A Hedgehog’s Opus Reviewed by a Fox

The range of The Emotional Life of Nations is breathtaking. It starts with how personal experiences determine political behavior, stresses psychohistorical theory, and concludes with psychohistorical evolution. Childhood, violence, and war are Lloyd deMause’s main psychohistorical foci. These are vitally important subjects to which he brings the erudition of four decades of psychohistorical research and thousands of footnotes. He uses extensive anthropological, clinical, historical, and neurological evidence. I will examine his book from my perspective as a historian, psychoanalyst, psychohistorian, and “intellectual fox.”

I first developed the psychohistorical hedgehog-fox dichotomy in the Rudolph Binion

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“Group Psychohistory Symposium” in Clio’s Psyche (December 2000, Vol. 7 No 3:148-149). An idea of Tolstoy’s inspired Sir Isaiah Berlin to write his well-known essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” in 1953, in which he divided all intellectuals into two separate categories: hedgehogs and foxes. The hedgehog sits on his mound viewing the prairie in every direction, enabling him to know one big thing and therefore build an intellectual system. By comparison, the fox knows many little things, as he sniffs around, but not one big thing. Berlin saw Marx as a hedgehog and himself as a fox. In these terms deMause is a hedgehog and I am a fox. We see the world from rather different perspectives. Let me as a historian explain some of the predilections of my profession.

The main focus of historians is on archival research, primary sources, and concern for careful, logical argumentation. The profession tends to be conservative and slow to accept theories from psychology or any of the social sciences. In practice, most of the educated public needs to utilize certain psychological terminology before more than a handful of historians will be inclined to put it in print in order to face the scrutiny of their colleagues. Broad generalizations about periods of history and the human condition are usually taken seriously by the profession only when they emanate from colleagues who have earned their credentials by painstaking archival work and have the prestige of holding endowed chairs at major universities. To reiterate, historians consistently stress evidence, archival research, and traditional processes of argumentation.

Lloyd deMause does not work in the dusty archives on the private papers of individuals, nor does he usually follow many of the canons of the historical profession. He makes sweeping generalizations; creates numerous terms of his own invention (“fetal psychology,” “poison containers,” “poison placenta,” “psychogenic pump theory,” “social alters,” etc.); and uses technical psychological language (“borderline,” “phallic,” “schiz-oid,” etc.) on the one hand and commonplace language on the other (“bad children,” “killer mommies,” “punitive mommies,” etc.). He tends to jump from era to era, and is sometimes careless with details. He quotes himself and the authors he has published far more than is customary, and does not cite scholars who are not affiliated with him as much as he should, though in some areas this can be difficult because he in working in virgin territory. He has little regard for the historical profession: deMause thinks that “most of what is in history books is stark raving mad” and reports that these books, as well as the news, literally leave him in tears (p. 108).

There are a variety of careless errors and questionable usages in The Emotional Life of Nations, as well as some omissions. For example, Glenn Davis’ surname is misspelled as “David” (p. 13). On page 223, the subject heading is “War in the Next Century,” but clearly the author is writing of our current 21st century. He refers to the first President Bush (George Herbert Walker Bush) as “George H. Bush” (p. 14), which is not an acceptable usage, to differentiate him from his eldest son, George Walker Bush. He could have differentiated the two presidents Bush as “Bush the 41st president” and “Bush the 43rd president.”

DeMause jumps to conclusions on the basis of limited information, for example, claiming that Ronald Reagan’s childhood “was more [than that of Carter and Eisenhower] like that of most presidents: a nightmare of neglect and abuse” (p. 13). Recently, I spent most of a year reading psychoanalytically informed studies of American presidents, and it is clear to me that we simply do not have data to support this claim of presidential “neglect and abuse.” Furthermore, deMause has insufficient evidence to claim, on the basis of Reagan’s autobiography (pp. 9 & 11), that the future president’s mother was obsessively religious” or that her husband was a “violent alcoholic father.” Information in Reagan’s autobiography raises these possibilities, but deMause does not do the interviewing and detailed archival research to confirm or deny his assumptions.

Alice Miller, whom he cites as a source for Hitler’s childhood (p. 49), is a pathbreaking author on child abuse. Nevertheless, what she writes on Hitler, while providing valuable insights into family dynamics based upon her clinical experience as a psychoanalyst, is derived from secondary sources and is historically weak. Regarding omissions in The Emotional Life of Nations, there is no bibliography and the authors cited in the notes are not included in the lengthy index. The author fails to credit Professor Rudolph Binion with developing the concept of traumatic repetition, which is used extensively in this volume.

From my perspective as a psychohistorian, deMause is too quick to make sweeping generalizations, with broad categories such as “The Schizoid Psychoclass of Tribal Societies,” “The Borderline Psychoclass of Later Christianity,” and “The

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Depressive Psychoclass of the Renaissance.” I sometimes find his categories to be valuable as hypotheses, but not as proven fact. While I do not have the time and space to challenge the above generalizations about large time periods, I can easily point out two examples of questionable generalizations from the last decade, starting with his claim that “no American war began in the first year of any president” (p. 5, note 4). Did not the American war against the Taliban of Afghanistan, as part of the War on Terrorism, begin in the first year (2001) of George W. Bush’s presidency, with the Afghan capital of Kandahar being captured in early December 2001? DeMause asserts that presidents go through “the four leadership stages of (1) strong, (2) cracking, (3) collapse, and (4) upheaval,” stating that “in the first year or so of his term of office, the leader is portrayed as grandiose, phallic, and invincible” (p. 129), while my own research on President Clinton directly contradicts this pattern. (See “Childhood, Personality and Clinton’s First Year: Why Was There No Honeymoon Period?” in the Journal of Psychohistory, Vol. XXI, Winter 1994: pp. 257-286.)

