Books Shaping Psychohistorians (article)

Fifty years ago, at the time of graduating from medical school, I first read My Past and Thoughts, the memoirs of the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary, Alexander Herzen. That work described in a manner which was both fascinating and deeply moving the vivid and complex personalities of Russian and European revolutionaries, their prolonged emotional sufferings as a result of political defeats and exile, and their struggles to maintain their political hopes.

In my early years as an analytically oriented psychotherapist (treating graduate students at Columbia University), while undergoing a lengthy psychoanalysis and beginning to write biographical essays on scientists and revolutionaries, I was engrossed by books about the formation of identity that included Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950); Allen Wheelis, The Quest for Identity (1958); and Daniel Levinson’s The Seasons of a Man’s Life (1978). Later books that stimulated my thinking on how to apply psychoanalytic insights to biography were Hanns Sachs, Caligula (1931); Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (1981) (which was unusual among psychobiographies because it drew on both Freudian and Marxist theories); and Peter Loewenberg, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (1982).

I have also frequently read, and reread, the writings of Freud. Among the many books about his life, and how he developed his ideas, I have been most stimulated by Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (1972); Leonard Shengold, The Boy Will Come to Nothing: Freud’s Ego Ideal and Freud as Ego Ideal (1993); and Sander Gilman’s two 1993 books, Freud, Race, and Gender and The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at

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the Fin de Siècle.

J. Donald Hughes, University of Denver

The books I have found influential in my thought on psychohistory have not always been those I agreed with, but those that stimulated me to further thought. When I was an undergraduate, I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, probably because Freud’s theory was supposed to have something to do with sex. As I recall, it had to be checked out from behind the desk at the library. As far as that goes, it was disappointing. Although it was not easy reading, it was my first key to the idea that dreams reveal unconscious motives. Also, I was bemused by the thought that dreams can tell puns.

In graduate school, I came across Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and it opened to me the concept that dreams, carefully attended to, have a pivotal role in the course of a life. I have returned many times to Jung’s encounter with the mysterious figure who was meditating him.

As a professor, I picked up Paul Shepard’s Nature and Madness (1982), which has its obvious flaws in spite of the author’s fine writing. His parallel between history and biography was interesting (sort of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”), although I could not agree with his simple periodization. More important for me was the idea that the human relationship to nature, the community of life, is of primary importance in psychological development. Suddenly I saw that my interests in psychology, ecology, and history could be combined.

Then I must mention John M. O’Brien’s Alexander the Great: The Invisible Enemy (1992). Although I read it after I had published my article on the dreams of Alexander in The Journal of Psychohistory, I found it stimulating. I have used it as a text in my course on Alexander the Great several times, because it is the only recent biography that seriously tackles the question of his motivation. I hope my shadow boxing with O’Brien’s provocative interpretations intrigue my students as they do me.

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