A Literary Psychohistorian: Dan Dervin

Dan Dervin was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1935. He earned his MA (1963) and PhD (1970) degrees in English drama and comparative literature from Columbia University. He taught on the English faculty at Mary Washington College from 1967 until recently retiring as Professor. He is an expert in creativity, psychohistory, and psychoanalysis as applied to cultural fields such as film, literature, and art. A member of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA), Dervin has been attending meetings since 1981 and has published numerous articles and reviews in the Journal of Psychohistory.

Dervin is the author of seven books: Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study (1975); A Strange Sapience: Psychoanalytic Study of Creativity in D. H. Lawrence (1984); Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of the Cinema (1985); Creativity and Culture (1990); Enactments: American Modes and Psychohistorical Models (1996); Matricentric Narratives: Recent British Women’s Fiction in a Postmodern Mode (1997); and Home Is Another Country (1998). Matricentric Narratives received the Adele Mellon Award for Distinguished Scholarship. Dervin is currently working on a compilation of studies on childhood and parenting from a global perspective. He has also authored numerous articles, short stories, and poems, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Psychohistory and American Imago.

Paul Elovitz interviewed this distinguished scholar over the Internet in July. Professor Dervin may be contacted at

Paul H. Elovitz (PHE): Please tell us about your family background.

Dan Dervin (DD): My parents were blue-collar, working-class Irish Catholic. My dad repaired gas stoves and appliances. My mother was a housewife. I had a brother, five-and-a-half years older, and a sister, three years older. She was born retarded, raised in a home run by an order of Catholic nuns, and is now deceased. My father died in 1984 when I was 49 and my mother, in 1993 when I was 58.

PHE: What was your childhood like?

DD: Mixed but pretty good. When I was four, our family moved into a new parish in the west part of town, into a modest brick home with lots of young families bringing up kids, and so it was a neighborhood of peers. Adjoining our property was a wooded gully with a stream which was used for bottling soda pop founded by a German immigrant. Beyond, were railroad tracks leading out of town. In the other direction was a parish school run by nuns who were long-sufferingly pi-

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ous, often strict, and seldom tuned into the pupils’ reality or needs. At 13 I first attended a youth camp in Colorado and have never since gotten over the mountains. These worlds became the source for a collection of stories written over many years and published in 1998 as Home Is Another Country.

Within the family, among other benefits and perplexities, I was a replacement child for my sister whose retardation and attachment deficiency inflicted traumas on everyone but me, who knew nothing of her, nothing was ever said, until I returned from the Service at age 23. Though done with the best of intentions, this act of benevolent deceit was not possible to bring off. Otherwise, I enjoyed reading and rough physical play, ran pretty wild, and was an ill-blended, studious, and hell-raising teenager.

PHE: How did your childhood cultivate your thirst for knowledge?

DD: As a preschooler, I walked with my mother to our branch library to bring home books which she read to me during nap times.

PHE: Why did you become a literature professor?

DD: I loved the study of literature, enjoyed discussing it, and also wanted a dependable income while I pursued my own unprofitable writing projects.

PHE: What books were important to your development?

DD: Greek tragedians. Major works of Shakespeare. Oxbridge classicists — Harrison, Murray, and Cornford. Ibsen, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, and Iris Murdoch. Sartre and Camus. Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Philip Slater, and Norman O. Brown. And countless others.

PHE: What has been your psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic experience and its influence on you?

DD: From 1960 to 1964 I was employed as a social worker in the inmate rehab unit of Westchester County, Pennsylvania. As I trained in group therapy, read Freud, and talked continually with a staff psychologist and friend, I began to glimpse the psyche’s underworld. My master’s thesis was a psychoanalytic study of Tennessee Williams. My doctoral dissertation was a psychoanalytic study of George Bernard Shaw, under Professor Steven Marcus and Dr. Arnold Cooper. In 1977, through correspondence with William Niederland, whose views on narcissistic injury I was using for a study of creativity, he suggested we meet for analytic dialogues in his home, which we did.

PHE: What brought you to psychohistory?

