Philip Pomper: A Psychohistorical Scholar of Russia

Philip Pomper is a distinguished scholar of Russia and Communist leaders as well as the William F. Armstrong Professor of History at Wesleyan University. He was born on April 18, 1936 in Chicago

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and he took his degrees in history at the University of Chicago in 1959, 1961, and 1965. In 1964 he started teaching history at Wesleyan University where in 1992, he assumed the Armstrong professorship. At Wesleyan he teaches World History: A Psychohistory of the Modern World, Russian History, The Intelligentsia and Power, Stalin and Stalinism, and The Historical Evolution of Power and the Human Psyche. He also has held important positions of faculty leadership including the coordination of freshman courses and the chair of the History Department. Professor Pomper is the author of a number of important books by well-respected presses

These include The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia (1970); Peter Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (1972); Sergei Nechaev (1979); The Structure of Mind in History: Five Major Figures in Psychohistory (1985); (editor) Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933-1935: Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolution (1986); Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power (1990); (Editor, with Elphick and Vann), World History: Ideologies, Structures and Identities (1998); and (Editor, with Shaw), The Return of Science: Evolution, History, and Theory (2002). Among his many articles and chapters are “Problems of a Naturalistic Psychohistory,” History and Theory, Vol. 12 (1973), pp. 367-388; “Nechaev, Lenin, and Stalin: The Psychology of Leadership,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Vol. 26 (1978), pp. 11-30 and “Trotsky and Martov” in The Trotsky Reappraisal, edited by Brotherstone and Duke (1992). Currently, he is working on a book on Lenin’s older brother, Alexander Ulianov. In the course of his career, Professor Pomper has received a National Defense Education Act grant at the University of Chicago (1960-1962); Travel Grant at Moscow State University (1962-63); Ford Foundation Grant at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, continued in New York City (1963-1964); Social Science Research Council Grant for one semester for postdoctoral training in the applications of psychology to history at Yale University with Robert Jay Lifton (1968); International Research and Exchanges Senior Scholar Exchange at Moscow State University (1973); Visiting Scholar at the Russian Research Center, Harvard University (1984-1985); Title VIII Fellowship at Hoover Institution (summer, 1987); Visiting Scholar at the Russian Research Center, Harvard University (September 1987-March, 1988); Fellow, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Wilson Center, Washington, D.C. (March-August, 1988); and a Fellow of the Russian Research Center,(July-August 1989 and 1991-1992). He is an associate editor of History and Theory. Dr. Pomper (PP) was interviewed in April by Paul Elovitz (PHE). He may be reached by e-mail at.

PHE: What brought you to psychoanalysis and psychohistory?

PP: I found it difficult to explain the revolutionary career of Peter Lavrov without resorting to psychology. In 1963-64 I was in Amsterdam doing research at the International Institute of Social History and a few

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historians used to gather informally to discuss our work. One friend of a friend named Max Lesnik Oberstein suggested at one such gathering that Lavrov belonged to a category, homo religiosus, delineated in Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther. He highly recommended the book. I took his advice, read it, and saw the resemblance. However, I understood that any systematic effort to psychoanalyze my subject would be difficult, that I didn’t know very much, and that my best course at the time was to take a broadly psychological approach but not to try to insert into the narrative systematic psychoanalytic comments. It was perfectly clear than Lavrov had an outsize superego that translated nicely into the doctrine of the Russian intelligentia’s “debt to the people,” an idea that served “repentant nobles” very well. I began to think systematically about the relationship of personality and doctrine, but also about some of the decisions that he made and the reasons for them. Here, too, it was rather clear that personal loss and a sense of guilt precipitated actions and decisions that affected his commitment to a revolutionary career.

PHE: How have psychoanalysis and psychohistory impacted upon your work and life?

