Dreams and the Historian’s Mindset

Professor Peter Petschauer is a fine academic, colleague, and historian. He is a good human being who is generous, open minded, and courageous. To an unusual extent he is also giving to his colleagues. Yet his thorough historical training and the resulting mindset, keep him from maximizing his ability to understand his fascinating dream. Let me start by describing his accomplishments and attributes, relating them to his history, and then showing how they paradoxically limit his work with the dream in question.

Petschauer’s accomplishments are manifest. He has achieved excellence as a colleague and historian at Appalachian State University (ASU) in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina. When he arrived there in 1968 it was a backwater, undistinguished educational institution which he and his colleagues have continuously worked to improve (Peter Petschauer, “Rediscovering the European in America: From the German Boy in Italy to the Man in North Carolina,” in Paul Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn, eds., Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis [Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997], pp. 25-46). He has held the History Department’s I.G. Greer Distinguished Professorship, served as chair of the university’s Faculty Senate, as well as chair of the Faculty Assembly of the University of North Carolina State University system, co-founded his university’s interdisciplinary studies program, has mentored many colleagues, and presently serves as a director of a center that mentors faculty and staff at ASU.

Professor Petschauer’s considerable accomplishments may also be measured in the variety and quality of his publications on subjects such as childhood, the education of German women in the 18^th century, women artists of the 18^th century, human space, human rights in a threatening world, and psychohistory. He has published in the Journal of Psychohistory and elsewhere enough about his own life story to give us great insight into his thinking and formative experiences. Peter was born in Germany but spent World War II mostly in a German-speaking

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rural area of Northern Italy where he was separated from his parents and overcame the death from diphtheria of his only sibling, a brother. He established warm relations in the matriarchal society of the farm. After the war his father was incarcerated in 14 American prison camps and his self-involved mother was reduced to near poverty while he was sent off to various monastic boarding schools. He came to the United States alone as a 17-year old where he worked first in a factory in New Jersey, then in various offices in New York City. He jumped at the opportunity to get an education at New York University where he took a doctoral degree in modern European history at night and then began his teaching career in North Carolina. Clearly Peter is a survivor. It is my sense that wherever he has lived he has established constructive and warm human relationships and felt a strong connection to the people he has left behind, he visits and feels a sense of responsibility for them.

Peter is also quite open to new experiences as reflected in his willingness to publish on his powerful and fascinating dream. Last January he was just back from an exhausting trip to Europe and commented that he had a dream as we exchanged colonoscopy stories. Since the dream was so vivid and powerful, he wrote me about it and I encouraged him to write more, eventually suggesting that he might make it the subject of a pioneering piece on how scholars can use dreams to better understand their lives, interests, and work. For six months we discussed his dream as several of us sought to help him delve into its meanings. However, in the process of it becoming the subject of an intellectual exercise, the tendency was for the main ingredient (emotion) of understanding being overshadowed.

As a finely trained historian and academic, Peter`s response to my request for the precise feelings, associations and additional details of the associations he had given, was to the intellectual work of others. Thus Bryan Mark Rigg’s book on German-Jewish soldiers, Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s autobiography, and Thilo Thielke’s description of love in and escape from Auschwitz. As historians we were trained to give bibliographies, not emotions. Indeed, as David Beisel has often pointed out, historians of our generation were specifically trained to reject emotion. As is the case with many intellectuals, in the analyzing the dream it seemed easier for him to recognize and accept the emotions of others rather than his own. Peter reached some associations of the dream that touched his feelings and life, but as time went on I felt that despite his intellectual courage in probing, my queries were as often moving him away from his real feelings about the dream as toward them. I just wished we could have been communicating face to face, rather than via e-mail and occasionally on the telephone, so that signs of emotional valence could more easily have been noted and picked up upon. Or better still, that we were in a Montague Ullman style dream group that does a superior job of helping the dreamer to get at the dream’s underlying emotions, associations, and fantasies. In my experience, such groups are more successful than psychoanalysis in uncovering the unconscious content of dreams and that such dream analysis works best with the ordinary population. Though intellectuals tend to cloud the issues this method is still quite effective in helping them understand their dreams.

I also felt that if the dream were mine, I probably would not have been able to delve as deeply as Peter did into its emotional content prior to my having had a long psychoanalysis, group therapy, and Ullman dream group experience as both a member and a leader. These experiences changed my consciousness and taught me to approach dreams in a radically different manner.

Professor Peter Petschauer does scholarship, history, and psychohistory a valuable service by sharing his “terrifying” dream of being in a concentration camp, associating to it, and analyzing it for our (and his) benefit. He has even encouraged others with expertise in the field to comment on it. He finds the responses to be meaningful and fascinating and recognizes that they “say as much about the dreamer as they do about the analysts; a very normal situation.” Peter chooses to not comment on them “because that would detract from their thoughtful insights,” preferring to let them stand on their own.” Nevertheless, he reports that the books he mentioned awoke his soul, in a way that my questions did not (personal communication). He is a man who is both open to experience and honest about his feelings, but who also thinks, following Elie Wiesel’s advice, it wise to not delve too deeply into some areas of his life.

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