Psychohistorians Lifton, deMause, and Volkan

Applied psychoanalysis, political psychology, and psychobiography, subsumed under the category of psychohistory, have had many hundreds of significant contributors for over a century. Robert Jay Lifton (5/16/26-), Lloyd deMause (9/16/31-), and Vamık Volkan (12/13/32-) are three leaders of the field. While having much in common, they each have very different achievements, approaches, goals, and impacts on the development of contemporary psychohistory. A major theme of this essay will be to show how their backgrounds, life experiences and personalities influenced their scholarly work. Each will be discussed and then they and their work will be compared, contrasted, and assessed. The long-term prospects for the continued influence of their ideas and the institutions they built will be examined.

Robert Jay Lifton: Scholar Activist

Lifton was born to a Jewish businessman and his wife in Brooklyn, New York in 1926 and educated in the city. He attended Cornell University, medical school, and then trained as a psychia-

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trist. He reports that his best psychiatric teachers were psychoanalysts, but he was always ambivalent about analysis, which he lauded as a great intellectual breakthrough but also compared to the totalism of Chinese thought reform! Lifton trained as an analyst for two years before he dropped out of the analytic institute to return to the Far East for research. The Nazis, World War II, and violence are central to his consciousness. Yale University had hired this bright young psychiatrist, but first he had to fulfill military service that would change the direction of his life. He accepted a commission in the Air Force, where he could function as a psychiatrist, rather than allowing himself to be drafted as a private in the Army. His work in Japan and Korea, evaluating brainwashed former prisoners of war of the Chinese Communists, fascinated him and led to studies of priests and others subjected to “thought reform.” This ultimately led to his Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (1961).

Erik Erikson’s focus on identity became central to Lifton’s thinking. He reports being “spellbound” by this mentor and friend, and he prides himself on carrying on Erikson’s work. At Lifton’s summer home in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, with Erikson, Bruce Mazlish, and others, he formed the oldest continuous psychohistory group, which has been in existence since 1966 and now meets for three-day seminars every fall. By comparison, the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) and the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP) began meeting 12 years later. For three years, it was labeled the Group for the Study of Psychohistorical Process, but the name was later shortened to the Wellfleet Meetings. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the sponsor of the early meetings, wanted the “Wellfleetians” to create an academic discipline of psychohistory and eventually become a training center for it. Lifton writes that the participants soon gave up this “illusion” in favor of informal, more imaginative, freewheeling meetings with little structure. Like Erikson, Lifton considers himself to be a psychohistorian, but does not like to use the word as a noun. After the early “illusion” period, the last thing he wanted to do was create a separate field of psychohistory.

Lifton received various grants, including a “five year dream grant” to support his brainwashing and totalism work, and Yale

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University was quite tolerant of his delays in taking up his duties in New Haven (Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century, 2012, p. 48). It should be pointed out that Lifton has received a remarkable amount of financial and other support throughout his career, which has allowed him to be a perpetual psychohistorical student of brainwashing, the impact of the first nuclear bomb on the survivors of Hiroshima, the trauma of war on veterans of Vietnam, the evil of Nazi doctors, the Aum Shinrikyo subway bombing cult, and much more. His quest has been to determine how people struggle to live “in the face of death.” He has been an anti-nuclear and anti-war activist as well as a scholar. In keeping with Eriksonian disciplined subjectivity, he has done an extraordinary job of intertwining his own personal subjective experience with his scholarly narrative (David Beisel, “Genocidal Agenda: Witnessing the Role of the Nazi Doctors,” Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 19 No. 2, September, 2012, p. 170).

This dual drive of the scholar/activist led him to leave his Sterling Professorship at Yale to found and head The Center for the Study of Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of CUNY in New York City from 1985-2003. At the Center, peacemakers from the United Nations, scholars, and many others met with therapists, historians, political scientists, and psychologists to deepen their understanding of the difficult problems they faced. Eventually, when Lifton’s financial support was cut by CUNY, he retired to Boston and Cape Cod. His younger colleague, the historian/psychoanalyst Charles Strozier, transformed the Violence Center into the Center on Terrorism to help police and firefighters-in-training develop a psychosocial approach to their work. Lifton then took an honorary professorship at Harvard.

