Eli Sagan: Scholar of Aggression and Sociologist

Eli Sagan was born in 1927 in Summit, New Jersey, and graduated with honors from Harvard University in 1948. He then devoted the next quarter century to a business career in New York City, but never lost interest in the life of the mind. After retiring from business in 1974, he devoted his life to scholarship, eventually publishing the following books: Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (1974), The Lust to Annihilate: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Ancient Greek Society (1979), At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State (1985), Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil (1988), and The Honey and The Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America (1991). Currently, he is working on a book on the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, tentatively called Citizens and Cannibals. In recognition of his intellectual achievements, despite his lack of advanced degrees, Sagan has been on the faculties of Brandeis, the New England Conservatory, the New School, and UCLA. This scholar of aggression was interviewed at Ramapo College on December 6, 2000.

Paul H. Elovitz (PHE): Please tell us about some of your formative experiences?

Eli Sagan (ES): I grew up in Summit, New Jersey, which was an overwhelmingly non-Jewish, white middle-class town. I was among only three Jews to graduate from my high school class of 185 people. That was an important part of my life. Both of my parents’ parents were born in Russia and came to the U.S. as teenagers. I was the middle of three sons. My mother had no occupation. My father started as a machinist then became a manufacturer of girls’ coats. It was a rags-to-riches American story. At Harvard my major was labor economics and my thesis was on the history of the labor movement in America for a 25-year period.

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Eventually I took over the business from my father and retired at age 47. My father died in 1975 and my mother in 1979.

PHE: Did you receive any psychoanalytic training? Were you in therapy or psychoanalysis?

ES: I was in psychoanalysis, lying on the couch, for five days a week for 22 years. I started in Cambridge when I was a junior at Harvard. I first heard about psychoanalysis from a woman who told me about the analysis she was undergoing. The Oedipus conflict hit me like a bolt of lightning—it made perfect sense. I learned about the unconscious, ambivalence, unconscious conflict, developmental stages, and so forth.

PHE: How did your family react to your analysis? In many ways I come from a similar background; my mother and father came to the U.S. as immigrants from Eastern Europe. In my family there were a lot of prejudices about going into psychoanalysis, anything “psycho” was for crazy people or the idle rich; we were neither.

ES: My family was not that strong in opposition to analysis. Both my father and mother knew that I was disturbed. They had consulted a psychologist they knew socially when I was about 12 and she said don’t give him any therapy. My mother was a believer in psychology, she felt it was the way people had to deal with their problems. I don’t know how she came to this conclusion. She was uneducated, born in a shtetl.

Later in New York City I switched to an Austrian-born analyst, Otto Isakower. Being in analysis gave me the capacity to leave my father’s business. I had a reluctance to do something my father would disapprove of, as I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to surpass him. I also maintained an intellectual interest all those years doing serious reading and serious thinking. My closest friends were professors and my analyst was a serious intellectual.

PHE: How did your psychoanalysis affect your outlook on society?

ES: It did not change my worldview very much. I was always a person with a strong interest in politics, even when I was in eighth grade. I became a left-wing person, although not a Communist. My brother and I spent several weeks one summer at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School in New York City taking a course on dialectical materialism. Then we went to a Communist Party camp to check it out, but we didn’t like it and we didn’t stay very long—it was too ideological for us. In college, all my friends were Communist Party members, including Herbert Marcuse’s son. They were not serious; they were just playing with revolution. I joined the Harvard Liberal Union, passed out leaflets for the United Electrical Workers, and I worked for Henry Wallace’s Presidential bid in 1948. I was interested in changing society for the better. I had a strong concern for the disadvantaged and with the possibility of the nuclear destruction of the world. I remember the day, and where I was standing and where the sun was shining, when I heard we dropped the bomb that killed 100,000 people at Hiroshima. I knew we were in big trouble. All of this predates my time in analysis. When I started to do my intellectual work, I used psychoanalytic theory to understand why we were threatened with self-destruction.

