A Professional and Personal History 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’ long-awaited oeuvre comes in a slim volume, but within its 125 pages of text the author has compressed a thorough survey of his subject, expressed in an elegant prose that keeps the pages flying. It just about does what it says on the table of contents, but the title misses out on the particularly personal perspective that this author brings. Elovitz’ own long and unique journey into psychohistory is central to the narrative: “doing psychohistory has been a wonderful, enlightening, and at times frustrating journey” (121). This is a congruent summary, and Elovitz’ three adjectives get good exercise in his account. The frustrations have to do with “intense resistance in academia, divisions among psychohistorians, and leadership missteps” (121). Yet it is perhaps these same frustrations that so enliven Elovitz’ book. Its garnish of highly personal assessments of the leading thinkers in the field, including Peter Gay, Erik Erikson, Robert Lifton, Vamik Volkan, Peter Loewenberg, Rudolph Binion, Sidney Halpern, Monte Ullman, and, of course, Lloyd deMause, actually constitute the main body of this important book.

Inevitably, it is when discussing Elovitz’ former mentor deMause, a prolific self-funded giant in the field, and author of the seminal, if controversial, Evolution of Childhood (1974), that the most delicate components of the story emerge to dramatically take center stage. Elovitz painfully acknowledges: “There are elements

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of tragedy in Lloyd deMause’s relationship with psychohistory, a field he did so much to build while simultaneously hurt. It is hard for me to determine if he did more to help or hurt the field” (99).

It is hardly a surprise that psychohistory has been fraught with differing values and approaches alongside ego-driven competition, since psychoanalysis—and the whole field of psychotherapy that was derived from it—has suffered a similar, bitter fate. The tragedy is that, in the parent discipline, no central public understanding of what psychology actually consists of has emerged. This is heinous, I believe, so that we are left with public political commentators, who (as I have written about elsewhere) have scant ability to recognize, analyze, and denounce the politics of dissociation and blame as psychopathological elements. Today’s political scene urgently cries out for a psychohistorical remedy.

I had expected a much more academic book, and indeed it is immaculately researched and annotated (in Routledge’s end of chapter style, though, I must say that, for continuity, I’d rather have my notes below the text or at the end of the book). But I was really delighted to be so entertained by the succession of anecdotes. I indulged in the chatty background detail of the various figures that Elovitz met and corresponded with; at times there’s a level of gossip that takes the reader right backstage. This is all great fun, although it left me with a hunger to know just a bit more of what psychohistory was made of while it was being made.

As someone who blossomed by adding psychoanalysis to his academic historian’s background and became the long-term editor of the prestigious journal Clio’s Psyche, Elovitz is better placed than anyone to tell the story in his way. Yet, for me, it is his honesty that always carries the day. Speculating on why anyone would be interested in a subject that had to try so hard to prove itself, Elovitz acknowledges that the psychohistorical approach helped him overcome writer’s block. Deeper motivations were the search for “tools to better understand myself, my relationship with others, and the problems in my marriage” (121). To this end the book is peppered with reminiscences of his own childhood, which I would have thought deserved a proper place elsewhere since, for this reader, they did not greatly support the unfolding story.

My main critique is that this book gives the impression of psychohistory as a purely American approach that only happens in and around the U.S. university scene. As a European, I am unfortu-

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nately used to such assumptions. In the U.K., clinical psychologists are trained in universities, but the bulk of counselors, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts aren’t, since we regard psychotherapy as a second profession. I would point the interested to the contributions of the psychoanalyst Adam Philips, the attachment therapist Sue Gerhardt, and the psychologist Oliver James.

To take this further, the interesting discussion of whether it is okay to make a personal analysis on the alleged psychopathology of world leaders, never personally met, could have been developed much more, I felt. This is especially important in these Trumpian times, as it was during Watergate, and Elovitz has particular experience here. For example, I think it important to speculate whether nations get the presidents they deserve and whether the perceived narcissism is a matter of individual mental health or if it is emergent in the culture per se. Even more importantly, there is a pressing need to look from outside the box and ask why the massacre of innocents in U.S. schools is so often repeated and to be curious whether its repetition could be an unconscious communication from the culture itself. I have little doubt that psychohistory will have to become a major discipline for negotiating a difficult future and Elovitz’ contribution will surely be seen as a foundational stone.

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