Lloyd deMause: Psychohistorical Organizer and Meta-Theorist

Lloyd deMause, born in 1931 in Michigan as the elder of two sons of an auto executive, was a precocious child and eventually graduated from an automotive college in Michigan. In the era of a draft, he served as an enlisted man in the Army. He wondered about all the abandoned children sleeping under bridges in Korea, and this sent him thinking more about childhood. Subsequently, he became interested in the liberal arts, studying them at Columbia University in New York City prior to working on a graduate degree in political science there. However, a dean at the school refused

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him permission to write an explicitly psychoanalytic doctoral dissertation. Unlike a few others with the same interests who wrote camouflaged psychoanalytically informed dissertations without administrative approval, deMause quit graduate school and went back into business. There, he built a financial basis for his psychohistorical goals by creating a company that published newsletters for the automotive industry. The Saturday Workshop meetings of the Institute for Psychohistory were held in the elegant New York conference room of his Atcom Publishing Company on Broadway, not many blocks from his apartment on Riverside Drive, where he spent as much time as possible raising his first son in what he called helping mode parenting. Improving the life of children is his passion and his hope is that children raised in the helping mode will be much better human beings.

Lloyd deMause did some institute training in psychoanalysis without seeing any patients, and worked for a while within the psychoanalytic community on issues of childrearing. In the early 70s, he began to build psychohistory institutions, and indeed he has been most prolific in doing so. He started the Institute for Psychohistory, The Journal of Psychohistory (originally named The History of Childhood), the Psychohistory Press, and the International Psychohistorical Association. He edited and wrote various psychohistorical books. He sees himself as a scholar and a “meta-theorist” of social theory, propounding a scientific psychohistory. “The Evolution of Childhood” is his work that has had the greatest impact on psychoanalytically inclined historians. His fantasy analysis methodology offers insights into large-group behaviors.

The Journal of Psychohistory is the only profitable journal in the field, which is quite an accomplishment because scholarly journals normally need the financial backing of universities or foundations. Among other things deMause deserves credit for is bringing many likeminded colleagues together around his journal and in the IPA.

Vamık Volkan: Peacemaker Theorist and Practitioner

Born into a Turkish family of educators on British Cyprus, Vamık learned about ethnic identity and conflict as he grew up on the island divided between Greeks and a Turkish minority. He would later go to the capital of Turkey for his medical training, and

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at age 25, the young physician came to the U.S. and became a citizen. Here, he trained as a psychoanalyst, practiced psychiatry, and worked as the medical administrator of the University of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Hospital from 1978 to 1994. Meanwhile, in the 1960s and 70s Cyprus exploded in violence between Greeks and the Turkish minority, causing him great concern and survivor’s guilt as he lived in the safety of America.

His third profession as a psychoanalytic political psychologist was unexpected. After Anwar Sadat of Egypt amazed the world in 1977 by flying to Israel and telling the Knesset that 70 percent of the problem between Arabs and Israelis was psychological, Volkan became involved in the conflict when the Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs of the American Psychiatric Association started to arrange unofficial meetings between Egyptians and Israelis that later came to include Palestinians. He was one of the founders of the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP) in 1978 and was its fourth president. At the University of Virginia, he established the interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (1987-2003), which focused on such issues as ethnic tensions, leader-follower relationships, national identity, racism, societal trauma, and the transgenerational transmissions of identity and trauma. Shortly after, he started the journal Mind and Human Interaction: Windows Between History, Culture, Politics, and Psychoanalysis (1989-2005), devoted to the same issues.

With a large network of international colleagues, Dr. Volkan has worked in over a dozen countries in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. From 1989 to 1998, he was a member of the International Negotiation Network under the chairmanship of former President Carter. In 2008, Volkan started the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI), which he now chairs along with an Israeli psychologist and a British psychiatrist. It is organized out of the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where since 2003 he has served as the senior scholar at the Erikson Research Institute when not on his extensive travels.