My analysis was strictly personal, discussing my father, my brothers, my mother, etc. My psychoanalytic sociology I got from reading, mostly Freud. In my analysis I wasn’t any more obsessed with aggression than are most people. I started writing my first book on cannibalism while I was in analysis but there was no conscious connection. I have a deep interest in the concept of aggression but I think that anyone in liberal or radical politics does, too. It’s always about aggression.

PHE: Yet very few write about aggression while you have written five books about it.

ES: Near the end of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud said that someday, as difficult as it is, someone would bring us a psychopathology of cultural beliefs. That is essentially what I’ve been doing. Aggression is the cause of psychopathology in society. The problem with talking about aggression is that you have got to have some line to awareness of your own aggressive feelings. If you don’t have a connection with the Nazi within yourself you’ll never understand Nazism. If you don’t understand the cannibal within yourself you will never understand cannibals. People who do not have a sense of their own aggression will never understand the aggression of others. As far as I’m concerned, the psychoanalysts are as repressed on this as anybody.

We’re back to where we were when Freud started talking about infantile sexuality in 1905 and there was a big hoo-ha. There have been no advances because people take it as a personal attack on character. That is why the psychoanalytic community has been very anti-Melanie Klein. She talks about rage—infantile rage—and betrayal and destruction. For most people aggression is other

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people’s problem. Everything I write says aggression is our problem, my problem and your problem. When people hear you’re writing a book on cannibals it’s fine so long as you’re talking about those cannibals. But when they find out you’re talking about us cannibals, they don’t want to have anything to do with it. They don’t want to read that racism is our form of cannibalism. Something in my analysis allowed me to face, at least on a pretty conscious level, my primitive aggressive impulses.

PHE: I strongly agree with most of what you are saying. It is also interesting that Hitler, a racist of the first order, was flirting with vegetarianism when he was “devouring” Jews, Russians, and millions of other people.

ES: Returning to the issues of gender and aggression, I believe that over and over again men cannot deal with the feminist agenda for equality unless they can get in touch with their own aggression towards women.

PHE: Agreed. I would also say that they have to come to terms with their own feminine feelings.

ES: Yes, but they can’t come to terms with their feminine impulses if their reaction is to be aggressive towards women. When feminist ideology first started in the mid-1970s, the two leading theorists were Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow. I discovered their work very early and then I taught it. Nancy Chodorow became a clinician and has been completely accepted in the psychoanalytic establishment. Her work is cited all the time in the journals. But Nancy Chodorow does not believe in aggression. The first time I had lunch with her she told me there is, from her observation, no anal stage. Dorothy Dinnerstein is completely committed to examining the process of rage and other issues raised by Melanie Klein. Dinnerstein really gives us an avenue into the origins of patriarchy that is connected to men’s rageful need to subordinate women. She also recognized that women consented to their own domination, which Chodorow never touched. Consequently, Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (1976) was out of print for 10 years. The psychoanalytic establishment never mentions Dinnerstein’s work. The problem with Dinnerstein is that she raises problems of rage in a way that they just don’t want to hear.

PHE: I agree with you. Can you correlate their ideas at all with their personal histories or personalities? I don’t know Chodorow, but I met Dinnerstein in her later years and I’ve seldom known a more depressed person.

ES: When her book first came out she was very reluctant to start her public lectures. So I went with her and was her Bergen County, New Jersey, warm-up band. My wife and I were very close to this remarkable person. She was willing to admit to the things people don’t want to admit to, such as their aggressive feelings toward their children. It’s pre-oedipal stuff. Mainstream academics and analysts just do not want to talk about rage against the mother. I was once at a lecture with the great Charles Brenner and somebody asked him a pre-oedipal question and he said, “I can’t answer that, ask Roiphe and Galenson.” It is as if Charles Brenner never had a mother!