PP: I think that it gave me a valuable orientation that informed my choice of research topics. On the other hand, those of us who chose a psychoanalytic approach and psychohistory for our research programs in the early sixties found the historical profession marching in many different directions—away from the use of individual psychology. Historians reacted against approaches that emphasized individual agency in history. In addition, hostility to Freud and later to Erikson (in particular their shared notion that anatomy was destiny) affected the attractiveness of psychohistory after the initial enthusiasm of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It seemed to get lonelier and lonelier. One had to explain oneself to colleagues and even students who felt that the field had been discredited, although students remained open minded and even attracted to psychohistory.

PHE: What is your primary affiliation?

PP: History remains my primary affiliation. I acquired what I needed to conduct the investigations I had set into motion. I chose Russian history almost accidentally and the same is true for the psychoanalytic approach to biographies.

PHE: What brought you to Russian studies?

PP: That’s a story. Two friends and I were hitch hiking through England and Scotland in the summer of 1957 as part of a four-month grand tour of Europe. We reached the Lake District sometime in August. One of the cow pastures where we had deployed our sleeping bags also served as temporary haven to a Cambridge geologist’s “caravan.” He and his two young sons were hunting geological specimens for his courses. He befriended us and we joined the rock hunting expeditions in the vicinity of Keswick and Penrith. After several days our geologist friend invited us to join him, his wife, and a Russian émigré couple for dinner at an inn in one of those towns. I remember the evening vividly: it was August 1957 and it was already chilly because the inn had a fire going. The Russian gentleman, a Cambridge mathematician (his wife taught jurisprudence there), was spellbinding. He told us that Khrushchev would propel the Soviet Union past the United States and everyone else; that Russian science and technology were making great strides; and that anyone who wanted to keep pace with the new world that was coming into being would have to study Russian. I was fascinated, but I had always been more interested in the French Revolution and I was heading in that direction. I knew French well and some German, but did not know any Russian. Sputnik in October 1957 seemed to confirm our Cambridge mathematician’s predictions. The rest of the story is predictable. Although he was wrong, I was convinced and studied the Russian Revolutions instead of going into French history and studying the French Revolution.

PHE: What is the impact of psychoanalysis/psychohistory on the study of communism and Russia?

PP: There were some well-known studies (the work of Nathan Leites on the operational code of the Politburo, for example) and efforts to try to find the sources of Russian national character in the early stages of the cold war when psychoanalysis was in vogue (Geoffrey Gorer, John Rickman, and Erik Erikson), but the social historians took over by the late ninety sixties, neo-Marxism gained adherents. People like Marcuse tried to add a psychoanalytic dimension to Marxism and there were various other hybrids (for example, feminism plus psychoanalysis), but only a few of us continued to practice psychohistory beyond the 1970s. The research programs of the younger generation took things in different directions. “Revisionism” in Russian and Soviet history tended to reduce the role of personal agency in history and made biographies of major figures seem otiose. This trend affected attitudes toward the roles of Lenin, Stalin, and others. Students of Soviet history emphasized social structures and played down the role of individu-

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als. The notion of applying psychoanalysis to analyze groups (whether the Party or the Russian people) did not catch on. People simply downplayed psychology in favor of social structure.

PHE: How did your travel in Russia impact on your study of the field?

PP: It affected the way I thought about the fate of the revolution and tended to form in me a tragic vision of the revolutionary process. I began to look for the combination of factors, both structural and individual, that led to the tragic outcome.

PHE: All three of your degrees are from the University of Chicago. Which instructors there helped open you to a psychodynamic approach?

PP: Only one did, Leopold Haimson. His book, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (1955), was an eye opener for me. He showed that the different backgrounds and psychologies of Lenin, Plekhanov, Martov, and Akselrod produced different variations of Marxism. Not just social position and generation but personality contributed to the creation of these variations. Haimson prepared me to look for the psychological component in Lavrov’s variation of socialist doctrine, but Erikson gave me the inspiration and a sense of Lavrov’s development. Haimson (ahead of the trend stimulated in 1963 by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class) had already moved over into social history and showed very little interest in psychobiography by 1961, when I began the research for my dissertation.

