Empirical Metahistory?

It is an intimidating task to evaluate a work like The Emotional Life of Nations, which ranges so widely over so many fields and exhibits such a plethora of data. Lloyd deMause even quotes articles from my daughter’s analyst! As the author himself states in his Preface, “Much of this book is upsetting and difficult to believe, despite the extensive historical, anthropological, clinical, and neurological evidence I will present” (p. vii). It is, therefore, almost impossible to deal with all the conclusions and assertions in each chapter. Take, for example, the sections in Chapter 4, which deal with fetal memory. DeMause overwhelms the reader with research data, which supports, or at least

Page 37

seems to support, his assertion that neurological evidence undergirds his theory of social change. It is difficult to argue with this claim without going through the same rigorous reading to which the author subjected himself. Personally, I have tried to keep up with the continuing debate among and between neurobiologists, and my sense is that there seems to be less unanimity in that field than deMause suggests. But, again, he produces data, which has, at least, to be taken at face value. It is unclear if one can then make the leap from clinical and neurological research to deMause’s central claim as stated below:

However disguised, the Poisonous Placenta and the Suffering Fetus are the most important images of the fetal drama, and the restaging of their violent encounter is a central religious and political task of society. I suggest that this battle with the persecuting placental beast constitutes the earliest source of war and social violence, traumas that must be restaged because of the neurobiological imperatives of early brain development (p 76).

Perhaps this is so, although the passage contains theoretical assumptions which make me, as a historian, a bit skeptical. Lloyd deMause goes on to maintain that this restaging “is thus a homeostatic mechanism of the brain, achieved by groups through wars, economic domination and social violence” (p. 79). To deMause, once the concept is grasped, the “rationalizations of history become transparent” (p. 79). His example, the German desire for revenge after WWI for the day of shame (the Versailles Treaty), is really a reference to the real source, namely the abuse that German children suffered from their parents, particularly the father. A strange thought occurs to me at this point: What if Germany had won the war? Would there still have been a “day of shame”? Or, to put it another way: Didn’t the historical event awaken “the shame?” Is this an over-determined outcome? Or, to put it even another way, did the event trigger, or cause, the emotions rather than the emotions triggering the event?

I suppose I am entering the old problem of the chicken and the egg, and what I write now may be considered nit-picking, but that is a tendency of historians. Later I will raise more theoretical caveats, which I hope will be resolved in this symposium. I admit that, as deMause himself comments, “Much of this book is upsetting and difficult to believe” (p. vii), and I find myself having difficulty with such concepts as the poisonous placenta.

Let me give some random thoughts on historical assertions. It is true that the Germans cheered Hitler at the start of WWII (p. 155), but this was the result of a string of diplomatic successes and, therefore, euphoria about Germany’s rise to pre-eminence politically and militarily. During the Czech crisis, Hitler pulled out all the propaganda stops (parades, etc.), but was unable to muster very much public support to go to war in 1938. There is evidence that Munich was not what he wanted, and some historians label it as a defeat for Hitler. By the time we get to September 1, 1939, an entirely new psychological stage was set. There had even been a plot by German generals to assassinate Hitler if he went to war at that time (1938). The question which bothers me is the one I will keep coming back to: Are the Germans people (and that is another problem), acting out childhood traumas, or is the messianic leader capable at a certain historical junction of arousing childhood memories?

Although I do agree with deMause on the emergence of different psychoclasses, I have the same difficulty defining psychoclass that many other historians have defining economic class. As deMause admits, there exist various psychoclasses at any one historical period. I found his section on the Reformation particularly persuasive, but I was confused by the section on German childrearing, where he states that the German workers held to democratic ideals, a higher level of psychoclass (p. 183), yet on the next page the evidence shows that “autobiographies of late nineteenth-century working-class childhoods found the German ones far more brutal and unloving…” (p. 184). Since these children would be adults during the Hitler regime, one would expect them to be less democratically inclined than the earlier generation. I also find the assertion that the German people “knew deep down they were committing suicide” to be problematic (p. 155). How does one document that?

On a subject closer to my heart and reading is the question of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. DeMause has swallowed whole the “revisionist” theory that FDR deliberately lured the Japanese into attacking. As I recollect, this version has been around since Charles Callan Tansill wrote Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941 (1952). Given the limits of space and time, it is impossible to recapitulate the extensive scholarship devoted to this topic. Suffice it to say that Joseph Persico’s recent work, Roosevelt’s Se-

Page 38

cret War (2001), ably summarizes recent revisionist theories and just as ably refutes them, including the work of Robert Stinnett, on which deMause relies. There is no doubt FDR was intent on getting into the war against Germany, but, as he said to Churchill, a fight with Japan would be “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.” They agreed that the first priority was the defeat of Hitler.

FDR was dealing with an American public rather strongly opposed to going to war and he saw his job as leading them into an awareness of the danger posed by Hitler. Even after Pearl Harbor, the American public would have opted for America only being at war with Japan, while Britain was at war with Germany and Japan. What a mess that would have been for Churchill! On the other hand, it should also be borne in mind that Hitler didn’t have to declare war on the United States, since the pact with Japan called for mutual assistance in case of aggression by another country. I have belabored this point because it reveals one of the problems attendant on macro theory, namely the dependence, in certain instances, on secondary sources.

Let me turn to the issue that bothers me most: the relationship between leaders, institutions, and the psychogenic theory of history. In a recent review article in The New York Review of Books, Robert Skidelsky (“The Mystery of Growth,” Vol. L No. 4. March 13, 2003: pp. 28-31) reviewed two works: one by Liah Greenfield, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (2001), and the other by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert E. Lucas, Lectures on Economic Growth (2002). It is not my intention to enter that debate. I simply want to use it as a springboard to raise some questions.

For the sake of discussion, I want to pose a question to deMause. Accepting as a premise that Max Weber was right when he said that Protestantism was the carrier of the “spirit of capitalism” and the Protestant ethic is behind the great economic and scientific success of the West, particularly Britain (and I note the more advanced psychoclass in Northern Germany compared to Catholic Bavaria), how does one determine the role of the psychoclass(es) in creating the institutions of capitalist society, and when do the institutions begin to have momentum of their own? It is little bit like the problems Marxists have with their concept of structure and superstructure. The Scots turned to Calvinism, which became the engine for great Scottish successes in both trade and intellectual achievements. How did their childrearing lead them to Calvinism, and how did that interact with the social base which was the family?

A further problem I have with the overall thesis is the question of what constitutes a group (or a nation). I was once burned by this problem when I served on a panel with Graham Gibbard (Yale University), who wrote Analysis of Groups (1981) with John Hartman (University of Michigan). Gibbard found that my attempt to apply small group theory to the millennialist movements of pre-Civil War America failed to establish the boundaries of the groups.

To end on a positive note, I think the “debate” between Greenfield and Lucas would have been enhanced by the insights from The Emotional Life of Nations. There are many valuable ideas contained therein.

Page 39