If you don’t understand aggression then you’re not going to understand the psychopathology of society. You’re not going to understand welfare, racism, and self-destruction. Much of what goes on in society and politics is self-destruction. Yet there is no psychoanalytic theory of self-destruction, it is as if it doesn’t exist. Fortunately, sometimes self-destructive impulses work to our benefit as when Hitler decided to invade Russia when he couldn’t conquer England. He wouldn’t retreat at Stalingrad so his whole army in Southern Russia was wiped out.

PHE: Sometimes self-destruction works against us as well.

ES: Of course. Ralph Nader did it. He made Bush President. Nader got 90,000 votes in Florida, because he was on some narcissistic trip. The liberal Left in America has this tendency, every now and then, to commit suicide instead of doing it the way it should be done.

PHE: The conservative Right also has that tendency. I remember that when Newt Gingrich resigned, The New York Times quoted him as saying that he would not be hostage to four, or five, cannibals in his “Republican Revolution” caucus, who were so ideologically fanatical that they would destroy him and everyone else.

ES: Gingrich had it in his hands. For his Republican Revolution to be in business for 50 years, all he had to do was to give to the rich, forget the blacks, cut welfare, and not touch Social Security. But he decided to touch Social Security, which was self-destructive. The radical Right and the radical Left both show signs of self-destruction,

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which is an important dimension of paranoia.

PHE: Returning to our History and Makers of Psychohistory Research Project questions, how do you define psychohistory?

ES: The study of those places where psyche and society come together. To me, psychology is when you are on the couch with your analyst—but that’s not society. Psychohistory is a psycho-social union that tries to examine the psychological motivations that influence history.

PHE: What brought you to psychohistory?

ES: Politics brought me to history and sociology. I read a great deal of sociology. I was essentially a psychoanalytic sociologist. I have taught Talcott Parsons’ psychoanalytic essays. Both Parsons and I had the same analyst so I would see him at the Austin Riggs Institute and in Cambridge.

My own excitement and sense was that psychoanalysis as a theory was about the truth. So I have used psychoanalytic concepts to try to explain what goes on in society, as in ambivalence, which is essentially a psychoanalytic concept. In Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form, I say that all expressions of social aggression are ambivalent. My proof is that all cannibalistic activities are surrounded by ritual. The ritual is about the ambivalence with the fact that you know you’re not supposed to eat people but you do eat people. So you ritualize the eating of people. For me all ritual is about ambivalence. If you’re not ambivalent about something then you don’t have a ritual. You don’t have a ritual about going to the supermarket. You do have a ritual about sex, graduating from college, getting married, and death—all situations of ambivalence. The ritual comprises a compromise formation to help you deal with this ambivalence.

PHE: Turning to your scholarship, of which of your works are you most proud?

ES: My finest book is At the Dawn of Tyranny, although I have a hunch that my current book is just as good. One was and the other will be a groundbreaking book. My new book is on the French Revolution Reign of Terror of 1793-1794. Its tentative title is Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, The Struggle for Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror. It’s a study of left-wing ideological terror. It’s about why people with great moral insights, like Robespierre and St. Just, who had a moral banner hanging over their heads, end up slaughtering thousands of people. These people were not gangsters.

PHE: They are true believers rather than gangsters. True believers are much more dangerous than gangsters.

ES: Yes. They are not there to rob a country and take it over. I can’t speak about Lenin, but Robespierre was a moral genius—there is no question about it. If you hear Robespierre on the emancipation of the Jews or on the end of slavery, nobody said it better. On capital punishment, he said it doesn’t work: first, it doesn’t stop crime; second, it corrupts society; and, third, it’s human sacrifice. He is absolutely right. He also knows how sleazy the coming democratic bourgeois society is going to be. Robespierre asks, “Did we go through all of this revolution just to have essentially the kind of democracy that they got in England and Geneva?” He says, “Shall we substitute for the tyranny of birth the tyranny of riches?” He knows you’ve got to have a welfare system. He knows people are going to have to be paid to hold office if your going to have a true democracy.