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

PP: Robert Jay Lifton’s Yale seminar on psychohistory that I attended in 1968 as part of a post-doctoral fellowship and my one-on-one sessions with him played a big role. I gained perspective on the evolution of psychoanalysis. Lifton, of course, was quite unorthodox. I liked his approach and his willingness to sponsor a tyro who had no clinical background. His critique of orthodoxy encouraged me to take an independent approach and to decide what was most useful. At some point in 1969 we discussed a project. I would go to Leningrad in 1970 (after attending the International Congress of Historians that was being held in Moscow in the summer of 1970) and test his notion of survivor syndrome by doing some psychiatric interviews on survivors of the siege of Leningrad. The notion of collective trauma and the application of psychoanalytic ideas to groups were attractive to me. Aside from his seminar and conversations with Lifton, my major preparation was reading Harry Stack Sullivan’s The Psychiatric Interview. To make a long story short, the situation and, probably, my own lack of experience, made the use of the psychoanalytic “third ear” impossible. If symptoms were there, I could not find them in most of my interlocutors. I had no clearance to do such a study and chose my interviewees opportunistically. Some of them had experienced the siege and others had learned about it from survivors. Part of the plan was to investigate the social memory of a trauma and its continuing effects. However, I was sufficiently discouraged to give up on work in the field of the sort that Lifton himself had done. I became convinced that if I were to do psychohistorical work it would have to be on the basis of a broad array of documents (autobiography, family history, memoirs, and letters), my knowledge of events, the use of the psychoanalytically inspired work of others that might provide models, and whatever sensitivity I had for the subjects of my inquiry. To get back to your original question regarding what special training I had to do psychoanalytic work, I had none aside from the 1968 seminar at Yale with Robert Jay Lifton.

PHE: Of which of your psychohistorical works are you most proud?

PP: My work on Trotsky and Stalin in Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power (1990) has gotten good reviews. I occasionally hear good things about my psychobiography of Nechaev (1979) and just learned that it is being translated into Korean (even though English version is out of print!), so somebody over there must have found it convincing. One of my younger colleagues who himself became a psychohistorian told me that my work on Lavrov inspired him to go forward with his plans to do psychohistory, so that made me feel that I had done something worthwhile. Generally, I am uneasy about reviewing my own work—given what I’ve learned about defense mechanisms! I do my best and hope for the best. I have always reached that moment of believing deeply in my interpretations of the lives that I study. But I am a firm believer that one has to place some faith in readers, hence I am most proud of the works that readers have found convincing. So, the fact that you are interviewing me as a featured scholar suggests that there is enough of an oeuvre and positive readings of it to give my work some standing in the field.

PHE: How do you explain the fall of communism in Russia?

PP: The collapse of the Soviet Union, that would be a tough one to answer briefly but here are a few thoughts: On the one hand, people wanted a consum-

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er economy. The professionals and artists in particular wanted the life lived by their Western counterparts. They felt ashamed of the Soviet failures to produce a genuinely modern economy and resented being kept on a leash. They also began to feel increasingly ashamed about the Soviet past. The trauma of Stalin’s mass killings was revived at intervals. The leaders used Stalin’s atrocities to distinguish his regime from Lenin’s, but also to promote their own reforms. I saw the film Repentance in Moscow in March 1987. I think it was therapeutic, in that people wept openly. The film not only condemned the dictatorship, it poignantly brought home that their religious heritage had been virtually destroyed. Gorbachev’s glasnost allowed Russians to see the past in vivid terms and stimulated a sense of collective victimization. Many of them now felt that the Soviet regime as a whole had been like a colonial regime, destroying their culture and despoiling the natural world as well. Chernobyl punctuated glasnost. So the attempt to save the Soviet Union by separating the good from the bad, Lenin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev from Stalin failed. Everything except World War Two looked pretty bad, and the younger generation no longer felt awed by that achievement. Gorbachev tried to make Lenin a beacon—and I think he truly identified himself with Lenin—but that didn’t work.