This energetic man has had a remarkable number of visiting professorships and awards. He has authored, co-authored, or edited numerous books, published in a variety of languages. Some are

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comprised of case studies describing and explaining his major concepts in the context of his work defusing hatreds that could lead to violence. His concepts of chosen traumas and chosen glories focus on how the identities of ethnic and national groups are shaped by shared suffering and triumph. Time collapse explains how a group can focus on a trauma occurring hundreds of years before and speak as though it were a recent occurrence. An example of this is how, during the bloody struggles in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian leaders spoke of the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 as a justification for their genocidal actions against Muslims. Volkan writes of entitlement ideologies that justify aggressive behavior on the basis of past history or suffering. He describes how linking objects, which may be no more than a pebble or a parakeet, connect individuals to their ethnic or national group in times of stress.

A Psychohistorical Comparison

All are now in their eighties, with Lifton being the oldest at age 87, deMause at 82, and Volkan the youngest at 81. They were born respectively into Jewish, Protestant, and Muslim families. Each is the eldest son, Lifton the second of two children, deMause the elder of two sons, and Volkan the youngest of three children. They were born in Brooklyn, Detroit, and British Cyprus. The fathers of the first two were middle class businessmen, and the Cypriot comes from a family of educators. All three showed early signs of specialness. The two American-born colleagues showed signs of early promise of achievement: Lifton graduated high school at age 16, Cornell two years later, and after two years in medical school was on to his residency, while deMause was pictured at age two as the youngest reader in a Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” news clip and was intensively trained as a child to be a concert pianist. Volkan reports being a “replacement child” for a distinguished and wealthy maternal great-grandfather in Ottoman Turkey prior to the British taking over Cyprus in 1878.

In terms of military experience, a general requirement for American men of their era, the New Yorker served as an Air Force psychiatrist and deMause was an enlisted man. The experience they had in serving in Korea influenced their subsequent research. Their colleague born in Cyprus was not required to do military service. Volkan not only fully embraced psychoanalysis as a practitio-

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ner and supervisor, but also sought to apply it to large-group identity and peacemaking. While Lifton and deMause had some psychoanalytic training and were quite influenced by its concepts, they didn’t practice as analysts. Lifton saw it as a type of totalism that he disdained, while deMause’s interests focused elsewhere with analysis always being basic to his thinking. All three individuals created institutions to perpetuate their ideas: Wellfleet and the Center for the Study of Violence and Human Survival for Lifton; the Institute for Psychohistory, the International Psychohistorical Association, and the Journal of Psychohistory for deMause; and the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction with its journal Mind and Human Interaction and International Dialogue Initiative for Volkan.

Being beaten by an authoritarian father with a razor strop left deMause determined to understand and combat child abuse. Volkan felt survivor’s guilt while living in the safety of America while his family suffered in his turbulent homeland. Lifton, as a Jew in the era of Hitler and the Holocaust, also felt some guilt at his comparative safety.

Professionally, Lifton has had distinguished professorships at Yale and the City University of New York based upon his much lauded work as a psychiatric researcher, scholar, author, and public intellectual. Even in retirement he is affiliated with Harvard University. Volkan’s career has also been in academia at the University of Virginia as a hospital administrator, professor, and psychiatrist. These two have been well-funded for their work, compared to most academics, by academia, foundations, and the government. In contrast, deMause created a successful publishing business so he could spend his time on psychohistorical scholarship and organizing. He never had an academic appointment although he taught adjunct classes for a few years and gave some lectures in universities.

All three are theoretical innovators: Lloyd deMause developed the concepts of the evolution of childrearing based on his psychogenetic theory, fantasy analysis, the fetal origins of history, helping mode parenting, poison containers, and social alters; Vamık Volkan developed a methodology of dialogues between enemies and concepts including accordion phenomenon, chosen glories,

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chosen traumas, entitlement ideologies, ethnic tents, hot spots, linking objects, and time collapse; and Robert Lifton developed an interview methodology and the concepts of doubling, the protean self, psychic numbing, and totalism.