PHE: You make me want to read your book when it comes out. Please tell us some more about your business career in terms of analogies to your career as a psychohistorian.

ES: I learned in business how to be tough and not to be afraid of power. The problem with most intellectuals and 95% of academics is that they are afraid of power. The famous Kissinger statement is that the reason that academic meetings are so aggressive is because the stakes are so small. It’s my experience that good liberal people, like Hubert Humphrey, don’t know how to relate to power. They give power over themselves to other people, who serve as their surrogates in holding power. André Malraux asked an old priest, “What did you learn from all these years listening to confessions?” The priest replied, “That there are no grown-ups.” I thought to myself, What’s a grown up? I concluded that a grown-up is a person afraid neither of morality nor of power. I was never afraid of morality. And since my business was incredibly competitive, if I had not asserted my power against the interests of others, I would not have stayed very long in the business.

PHE: I have noticed your independence as a psychohistorian. You are quite able and willing to stand apart and alone.

ES: Well, I have no PhD, I have no credentials. When I submitted At the Dawn of Tyranny to the University of Chicago Press they turned it

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down and referred to me as an “uncredentialed academic.”

PHE: Please tell us about your teaching.

ES: I have really only taught in places where I have had a personal invitation. One of my closest friends was the head of the humanities department of the New England Conservatory, teaching literature and sociology. He invited me to teach there, and so for five years I flew up once a week. My other closest friend is a person with a certain amount of renown in the sociological field, who was the chair of sociology at Berkeley. After I had written the Tyranny book he invited me out to Berkeley. That was the best teaching I ever did, the most productive. I lived out there one semester a year for five years. It was absolutely marvelous teaching to graduate students there and I am still friendly with some of these former students. That’s where I started teaching psychoanalytic feminist thought: Freud, women, and society. Then it became too much for me and my wife, who teaches in Englewood, New Jersey, and didn’t come to California. My editor sent my Tyranny book to the economist Robert Heilbroner, who was very excited about the ideas in it. We had lunch, and I told him I was looking for a place to teach. He said, “Why don’t you teach at the New School?” I said, “Why don’t you ask me?” So he spoke to the dean and then they asked me to teach as part of the graduate faculty. I did that for eight years. The teaching there was only fair. There was not much interest in my ideas within the sociology department, feminist studies, liberal studies, or even among the psychoanalytically inclined faculty. Then I got an invitation to go to Brandeis from Shula Reinharz, the chair of Women’s Studies. Today her husband is the president of Brandeis. There I taught graduate students psychoanalytic feminist thought for eight years, ending two years ago. I don’t think I want to teach anymore. But, in all modesty, I was a great teacher and people knew that.

PHE: Your style for giving presentations has been very authoritative. I find your ideas interesting and worth engaging. You give a lot of material that’s worth agreeing or disagreeing with.

ES: Lecturing is not my teaching style—I have never given a lecture course yet. I only teach seminars—maximum 22 people around the table, take-home readings, and lots of interchange. The best compliment I got was when a student of Alan Dundes said to me, “You teach frightening material in a non-frightening way.” I love to make a lot of jokes. I tell stories about my children and that helps because the material is scary to people not committed to it.

PHE: How many children do you have?

ES: We have four children. Three girls and one boy, in that order. Two of them are into good works, one is a poet, and the other is an architect in Vermont. They are wonderful and they have all been in therapy. It’s all a question of aggression. I remember my five-year-old daughter announcing to me, “I hate you!” If I had said that to my parents, I would not be alive today. My analysis taught me that you don’t take those things literally. You’ve got to be imaginative to reach your own unconscious feelings, and therefore you don’t take them literally. For that moment she hated me, but overall she did not.

PHE: How do you see psychohistory developing in the next decade?