It should be emphasized, however, that the majority of Soviet citizens would have tolerated the continued existence of the Soviet Union. They simply didn’t care enough either to oppose its collapse or to participate actively in dismantling the system. They had been rendered passive and resentful, but not revolutionary. So they were vulnerable to revolution from above, which is what Yeltsin and the other leaders of the revolution from above accomplished. The professional and managerial stratum did want change along Western lines, but no one had planned what actually happened. When it did happen, the old nomenklatura, criminal organizations, and energetic and sometimes unscrupulous entrepreneurial types simply divided the spoils. I’m not suggesting it was all bad. After all, the Soviet empire was an anachronism and key figures in the power elite, as well as a large part of the professional and managerial stratum understood that. They also understood that they had to integrate themselves into the global economy and that could only be done by dismantling the command economy. But Gorbachev’s failure to grasp the significance of blurring the lines of authority by shifting power from the party to the state, and to elected presidents of the republics and Yeltsin’s resentful and reckless behavior created the miseries of the late eighties and nineties. Gorbachev also failed to grasp that freeing the satellite states would simply accelerate the domino effect in what is now called “the near abroad.” Furthermore, Gorbachev’s response to the nationalists miffed the military professionals, who had to put down nationalist movements with arms and who got the blame for barbaric acts, whereas Gorbachev got the Nobel Peace Prize.

The August plotters also showed that they had little steel in their souls. No one wanted to spill a lot of blood, especially of their co-ethnics. They were not the tough, leather-jacketed types who made the revolution, survived the Civil War, and then carried out Stalin’s commands. The generals looked for a convincing leader, someone who acted decisively and did not pass the buck as well as one who had legal authority. Gorbachev had so blurred the lines of authority that they could make their selection on the basis of leadership qualities. The professional military were disinclined to support either Gorbachev or the plotters in the August 1991 crisis. Yeltsin, on the other hand, looked like a courageous leader and in both 1991 and 1993 he showed his will to power. The professional military in each case went over to his side. There was something traditionally Russian and Soviet about it: small groups of men deciding the course of a vast state.

PHE: Turning to your book, The Structure of Mind in History: Five Major Figures in Psychohistory (1985), why did you choose to focus on Brown, Freud, Erikson, Lifton, and Marcuse as the “psychohistorical intelligentsia?”

PP: I’m very interested in theory and used to think of myself as an intellectual historian, so I decided to drop my work on Russian theoreticians and practitioners of revolution for a moment and try to understand psychoanalytic theories of history. The people that I chose to study in The Structure of Mind in History seemed to me to be the most distinguished theoreticians—including the founders of the field. They also had had enormous impact and, of course, that was what they wanted to do. I might have included others, but I felt that the five represented the architectonics that I’ll speak about below.

PHE: I regret that when Norman O. Brown (September 25, 1913-October 4, 2002) died, no one wrote an obituary of him for Clio’s Psyche or one of the other psychohistorical publications. Did the two

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of you teach at Wesleyan at the same time and, if so, what was your experience with him?

PP: Norman O. Brown left Wesleyan University a few years before I arrived in 1964. I did meet him at conferences, but never had a chance to have an extended conversation with him.

PHE: In your acknowledgements, among others, you thanked the journal History and Theory and the University of Chicago scholar William H. McNeill. How open was and is History and Theory to psychohistory in its many varieties?

PP: History and Theory welcomes first-rate work from many schools of thought, but because it focuses on theory any psychohistorical submission would have to make a contribution in the area of theory. So, the usual practitioner of psychohistory would no more find a home in the journal than the usual practitioner in any other historical field. Rather, the work would have to be theoretical. For example, History and Theory ran a review of The Structure of Mind in History because of its theoretical approach rather than because of my presence on campus. I was not an editor at that time (1985).

PHE: How did and does the distinguished world historian William H. McNeill feel about psychoanalysis and psychohistory?