DD: Traveling in western Europe with my wife and young children in 1978, I would read brief histories of the countries we were visiting (notably France and Spain) and repeatedly I would come across an account that read in summary like “After achieving peace and prosperity, the province or nation decided to wage war against its neighbors, which caused untold suffering and hardship.” Economic or political motives failed to account for these irrational endeavors, so I sought psychological motives. I contacted David Beisel, then Editor of the Journal of Psychohistory, did an essay review, and began attending IPA meetings in 1981.

PHE: How do you define psychohistory?

DD: Psychohistory is a multi-disciplinary approach to the ways in which history and historical figures are shaped by the dynamic and hence non-rational forces of the unconscious, as stemming from early childhood experiences and manifested in the group as well as in the individual.

PHE: Have you taught psychohistory?

DD: I ran a course three times called Hitler and the Holocaust: The Psychohistory of Evil, with very mixed results. An approach that prized ambiguity, that raised questions rather than provided answers, stirred some deep-seated anxieties and even resentments.

PHE: What is your psychohistorical vision?

DD: In my book, Enactments: American Modes and Psychohistorical Models, I devised six models for deep research into historical material. Three were derived from Lloyd deMause, et al, most notably the equations of group-fantasy and the delegate; one came from Michel Foucault’s theories of repression; the remaining two were a blend of psychodynamics and drama which I termed Enactments. At this point, a single psychohistorical vision would be too reductive.

PHE: What special training was most helpful to your doing psychohistorical work?

DD: Learning to listen empathetically and non-intrusively in the group work mentioned above, and more recently recognizing that all our psychohistorical observations and interpretations

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are cued to models of which we may or may not be aware, and which may be relatively functional and appropriate — or the opposite.

PHE: Did Erik Erikson have an impact on you? Did you have any mentors?

DD: Erikson’s applied analysis to other cultures is interesting, but his concept of Identity lends itself to a psychology of consciousness and idealizations. Peter Blos on the ego ideal and adolescence is more profound. If you take Erikson’s Identity as a compromise formation, for example, you could then probe it for latent and manifest content levels. My key mentor would probably be the classical Freudian Donald Kaplan (also his wife, now his widow, Louise), whom I knew for over 30 years, and visited and corresponded with until his death in 1994.

PHE: As is the case with a number of distinctive psychohistorians, you taught literature before coming to our field. How has this journey affected your psychohistorical work?

DD: Well, fantasy analysis is really literary criticism with a dose of psychoanalytic theory. Any good scholar should have acquired the discipline of sticking to the text, which in our field enters areas of even-hovering attention and countertransference.

PHE: Has psychohistory helped you to understand literature in ways you would not have had you not known it?

DD: One way the former has impacted on the latter is to see how deeply the author is anchored in history, and is often a delegate for the prevailing group-fantasy, as well as how a few writers have been able to break new ground and overcome the dominant cultural mode as well as the group’s fantasy system.

PHE: What training should a person entering psychohistory today pursue?

DD: First, mastery of a discipline, in the humanities or the social sciences, helps to impart a sense of boundary and integrity within a field. Next, some analytic experience in which issues of competitiveness and one-upmanship in personal and professional endeavors have been worked through. Then, close study of the major works in applied psychoanalysis and psychohistory, and a fairly deep familiarity with Freud, would be ideal.

PHE: What do we as psychohistorians need to do to strengthen our work and to win greater acceptance?

DD: We spend much of our time re-inventing the wheel and not devoting sufficient energies to self-critical feedback and then to a synthesis, which should be our goal, though not my realistic expectation. Our tendency is toward hyper-individuality, hence fragmentation and lip service to colleagues’ ideas, and, therefore, a deficiency in both objectivity and rigor.

PHE: What is the importance of childhood to psychohistory?

DD: Childhood in its multifaceted dimensions is the core of psychohistory, which began in a key sense as the history of childhood. One could go on and inquire how childhood is constructed in psychohistory and consider deMause’s valuable contribution to childhood’s historical evolution via parenting modes. I have drawn on this model and also been inclined to tinker with it a bit, positing an intermediate Corrective mode between deMause’s Socializing and Helping modes.

PHE: Some Forum researchers have been struggling with the issue of identification with a particular parent and achievement.

