A Research Program for Psychohistory (article)

It is essential that the field of psychohistory remain a big tent that scholars having many different professional backgrounds, theoretical approaches, and methods can call home. In this spirit, I define academic psychohistory in the broadest possible terms as the study of how history shapes and is shaped by the psychology of individuals and groups. In addition, the field encompasses applied psychohistory, which puts the insights of research to work in ameliorating social problems and creating a more humane and sustainable future.

While holding this expansive view of what psychohistory is, I also have more specific ideas about a research program that could advance the field. The program I envision would not exclude others. It would concern itself with deep processes of historical evolution that span past millennia and can provide insight into public af-

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fairs today. It would be guided by an overarching theoretical framework (what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm) that is not directly testable, but which generates a series of testable hypotheses. I view Lloyd deMause’s “Psychogenic Theory of History” as providing raw material for such a paradigm, though I disagree with deMause’s reductionism and do not think that his specific typology of childrearing stages is necessarily the best starting point for this program of research.

The theoretical framework I propose is centered on the simple proposition that childrearing practices have important macro-historical consequences. While this proposition may seem axiomatic to psychohistorians, it is far from self-evident to many others. In fact, it was even controversial when I proposed it last fall on the Clio’s Psyche Listserv discussion group. This led to a very interesting dialogue, which was published in the Winter 2015 issue of Psychohistory News under the title, “How Much Does Childrea ring Really Impact History?” (http://www.psychohistory.us/archive.php).

The proposition that childrearing practices have important macro-historical consequences is too general to be tested directly but can be a source of testable hypotheses. In this essay, I will focus on one of these hypotheses, or family of hypotheses, namely that political preferences and belief systems held by individuals are related to the quality of the care they experienced as children. The advantage of formulating the hypothesis in this way is that it builds on existing research in political psychology, especially the literature on authoritarianism. I also assume that beliefs and subjective preferences determine behavior, in conjunction with situational factors, which is supported by theory and experiment (see Richard Marken’s Doing Research on Purpose: A Control Theory Approach to Experimental Psychology, 2014).

An important early study in this context was Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which used survey research and interviews to uncover a personality type associated with political conservatism, ethnocentrism, and anti-Semitism. While breaking new ground in political psychology, this study contained significant psychometric and methodological flaws. Subsequent research by Bob Altemeyer in Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1988) and Brian D’Agostino’s “Self Images of Hawks and Doves,” in Political Psychology (1995) corrected for these flaws and replicated some of Adorno et

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al.’s core findings.

The idea that political beliefs and preferences might be related to childrearing practices is implied by the terms “strict father” and “nurturing parent” that cognitive linguist George Lakoff postulated as the underlying types associated with conservative and liberal beliefs and political preferences. Many psychohistorians would recognize Lakoff’s strict father and nurturing parent types as different “psychoclasses,” Lloyd deMause’s term for groups having a common personality profile arising from a specific pattern of childrearing.

I would argue that a major testable hypothesis that can be derived from the new paradigm I am proposing is that the authoritarian or strict father type is in fact associated with punitive parenting, though the nature of this association is likely to be complex. Adorno et al. provided some evidence for this hypothesis, but their research did not adequately explore the childrearing/political preference nexus and subsequent research on authoritarianism did not address it at all.

This hypothesis can be explored using both historical and social science methods. As for the former, consider as an example the causes of the French Revolution. If the childrearing/political preferences hypothesis is correct, there should be plausible evidence of a causal nexus between advances in 18^th century French childrearing and subsequent revolutionary upheavals in France. Two studies that explore such a nexus are Lynn Hunt’s The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1993) and Barry M. Shapiro’s Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution (2009), reviewed by David Beisel in this journal (Vol. 17, #1-2, 2010, 149-153). Such research is a model of empirical work that can be done across a range of cultures and historical periods. Lloyd deMause’s far-reaching speculations on the historical stages of childrearing entail many similar historical hypotheses that can be tested empirically through in-depth studies of this kind.

As for social science approaches to the childrearing/political beliefs hypothesis, research can be done using a combination of interview and survey methods, as in The Authoritarian Personality. In “Scapegoats and Sacred Cows: The Ideology of American State Capitalism” (Journal of Psychohistory, 2012), I sketched a psychodynamic model that could account for one version of the childrearing/political beliefs nexus. I argued that right wing authoritarians

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in the United States at the present time are typically people who were subjected to punitive parenting, generally by fathers (c.f. Lakoff’s “strict father” type). They apparently idealize the punitive parent and repress/project onto symbolic objects the rage they originally directed at him. It would appear that they typically also internalize the father’s contempt for weakness and dependency, which is associated with infancy and the nurturing mother.

I hypothesize that the idealized punitive introjects are typically projected onto the violent arm of the state—the military and police—while the internalized contempt is projected onto the “nanny state,” that is, the social welfare and regulatory aspects of government. It is the latter to which American conservatives generally refer when they castigate “government”—even as they treat the military and police as sacred cows. By contrast, someone who becomes conscious of the punitive father introjects as the source of their rage is likely to become politically progressive, rebelling against the violent side of the state and embracing the nurturing side.

It follows from this that punitive parenting does not result in conservative attitudes when the unconscious complexes associated with it remain unconscious. Thus, psychotherapy and spontaneous personal growth can transform the effects of punitive parenting on political belief systems. People raised in a nurturing manner may end up in the same place politically by a different developmental route. Research in this area needs to take account of such complexities, which may explain why some studies have failed to find a straightforward statistical correlation between childrearing and political attitudes.

In addition, we need to consider childrearing variables other than punitive parenting by fathers. Snyder and Clifton identify some of these variables, including quality and continuity of attachment in infancy and early childhood in The Predictor Scale (2013). Their “predictor scale,” which incorporates a number of relevant variables, may be useful in social science research on the sources of political preferences.

In summary, the nexus between childrearing, political preferences, and belief systems is a promising area for psychohistorical research. Testable hypotheses on this and related topics arise from a theoretical framework in which childrearing practices are assumed to produce important macro-historical effects. These hy-

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potheses can be explored using historical methods, such as research on the childrearing antecedents of the French Revolution, as well as social science methods such as survey and interview studies of authoritarianism and conservative/liberal political belief systems.

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