PP: Bill McNeill, who I’ve known for decades and who taught me European history, simply showed very little interest in the field or, for that matter, in individuals. However, he wrote a surprisingly psychologically oriented biography of Arnold J. Toynbee in 1989. McNeill and I have had many conversations about the usefulness of studying individuals, fewer about psychoanalytic biography as such. His macroscopic approach works very well for him and others—including me—so I do not fault him for brushing psychobiography aside. It’s just a different way of doing things. He’s interested in big patterns, but he willingly (perhaps out of the dedication a teacher has toward his students) reads my manuscripts and gives sage advice. I feel quite indebted to him.

PHE: You use an unusual term, “architectonics.” Why, how do you define it, and how widely has it been accepted?

PP: When working on The Structure of Mind in History I struggled to find what underlay the different theories. Norman O. Brown’s notion that history had the structure of a neurosis, for example, struck me as the usual sort of “professional deformation” that I found in Hegel, who projected dialectic into history. Generally, it all looked like animism to me. I began to see if there were other principles operating in the theories that gave structure to continuity and change and decided that the theoreticians used the five architectonics that I named. They are structural principles widely used in a great many fields and I have never ceased to find them useful. For example, in my introductions to Trotsky’s Notebooks: 1933-35 I used architectonics to distinguish his dialectical approach from Bukharin’s and Lenin’s and tried to connect personality to architectonic. Unless my memory fails me, one reviewer (herself a practitioner of psychohistory) compared reading The Structure of Mind in History to smoking pot—not really necessary for a working historian. (I guess that she’d tried marijuana but didn’t like it.) Many historians just don’t like theory. I hardly get any feedback on architectonics. I am not the only one who uses the term—it’s fairly old. It goes back to the seventeenth century in English usage and it’s obviously from the Greek. Contemporary usages vary a great deal. You can find tens of thousands of references on Google. I wanted to avoid the word “structure” because it and “structural” have other theoretical meanings in sociology and anthropology.

PHE: Many of your publications have been biographical and psychobiographical. What is your approach to studying Lenin, Martov, Nechaev, Stalin, Trotsky, and others?

PP: I try to understand the psychological origins of their commitment to revolution, their political style, and historically important decisions. I immerse myself in the documents and try to find out everything that I can about their families and their early experiences. In my work on Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Nechaev, I found that adolescent crises and sibling relationships were important for answering the question about commitment. In Lavrov’s case it was personal loss and guilt. Historians rarely uncover enough reliable material about early family experiences to make any useful connections, but I work hard to look for the early sources of identity in families. My approach is eclectic. I find the Freudian psychosexual approach useful in that many of my subjects show distinct anxieties about their masculinity and those anxieties affected their political behavior. Eriksonian notions of positive and negative identity also play a big role in my work. Most of my subjects had to deal with the wounds connected with minority status and negative stereotypes. Lenin and Trotsky were Jewish (and Lenin had German, Swedish, and Asian ancestry as well). Stalin, in addition to being a Georgian, had physical stigmata; Nechaev came from a poor family

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in a mill town and suffered the wounds of being a gifted child in that milieu as well as the resentments and problems of upward mobility. I tried to understand the psychological impact of moving from rural backwaters to cities. Much of my work is psychosocial or psychocultural. I find Lifton’s notion of symbolic immortality useful for understanding the commitments and adaptations made by my subjects. Although I’ve studied object relations theory, pre-Oedipal materials lie beyond my grasp. However, I recognize the importance of paranoid ideation for anybody studying political behavior and the notion of the origin of paranoid thinking in pre-Oedipal traumas may be correct. Perhaps paranoid behavior has evolutionary origins. In any case, detecting and understanding the operation of paranoid mechanisms is important in my work. More generally, I find that investigating my subjects’ identities and defense mechanisms yields a great deal for a study of political behavior. Understanding identification with the aggressor and identification with victims, ambivalence, resolution of unconscious conflicts, a variety of psychic wounds—all psychoanalytic approaches—inform my biographical work.

PHE: Do you monitor your own feelings while doing this work? How do you work with your own countertransference feelings to your biographical subject?