As an intellectual hedgehog, deMause sees psychohistory as a science, which does enable him to probe the life of nations and even attempt the unorthodox claim of making predictions. I wonder how many have actually come true. By contrast, as an intellectual fox, I see psychohistory and history as art forms, using intuition as well as the scientific method. His evidence is based upon what he calls group fantasy derived from advertisements, cartoons, comics, fetal research, newspapers, and other soft evidence, as well as the standard scholarly monographs. Like most historians, who are foxes, I prefer to work on individuals rather than large groups and to mostly limit my generalizations to shorter periods of history.

Besides being a historian, I am trained as a psychoanalyst and naturally examine the notion of historical group fantasy analysis from the perspective of psychoanalysis. In professional presentations, deMause has often referred to himself as like a psychoanalyst listening to the emotions and fantasies, not of the individual, but of the nation. Yet as a trained psychoanalyst I find his categories to be too broad and his generalizations to be much too sweeping. For the sake of clinic intake or insurance forms, I make rather quick judgments about diagnosis, but the reality is that it takes years to really understand many patients as the layers of defense are slowly lifted in treatment. As a fox I sniff around to learn more and more about the person I am working to understand and help, and sometimes only have a clear understanding of the full psychodynamics involved after many years of work. While the concept of historical group fantasy analysis has considerable appeal to me, I have never been able to reconcile its sweeping generalizations about the millions, hundreds of millions, or billions of people one has never met with the reality of how difficult it is to understand even one individual and how inadequate diagnostic categories sometimes are in this process.

Lloyd deMause is self-trained and has not had the long supervised apprenticeship of the psychoanalyst-in-training teaching him how not to project his own unconscious desires onto the subject, always a problem for any scholar, psychohistorical or not. Psychoanalysts-in-training spend many years in individual and group psychoanalysis where they learn about their own unconscious. One learns to observe and listen carefully and not say much. An important part of listening is to encounter one’s own unconscious — the normally not articulated fantasies about and in relationship to the patient.

My inability to reconcile the promise and reality of historical group fantasy analysis is not for want of trying. I learned the rules of fantasy analysis, taught the subject to my students, and used the methodology for about a decade until discontinuing its regular use, mostly because the fantasies uncovered almost always reflected the psychic needs of the analyzers more than the public being observed. After a late 1980 meeting of the Institute for Psychohistory, when deMause formed a seminar on American Group Fantasy, I was one of the regular members of this group. We met in Manhattan for about six months. By the time of Hinckley’s assassination attempt on President Reagan on March 30, 1981, it was apparent to me that the group was split between the members who saw increasingly violent fantasies in the media and those who mostly saw other things. Personally, I found abundant pollution fantasies. Several years later, I organized the American Fantasy Analysis Research Project and in 1985 published its findings in the Journal of Psychohistory with Henry Lawton and George Luhrmann. Our conclusion, based upon the fantasy analysis by psychohistorians of the same documents was that there was some value in the methodology. However, this does not mean that I find deMause or anyone else’s use of fantasy analysis any more than merely sug-

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gestive.

The problem with group fantasy analysis continues to be: What is the analyzer projecting into the materials as opposed to what feelings are induced by the materials themselves? All psychoanalysts face this dilemma of the countertransference, which is why the training involves a long apprenticeship during which there are a variety of control analyses in which the analyst-in-training describes and analyzes his work in detail and is helped to improve it by a seasoned psychoanalyst. In my case, there were 10 control analyses, averaging over a year each and in some cases overlapping. If group fantasy analysis is to have wide credibility in the psychodynamic community, it needs this type of careful supervision. In any case, it seems unlikely that it will find ready acceptance among non-psychological scholars.

To improve the methodology of group fantasy analysis, I put considerable time and energy into writing a major grant proposal to study it. A large cost of the project would be to pay a group of highly respected psychoanalysts, who were open to the ideas of psychohistory, to supervise those doing group fantasy analysis to help them understand how their psychic needs influenced their interpretations. Another goal would be to determine how closely different analyzers, working independently and not being part of a particular school of thought, would replicate each other’s analysis. Regrettably, funding was never forthcoming. To my mind, the question of the value of group fantasy analysis remains open.

DeMause is so passionate in applying the psychohistorical methods he has devised, especially group fantasy analysis, that he appears to have none of my doubts, though he is aware that “much of this book is upsetting and difficult to believe” (p. vii), and he has occasionally said that even only a small number of people in the IPA understand and accept his ideas. In surveying his book, I am reminded of a point the late Professor Sidney Halpern of Temple University made about certain advocates of new approaches to understanding. They are like prophets who have a vision of a wonderful future they are so eager to achieve that they see it happening even when it is not occurring. The author of The Emotional Life of Nations may show some of these tendencies when it comes to the quality of historical group fantasy analysis and the results of the helping mode of childrearing — the helping-mode children he writes about are empathetic and “lack all need for nationalism, wars, and other grandiose projects” (p. 430).

War is the subject of Lloyd deMause’s next book, as he continues his lifelong struggle to understand and prevent it. It is my hope that in writing it, he will tighten his argumentation and draw more on the recent scholarship of those outside his immediate circle to find a larger audience of psychoanalysts, historians, psychohistorians, and foxes like me.

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