The Psychohistorical Contributions and Lives of Henry Lawton and J. Lee Shneidman

Although their backgrounds and educations are quite different, Henry W. Lawton (1941-) and Jerome Lee Shneidman (1929-2008) share many characteristics and have each made their mark in the application of psychology to history and society. These men are two accomplished and productive scholars who have made significant contributions to the field of psychohistory and scholarship in general.

Both scholars were born as the eldest of two sons into lower-middle-class, economically struggling families. Lee Shneidman was born on June 20, 1929 in New York City to a family of Jewish immigrants from Tsarist Russia, and Henry Lawton arrived on July 1, 1941 in Trenton, New Jersey to a Protestant family whose ancestors were well established in this country. The New Yorker’s family remained intact throughout his life, which was plagued by the cancer that struck him as a very young boy and dominated his childhood. In his bed in hospital charity wards, he discovered geogra-

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phy, history, and stamp collecting as he escaped from his bodily misery by learning and fantasizing about people in other eras—he remembered at age eight considering Aragonese kings as his friends. His familial and personal commitment to knowledge led him to earn degrees from New York University (BA, 1951, MA, 1952) and the University of Wisconsin—Madison (PhD, 1957), enabling him to have a career as a professor of history.

Henry Lawton identified strongly with his mother in childhood, and would eventually fulfill her dream by becoming a social worker. He was a lonely boy who developed a fascination with history and a enormous capacity for work. Although he came from a family with less emphasis on education than that of the New Yorker, after four years in the U.S. Air Force (1959-1963), Lawton nevertheless earned degrees from Trenton State (renamed, The College of New Jersey, BA, 1968), Fairleigh Dickinson (MA, 1971), and Rutgers (MLS, 1977) universities, prior to taking a graduate course on family therapy. He became fascinated by horror films as well as the potential of a horrifying right wing takeover of America led by Richard Nixon—in many ways his bête noire. In the 1970s Henry Lawton found an outlet for his scholarship at the Institute for Psychohistory, International Psychohistorical Association, and through the Journal of Psychohistory (JPH). Lacking the doctoral degrees of most of his peers was not a barrier for this diligent independent scholar, who always made his living as a social worker, thus fulfilling his mother’s frustrated dream.

Both men married, had two children (adopted in the case of the Shneidmans), and maintained a close relationship with their wives. Dr. Connie Shneidman (1930-2006) was a quite successful New York psychologist/psychoanalyst who enjoyed scholarly work with Lee, such as their joint article on the Burr/Hamilton duel. Helen Lawton focused on raising their children prior to working as a librarian. She has re-

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cently retired and now spends her time caring for her physically ailing husband and spending more time with her grandchildren.

Interestingly enough, neither man trusted his father. Henry Lawton thinks of his father, who separated from his family when his eldest son was in his early adolescence, as being somewhat unethical, overcharging customers at his sewing machine repair business. As a boy, Shneidman accepted his father’s communist ideals for a better society but rejected his father’s justification of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939 and continued commitment to Soviet communism. Throughout his life he delighted in exposing the foibles and secret deals of societal fathers such as Thomas Jefferson. Lawton holds to the belief, as did Shneidman, that one has to think for oneself rather than trust societal authorities. While Shneidman was active in his synagogue, Lawton’s current answer to the question of religious identification is “agnostic.”

Both have written extensively on both subject matter and methodology. Henry Lawton wrote the pioneering studies “The Myth of Altruism” (JPH], 1982), “The Group Fantasies of Psychohistorians” (JPH, 1983), and The Psychohistorian’s Handbook (1988), and contributed to various methodological discussions appearing mostly in Clio’s Psyche and the JPH. J. Lee Shneidman, who had the advantage of a university professorship providing far more time for scholarship and publication, wrote articles on methodology and a variety of books, including The Rise of the Aragonese-Catalan Empire: 1200-1350 (2 volumes, 1970, translated into Catalan); Spain & Franco: Quest for International Acceptance, 1949-1959 (1973); John F. Kennedy (1974, with Peter Schwab); and Leading from Weakness: Jefferson’s Overt and Covert Relations with Spain and the Barbary States: 1801-1807 (an unpublished manuscript).

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Although in very different venues, teaching was a significant activity for both. The professor taught historical methodology, Spanish history, and other subjects at Adelphi (for 45 years) and for four years at Fairleigh Dickinson universities, as well as at other institutions of higher education. In 1973 and 1975, he served as a Scholar-Diplomat for the U.S. State Department. In 1965, he established the “Seminar in the History of Legal and Political Thought and Institutions” at Columbia University, serving as chair from 1985 to 2002. Henry Lawton, who would have liked to have made his living as a college professor and research scholar, expressed his passion for sharing his knowledge on a one-on-one basis with his colleagues, especially at the Group for the Psychohistorical Study of Film, the Work-In-Progress Seminars of the Psychohistory Forum, and the International Psychohistorical Association. Students had most favorable comments regarding his teaching when he stepped in to help a colleague by teaching the second half of an undergraduate course on the Holocaust at Ramapo College.

In the early 1980s, Lawton helped to found the Psychohistory Forum as its Co-Director, and then several years later established and directed the valuable film group for close to 20 years. He performs an important service as Book Review Editor of the JP, as well as in his capacity as the tireless and overworked Secretary of the IPA. For many years, he served as the IPA Group Process Analyst and from 2000-04 assumed its presidency without relinquishing his other responsibilities.

Shneidman made important contributions to the IPA, where he served for several years as editor of its Bulletin and occasionally presented papers, in contrast to Lawton’s consistent presentations and tireless work for the organization from its earliest years. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Lee and his wife Connalee hosted and coordinated the “Communism: The Dream That Failed Research

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Group” of the Psychohistory Forum, which eventually morphed into the Psychoanalytic Autobiography Group. Regrettably, this stimulating group did not survive the deaths of the Shneidmans, which came after the loss of several other older participants—namely Chaim Shatan (1924-2001), Ben Brody (1920-2007), and Ralph Colp (1924-2008).

In the course of their decades of work in the field, both scholars demonstrated considerable determination, flexibility, and growth. Lawton started as a dedicated advocate of self-analysis, but eventually came to realize the extent to which the analysand needed the analyst as a transference object, and eventually entered personal analysis. Professor Shneidman, whose belief in developing knowledge through a process of challenging the ideas of others was supported by his contrarian tendencies, showed his willingness to change his beliefs on a number of occasions. An example of this was his insistence that dreams could not be a valuable historical source, a stance later changed in a published JPH exchange. To deepen his historical studies, Dr. Shneidman did post-doctoral study as a Research Candidate at the Columbia University’s Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and then at the Rubin Fine Psychoanalytic Institute, where the instructors eventually insisted he see living patients—although eventually he dropped out because, as he put it, “I only wanted to analyze dead people.”

To the very end of his life, J. Lee Shneidman worked on his book on Jefferson’s foreign policy amidst his beloved books and manuscripts. The pipe he loved to smoke while working in a constricted space ultimately caused his death by cancer. Despite illness and with his usual determination, Henry Lawton continues his psychohistorical work on film and on a long-term project on Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Church of the Latter-day Saints.

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Professor Shneidman’s work on early modern Spanish history, Aaron Burr, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Thomas Jefferson illustrates the breath of his erudition while Henry Lawton has demonstrated that independent scholars can make significant contributions to scholarship and scholarly organizations without a university’s institutional support. Each man deserves recognition for his significant contributions to both scholarship and psychohistory.

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