PP: I’ve tried to understand my relationship to my subjects but perhaps more as a historian trying to be “objective.” I knew that I liked Lavrov’s ideas and admired his learning and theoretical skill, but I didn’t develop (at least didn’t detect) any strong feelings about him. I think I recognized that I belonged to the same general type—a conscience-stricken member of the intelligentsia looking for progressive solutions to human ills. That’s what attracted me to the field and to Lavrov. But revolutionary violence and destructiveness began to preoccupy me and I moved to actors like Nechaev, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. As an older and presumably wiser historian (and one both teaching adolescents with revolutionary inclinations and raising my own children) I think I tended to look at my subjects as gifted adolescents. I recognized that if I were in their place I might easily have chosen their path. I saw their destructive and self-destructive sides, but tried to elevate the problem to a species problem—and I think that’s in the Freudian tradition.

PHE: What are you working on now? When do you expect to have it published?

PP: I’m going to take a new look at Alexander Ulianov, Lenin’s brother, who was hanged for his role in a conspiracy to assassinate Alexander III. I plan to work in archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg that were not accessible when I did my earlier work on the Ulianov family. Publishing schedules are hard to predict.

PHE: What training should a person wanting to be a good psychohistorian pursue?

PP: I think it’s a good idea to consult psychiatrists when one is out of one’s depth, although I admittedly did this very unsystematically in my own work and for a variety of reasons I never sought psychoanalysis.

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

PP: Right now I see interest mainly in such things as collective trauma. I imagine that terrorism and religious psychologies at the extreme end will attract increasing interest.

PHE: What do we, as psychohistorians, need to do to strengthen our work?

PP: I have no wisdom about this. Sometimes an outstanding book that becomes a model for young historians dramatically changes the direction of historiography. I imagine it will take another Young Man Luther or Life against Death to attract attention to the field, although obviously the book will have a different character and somehow fit the times. Timing means a great deal.

PHE: What is the importance of childhood to psychohistory?

PP: I think it’s extremely important, even though I do not think that we should get stuck in what Erikson called “originology.” As I mentioned, adolescence seemed centrally important to most of the people I studied. I generally like the more open approaches to the structure of a life.

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

PP: I just offer the common wisdom that intercultural contact, social mobility, the breakdown of not only family but other kinds of ties and continuity make the religious world view more important for quite a few people. But I also believe that the quieter process of secularization goes on and is the less noticed background for the chronic revivalism that accompanies urbanization, mobility, and secularization.

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

PP: I’m afraid that violence has a very good future because the human species hasn’t changed and aggressors always find ways to set groups against each other. Aggressive people will just find different groups to lead and different venues for their aggression. Europeans and their imitators became specialists in mass violence and suffered huge casualties until 1945 because of their religious wars, imperial competitions, revolutions, and arms races. Violent people in the future may no longer have the same mix of ambitions and state structures to develop and concentrate the technologies for violence, but they will go after opportune targets with the technologies available to them. Rwandans a mere decade ago presented us with the spectacle of genocidal slaughter without the use of advanced technology. Religious and ethnic groups will continue to use violent means to consolidate their cultural and territorial worlds. The government of the U.S.A. recently unleashed large-scale state-to-state violence in response to a small number of clever terrorists, but this was a misguided reflex based upon nostalgia for our success in WWII and its aftermath in Germany and Japan. I think that once people fully understand how terribly wrong this policy is, they will begin to develop measured and sophisticated responses to the new forms of violence sponsored by the present “politics of cultural despair.” But that will not necessarily prevent large casualties based upon the choice of individuals with an all-or-nothing psychology and the cleverness to acquire or manufacture the means to kill large numbers of a targeted enemy.

PHE: How do you understand the psychology of terrorism?

PP: I do not think that there is a single psychology of terrorism. Rather, there are people of different types, different psychologies, who choose terrorism as a tactic.

PHE: To what extent is the experience of terrorism in Russian history applicable to current problems in understanding and explaining terrorism?

