s The Two Mr. Gladstones (1997); as well as Roper’s Oedipus and the Devil and Witch Craze.

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