Public recognition for Lifton includes a National Book Award, Nobel Lectureship, Holocaust Memorial Award, and the Gandhi Peace Award. Volkan is the recipient of numerous awards including the Sigmund Freud Award given by the city of Vienna. He was nominated four times for a Nobel Peace Prize with letters from 27 countries. Awards have eluded deMause, who has worked outside of academia.

Analysis, Continuity, and Conclusion

Each of these talented men has found a unique career path, not following the typical academic track of the teacher/scholar. Their teaching has been focused on colleagues and others rather than young students. All three have won acclaim within divergent circles but have also been subject to criticism.

In his remarkable career as an activist, public intellectual, and scholar, Lifton has faced criticism. To some, it has not seemed proper for a distinguished professor to spend a night in jail because of his anti-nuclear activism. It has been suggested that one of the reasons he came up with the concepts of doubling and numbing is that he did not want to use the psychoanalytic terms of splitting, dissociation, and repression to describe similar phenomena. Colleagues who are explicit advocates of psychohistory and political psychology have seen him holding back the progress of the field by, at least in his early days, condemning those—this author included—who wrote psychobiographies of presidential candidates and downplaying his identification as a psychohistorian, while shunning others in the field as being too extreme and even “cultist.”

Negative reactions to deMause, the most productive psychohistorical organizer and institution builder, have prevented his theories from gaining a wider following. His ideas about fantasy analysis, the fetal origins of history, poisonous placentas, and social alters are simply too extreme for most academics and clinicians who often see them as reductionist. Furthermore, scholars sometimes complained that he is insufficiently diplomatic, as when he writes

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that any hundred historians give less than one percent of their space to motivation, that “expect[ing] the average historian to do psychohistory is like trying to teach a blind man to be an astronomer” (Lloyd deMause, “Independence of Psychohistory,” 1975, pp. 165, 179). Some academic historians, who have worked closely with him, believe that a disdain for academics that deMause sometimes slips into is connected to the disappointment he experienced at Columbia.

Critics of Volkan have focused on his failure to publically take a moralistic approach to the perpetrators of some of the horrors of our modern world, especially the slaughter of Armenians in World War I. However, this runs counter to his goal of persuading both parties in conflictual situations to speak to him, and ultimately their own enemies, in the process of humanizing the other.

One crucial way of determining the influence of an intellectual leader is the number of books written, the influence of these books, and the continuity of the institutions created. In terms of publications, including co-authored and edited volumes, Volkan was the most prolific with 58 books—many in foreign languages, followed by Lifton with 28 and deMause with eight. In terms of the academic acceptance and influence of these volumes Lifton has had the most influence, then Volkan, and finally deMause. On the web deMause’s approach to psychohistory is dominant.

While Lifton’s Center on Violence and Human Survival ceased to exist as such after he left it in 2002, Wellfleet fortunately continues, yet it remains to be seen whether it will survive without this 87-year-old man remaining in good health. My hope is that it will, but I know of no plan for a transition to younger leadership.

The failure of the center Volkan established, and of the journal he created, to survive long after his retirement from the University of Virginia is a negative indication for the continuation of his work. Yet the acclaim he receives around the world, as indicated by the large number of people willing to write tributes honoring him for a Clio’s Psyche Volkan Festschrift, is a positive indication for his continued influence.

In terms of the institutional continuity of deMause’s creations there is a mixed record. The Psychohistory Press ceased pub-

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lishing long ago and his Institute for Psychohistory meetings were discontinued three decades ago, but his journal continues and the IPA remains active. Indeed, there are positive indications that a younger generation of colleagues is assuming leadership roles in the association.

All three have contributed to our understanding of group phenomena and are committed to lessening violence in our world. Lloyd deMause has proudly advocated psychohistory as an independent scientific discipline while Lifton and Volkan are committed to applied political psychology/psychohistory focused on problems of hatred and violence, with Volkan taking his intellectual ideas to the actual hot spots from which violence springs.

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