PP: The Russian revolutionary movement is a great laboratory for studying all forms of revolutionary violence, including terrorism. My own conclusion that there isn’t any psychology of terrorism is based upon my study of Russian revolutionaries who chose terrorism as a tactic. Quite often their deep commitment to revolution and to each other rather than a fascination with violence as such (for example) or any unusual vindictiveness put them on the side of terrorism.

PHE: How can psychohistorians have more impact on history departments and universities, as well as on psychoanalytic institutes and in the analytic community?

PP: By writing intelligent books and presenting cogent cases and then praying that somebody notices.

PHE: What is your experience in teaching Psychohistory of the Modern World and other psychohistory courses? How open are students to the psychohistorical approach?

PP: I always find interested students who like the material very much. Some of them are seriously affected by the course—in a good way! They appreciate studying material that deals with such basic and global problems.

PHE: Please tell me about your teaching.

PP: My teaching style is designed to elicit respect for academic questions, to promote serious engagement with questions that many students have never thought to ask, to offer new perspectives, to challenge them and take them to the frontiers of learning, in short, to be sure that it’s higher education. I take teaching very seriously. That’s why I chose a small undergraduate school. I like to lecture and like to engage students in seminars. I think that I’m equally good (or bad) at both. The feedback suggests that the students experience my courses as both intense and funny. The humor is usually spontaneous, but may be unconsciously designed to reduce the tension associated with the investigation of the very serious matters we study. Much of my work touches upon the atrocities of the twentieth century and shows how human beings form pseudo species (Erikson’s term) and dehumanize each other. Other courses are designed to show the patterns of history and the evolution of power systems.

PHE: How can psychoanalysis and psychohistory have more impact on society in general?

PP: Again, people have to write intelligent and cogent books that attract the attention of the right readers. President Carter invited Christopher Lasch to discuss The Culture of Narcissism. I don’t think that President Carter’s campaign benefited from that, much less the American public, but the book is still in print. I would guess that Robert Jay Lifton’s work has had considerable impact because he has gone into the field, interviewed a great variety of survivors, and

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written his books for a wide audience.

PHE: Do you think that universities and research institutions will someday begin hiring psychohistorians as psychohistorians (or psychohistorically informed historians), instead of for their other qualifications as is usually now the case?

PP: I do not see any movement in that direction right now. In fact, the postmodern moment set many people’s minds against the systematic use of psychology and it may take a while for the profession to get over the rejection of psychology.

PHE: How can we recruit new people to the field?

PP: I suspect that people enter the field through the accidents of their research, but first of all historians have to accept the systematic use of psychology and they generally do not. I’m not certain that people within the history profession will be the ones to forward the interests of psychohistory. Some of the most influential psychohistorians were not professional historians. They were people who wrote interesting books applying psychology to history.

PHE: What books were important to your development?

PP: It’s easier to name authors rather than specific books: Freud, Erikson, Lifton, Norman Cohn, John Demos, Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt. Bruce Mazlish and Benjamin Wolman edited some important collections of articles that I found very useful.

PHE: Who was important to your development as a student of psychosocial phenomena? What impact did Erik Erikson have on you?

PP: Several of the authors mentioned above affected my appreciation of psychosocial and psychocultural approaches. Erikson no doubt had the most powerful impact, although I very early came to the conclusion that he used his subjects mainly to illustrate something important to him rather than to conduct a rigorous historical investigation. It was easy to forgive someone who had such wonderful gifts and valuable insights.

PHE: What mentors come to mind?

PP: I think Robert Jay Lifton was closest to being a mentor.

PHE: How do you define psychohistory?

PP: To me psychohistory is a form of historical investigation that explains both individual and group behavior in given historical circumstances by means of the theories and clinical experience not only of psychiatrists and psychologists, but also the theories and studies of anthropologists and sociologists. The best psychohistorians integrate all of the disciplines mentioned in some fashion.

PHE: Please list the five people who you think have made the greatest contribution to psychohistory in order of their contribution.

PP: Freud, Erikson, Lifton, Peter Gay, and John Demos.

PHE: Thank you for providing this interesting Featured Scholar Interview.

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