ES: I don’t see any radical changes. My one criticism is that there is not enough sociology—enough sociological theory—in the work. You see, I am an evolutionary sociologist. I believe in social development in stages and the stages are extremely important. But the developmental stages you can get to only by studying history and sociology, you can’t get to them through Lloyd deMause’s childrearing stages, although there is a connection. For one thing, there’s Revolutionary France and modern analogies. De Tocqueville has a marvelous insight regarding the Terror established by the Convention, which has left us with a terrible legacy of the politics of the impossible. Robespierre, Lenin, and Stalin were into the politics of the impossible. It acts as if you can skip a developmental stage—as if you can go from the ancien régime to a Republic of Virtue in one generation. It’s utopianism. Deep down they know it is impossible. Then they consciously discover it’s impossible and feel betrayed by their own ideal. They start killing people in response.

Marx knew that change depends on an evolutionary notion. During 1848 and the beginnings of the Paris Commune in 1870 he said, Cut the stuff about the socialist revolution, first we have to have a bourgeois society. The argument was between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks were a Marxist revolutionary party just as were the Bolsheviks. They said there has to be a bourgeois society before a socialist stage. Lenin said, No, we can skip that stage. So I believe that stages in evolutionary theory are enor-

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mously important.

I don’t hear in psychohistory the question of what pushes society from one stage to the next. Marx faced that problem, too, but he gave it a non-psychohistorical answer, a totally materialist answer: the means of production, etc. At one point Engels said that ultimately the whole thing is driven by greed. I don’t agree with that. In my forthcoming book I present a long complicated argument that in Revolutionary France ideological terror resulted from the failure of the French society to achieve a stable position in the modern stage of society—bourgeois, democratic, capitalist, and nationalist society. They couldn’t do it and neither could the Russians. But it seems to me that you don’t understand that unless you believe that modernity is a stage in the evolution of society. The problem in our society is that we have to go beyond modernity. Our society is so ambivalent about going beyond that bourgeois, democratic, capitalist, and nationalist modern stage that it can’t move.

PHE: To what do you want to go beyond modernity?

ES: A real sense of nurturing and equality within society. The welfare state took us part of the way but this richest country in the history of the world still tolerates 20% of the people living below the poverty level. It’s unimaginable; we can’t seem to figure out what to do about that. To go beyond modernity is to say that we won’t tolerate that anymore, but I don’t see that happening. We have to control the capitalists, not eliminate them, but control them. (You also cannot have a stable, democratic society unless you control the generals and armies.) We don’t have society in control because capitalists still essentially control the society.

PHE: What is the importance of childhood to psychohistory?

ES: Childrearing is enormously important. I taught a course at Brandeis on the history of childrearing from 1550 to 1950. One sees that stable democratic societies like England, America, and eventually France, are the ones who lead the way in the changes in childrearing from brutal primitive childrearing to a more democratic childrearing. We will only go beyond the modern stage of human development when we have better childrearing. Today we can’t get there because money has become unbelievably important in society. My wife tells me that her students are suffering from this focus on money and the ways to make it. There is something wrong with childrearing if children have to use that defense. Unfortunately, we still have to look for the changes in childrearing: a more democratic, empathetic, approach to socializing the new generation. The promise of the 1960s and 1970s was not fulfilled. Lloyd deMause’s advanced psychoclass seems to have shrunk instead of growing larger in the last 20 years.

PHE: I am more optimistic than you are on this issue, but I also think that Lloyd’s “helping mode” parenting takes a good idea too far. As someone who has done child analysis, I think it borders on utopianism, at least as far as it is applied by most parents I have encountered.

ES: We have seen tremendous moral revolutions in the past—the Reformation and the changes from early modern society to modern society, including democracy and women’s rights. We cannot assume that we have come to the end of revolutions. The 1960s really pointed us toward a revolution, but society’s decision-makers seem to have been able to co-opt sexual liberation, a certain amount of equality for women, homosexuals on TV, and a large black middle class without yet making the real revolution. Again, my basic theoretical notion is that the development of the psyche is the paradigm for the development of the culture and society. When changes are part of the psyche we have made great progress.