DD: My study of abandonment in the lives of creative persons points to a Uses-of-adversity model.

PHE: In your experience and life, are high achievers more identified with their fathers?

DD: No — that’s an awfully pat formulation, isn’t it? A strong oedipal revolt is probably required for originality. Or are you implying that high achievement is a kind of conformity, that is, identification with the aggressor?

PHE: Of which of your many scholarly works are you the most proud?

DD: Creativity and Culture probably hangs together best. Creativity and Culture is a psychodynamic-based study of the roots of creativity as they culminate in works of the arts, but also in cultural works, and the inner processes which produce that natural work of creativity, the self. It is psychodialectical study between versions of origins, which form subjective and objective poles of the psyche; the former being epitomized by a family romance version of origins, the latter by the primal scene, which is also subject to distorted perceptions.

PHE: What are you working on now? What is its importance and when do you expect to have it published?

DD: I’m preparing a collection of psycho-

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historical pieces on childhood and parenting from a global perspective, in which my role will be primarily editorial. I believe this area is psychohistorians’ strongest suit, partly because the material is grounded in observations and not so prone to being over-interpreted. It is still in its very early stages.

I’m also writing on a larger project centered on the psychoanalytic concept of negation as a way into a study of mental operations generally (e.g., Why is there nothing instead of something?) It’s a position I’m comfortable with, but it bothers some psychohistorians to no end. Psychohistorians by and large want to locate the bad stuff that warps human development and functioning in a real, and usually traumatic, intervention, typically resulting in some form of child abuse. This is true as far as it goes, but it leads to a kind of simplistic parity of psychic dysfunction, which is echoed by the media. Leonard Shengold, the psychoanalyst, for example, distinguishes among his patients — between real abuse and pseudoabuse, the latter being about that “nothing” which is nonetheless real ever since Freud designated it “psychic reality.” Another example is that we don’t know why Clinton screwed up so awfully, but labeling him a “sex-addict” doesn’t get us very far.

PHE: Do you plan to publish any autobiographical writings?

DD: Probably not. I’ve cannibalized my life and others’ as well in creative work. When writing, I prefer masks and personae to the naked self.

PHE: These days I hear little reference to American Imago in which you publish. Would you speak about its contribution to applied psychoanalysis and psychohistory?

DD: It is largely given over to guest editors, and so the issues and quality vary accordingly, but recently there’s been a trend toward the postmodern cultural model, which I part company from. It refers to the tendency to explain all kinds of diverse actions and mental phenomena in terms of cultural forces. It leads to discourses on oppression, conspiracy, and the kinds of splitting that produce victims and victimizers.

PHE: What has your second career as a full-time author been like? Do you miss the stimulation of teaching?

DD: Writing is freer than teaching. There is a tendency among academics to dovetail their thinking with student interest, to court superstars in the field, and to kowtow to prevailing trends — all of which contribute to trite orthodoxy and arrest individual development.

PHE: How do you explain the growth and psychology of fundamentalism?

DD: In a word, splitting; but there is no short answer.

PHE: What are your thoughts on the psychology and psychodynamics of violence in our world?

DD: I feel we should be very tentative in any hypotheses we put forward, and so I hesitate to do so.

PHE: What are your thoughts about the Y2K emphasis and other reactions to the coming of the third millennium?

DD: I read a passing reference in the London Times that suggested that end-of-the-world fantasies are fueled by revenge, of the powerless against the powerful — not a bad starting point.

PHE: How has your psychohistorical experience changed your vision of the world?

DD: My sense is that individuals continue to struggle with early conflicts, which they displace, repeat, flee from, and glimpse but find too painful or unrewarding to hold in attention for long or to work through. Yet they often do form adaptations, or live in the conflict-free chambers of their psychic mansion, or form loving ties, or find sublimated/symbolic release in quasi-creative activities, or transcend their self-concerns to act altruistically and with kindness — for some, consistently, for others, erratically. But, in fact, we all put these ingredients together idiosyncratically and ad-hocly, adding in a portion of free will and the contingencies of circumstances and temperament. So we need to keep alive the capacities for surprise, wonder, insight, pleasure, paradox, suspending judgment, and changing our mind at whatsoever the cost.

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