It seems to me that one way of describing this society is that we’re a well-functioning, reasonably healthy, late adolescent society. If you are like a late adolescent—aggressive, well organized, and not caring about anybody else—you are a phenomenal success in this society. But what follows late adolescence? Ultimately, nurturing. You are supposed to leave late adolescence and have nurturing relations with a spouse and then with children. So maybe developments are pointing in that direction. Certainly, there are indications of this. But, for me, evolutionary theory is very helpful. The time in history when a moral revolution is on the agenda but the people will not do it, is a time of great disorder and great despair. I think that’s where we are now. There is a great quote from the Roman historian Livy where he says, “We have reached the stage where we can stand neither our vices nor their cure.” If that doesn’t describe America, I don’t know what does! We can’t stand such things as child abuse and homelessness, but we will not institute their cure. Pre-consciously we know we must do something, but we deny it con-

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sciously. This society is enormously ambivalent about implementing moral change.

Why do we change? What propels evolutionary movement? What is the engine of history? What is pushing society to a more and more nurturing, more and more democratic and egalitarian childrearing? Those are the great questions and I don’t think many people are prepared to give intelligent answers to them.

PHE: Regarding change, I have a problem when teaching Lloyd’s theory of the changing modes of childrearing in my Western Civilization course. Students are assigned his wonderful essay, “Evolution of Childhood” (1974), but then I have trouble getting them to acknowledge the psychogenic theory. They read and re-read it. They are quizzed on it. But they cannot absorb it. The level of denial just amazes me; it is as if they are not influenced by the essay beyond being repelled by the abusive childrearing.

ES: Well, it’s probably too abstract and too theoretical for them. When I teach this kind of thing, I find it works very well to describe how my father and mother were raised, how they raised me, how I raised my children, and how my children are raising their children. The change is revolutionary. My father would no more change a diaper or push a baby carriage then he would jump off the Empire State Building. You don’t have to go back to the 15th century to find abusive childrearing. You could even assign them the task of asking their parents how they raised their children differently than they were raised. That might open their eyes—to see the enormous changes within three generations. Regarding changes affecting women, one does not have to go to ancient times. In my wife’s generation there are vast differences since the era she grew up. Somebody should write an essay suitable for classroom use on the changes in childrearing within bourgeois American society within the last three or four generations.

PHE: We transformed society, yet we don’t know where it’s going and we are not sure we want to go forward because of the uncertainty involved. In terms of last fall’s Presidential election, we elected a candidate who clearly was whacked around (George W. Bush) to one who apparently was not struck by his parents.

ES: It is my guess that Gore was whacked around psychologically. I knew his parents very well. His mother, who is still alive, was a very intrusive, domineering person. That is why he looks like someone is standing there looking over his shoulder. People didn’t want change and Al Gore wasn’t telling us what he thought.

PHE: How do you explain the growth of fundamentalism?

ES: That’s a chapter in my new book on the French Revolutionary Terror, called “The Great Promise and Great Anxiety of Modernity.” Modernity increases anxiety at a quantum level because it demands that we give up certain defenses. We can no longer huddle under the power of an omnipotent king nor under the power of a dogmatic religion. Giving equality to women is scaring “the shit out of everybody.” We also have to give equality to the so-called “inferior people”: poor people and black people. We are witnessing the greatest breakdown of the kinship system ever: people are on their own. In our society if you fall in the gutter nobody picks you up. Tom Paine has a marvelous passage in which he says nobody starves to death in the country, somebody takes care of them; only in the city do they starve to death. The city is modernity personified. Dostoyevsky tells how when you walk on the Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg at night you pass 8,000 people and you don’t know one person. Human beings are not meant to live like that, but the modern world says that’s the way we live.

Modernity increases anxiety. Fundamentalism is a defense against anxiety. All fundamentalists turn back modernity and its advances: women are back in the kitchen and homosexuals are put away because we don’t want to see them anymore. Daniel Bell had this great insight back in 1978 when he predicted what would happen, in the essay, “The Return of the Sacred?”

Part Three of my book is called, “Modernity Psychosis.” I came to that title when my daughter called me about two incidents in Israel. Jewish fundamentalists drew swastikas on the doors of a reform temple and they firebombed a daycare center because boys and girls were going to be taught together. When my daughter asked me for an explanation, I said it’s “modernity psychosis.” The ultra orthodox were willing to live as a righteous minority in a gentile world for 2,000 years, but to live in a society with Jews who in their eyes are not Jewish is driving them crazy. With Islamic fundamentalists, the first thing they do when they get into power is to degrade women. Equality of women is one of the great gifts of modernity. Modernity is driving the fundamentalists crazy! [Sagan lifted his hands in despair and

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sighed.]

PHE: My next question is about the psychodynamics of violence and terrorism in our world.

ES: Social regressions always increase the level of violence in society. De Tocqueville brilliantly comments, “We can never again see this society of Henry IV or Louis XIV.” The patriarchal king is out. “We will either have democracy or we will put all the power in the hands of one man and we will see things our fathers never saw.” It’s a prediction of fascism that is unbelievable. When society decides to regress it does not regress back to the nice patriarchal, authoritative rule of Louis XIV, it goes into fascism where ideological terror and the level of violence enormously increase. My guess is that the same thing happens with people.

Modernity sets this march forward on the agenda and some people embrace it, going on to create stable democratic societies. Other people say, “The horror, the horror, I am not going there and I am going to kill as many people as possible so that I don’t go there.” That’s why we get these great contradictions. How are we going to remember the 20th century? As the Holocaust and Hiroshima? Or as the greatest advance for women, for minorities and sexual liberation, since primitive society? The truth is that both good and evil will be remembered. Modernity is a double gift.

PHE: What books were important to you?

ES: E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational is a great book using psychoanalytic theory to understand Greek society. Sir James George Frazer’s Golden Bough was enormously important. I read everything of Freud’s at one point. The feminists, Chodorow and Dinnerstein, were very important to me. Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, especially the latter’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, were quite important to me. Talcott Parsons has an essay on the father where he says that if a boy has to deal only with his father, he can’t make it. But in society there can be many “fathers.” Society invents the notion of fatherhood and the boy realizes that he could also be a father. Rather than be trapped between himself and his father, an unwinnable war, the boy can relate to other fathers in society. So working with symbolic fathers allows the son to work out his problems, helping with his liberation. To me this is a very broadening, important way to think about how society itself can make people healthy. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom is a terrific book on the ambivalence of modernity. How modernity both sets us free and drives us crazy simultaneously. Lloyd deMause’s work was also important to me. Alan Dundes’ book on anality and the Germans, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore (1984), is one of the best books on psychohistory that I know of. He has recently written a book on untouchability in India that is very powerful, Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability (1997). He talks about how in India everything that comes out of the body is contaminated and certain people’s job is to clean up the contaminated stuff. He was turned down by about 15 university presses—nobody would publish it. On the one hand the psychoanalysts ignore it and on the other hand the psychohistorians don’t read it.

PHE: Did Erik Erikson have any impact on you?

ES: Very little. He, too, was very afraid of aggression. Erikson writes a book about Luther in a society in which the devil is called “shit” and where his hero has his biggest insight sitting on the can. Erikson never talked once of anal aggression in the whole book.

PHE: Any final comments?

ES: Lloyd deMause has done path-breaking work in a number of areas. He is the only person I know who realized that the anti-masturbatory psychosis of the 19th century directed at the children, was unconsciously aimed at the writers themselves. That’s how the psyche works: projection comes first and then you take it into yourself. That’s why real psychohistory is not just the study of Hitler’s psyche.

Omnipotent fantasies is something that goes on within societies. Max Weber says that the greatest danger to kingship is when it loses a war. The greatest danger to a democracy is when it wins a war: its own fantasies of omnipotence carry it away.

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