Feminist Historian Joan Wallach Scott: Featured Scholar Interview

Joan Wallach Scott is a historian of France with major contributions to gender and intellectual history. She was born on December 18, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York as the eldest of two daughters to Sam and Lottie Tanenbaum Wallach, who were both high school history teachers. She was raised to believe in the equality of women and academic freedom. The failure of the latter hit close to home when her father was fired from his public school position in 1953 in a McCarthyite attack on leftist teachers. After attending Midwood High School she graduated Magnum Cum Laude from Brandeis in 1962 as a Phi Beta Kappa.

Scott received her doctoral degree in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969. She then taught in history departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1970-72), Northwestern University (1972-74), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1974-80) before becoming Nancy Duke Lewis University Professor and Professor of History (1980–85) at Brown University. There she was founding director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. In 1985 she became Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. before being appointed the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute in 2000. She became Professor Emerita upon her retirement in June 2014.

Scott’s eight books include The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City (1974); Women, Work and Family (co-authored with Louise Tilly) (1978); Gender and the Politics of History (1988); Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996); Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005); The Politics of the Veil (2007); and The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011). She has also edited ten volumes and written

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some 72 articles.

Professor Scott is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received numerous awards and prizes including the Hans Sigrist Prize of the University of Bern (1999); the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association (AHA-1974); the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the AHA (1989); and AHA Award for Scholarly Distinction (2009). She sits on the editorial boards of nine journals. She is a founding editor of the journal History of the Present; A Journal of Critical History (historyofthepresent.org). Professor Scott (JWS) was interviewed by Paul H. Elovitz (PHE).

PHE: I am impressed by your knowledge of applied psychoanalysis, what I call psychohistory, in your article, “The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History,” that appeared in the recent Cambridge University Press book, Psychoanalysis and History: Interdisciplinary Explanations. Why do you see psychoanalysis and history as incommensurable?

JWS: I think they are incommensurable in a productive way—that was my point in the article. History constructs narratives, prefers rationalist explanations for the texts it reads and for the events and behavior it recounts. It also strives for a certain closure in the interpretations presented. Psychoanalysis questions the coherence of narratives, looks for signs of unconscious disruption in texts, events, and behaviors, and, in that way, opens possibilities for different kinds of interpretation from the ones historians are used to offering. The time of history tends to be linear; the historian fancies herself an observer not a participant in the story she tells. The time of psychoanalysis is more confused; it’s not just that the past remains in the present, but that the present constructs the meanings of the past. The analyst is a participant in the process, not simply an observer.

PHE: Is there any way of overcoming this gulf that you see between the two disciplines?

JWS: Why should there be? The point is not to resolve the difference in one direction or another—I argue in the article that that was, in effect, what the psychohistory movement of the 1970s did, to its detriment—but to see how the encounter between the different approaches pushes each to places they wouldn’t otherwise go. People trained in both disciplines can move back and forth and offer insight that more traditionally trained historians can’t.

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PHE: What was the basis of your resistance to psychoanalysis?

JWS: Like many historians, I thought it was impossible to get to the unconscious minds of people in the past. I thought it could only be about individuals. I held fast to rationalist interpretations and was trained not only to produce coherent linear narratives, but to read texts for their coherence. In the intellectual history courses I took, one produced coherent readings of the thoughts and actions of historical characters. If there was incoherence, it was the historian’s fault.

PHE: When you write, “it is the unconscious that knows neither time nor contradiction that distinguishes the psychoanalyst’s version of history from that of the disciplined historian,” as one of a number of scholar/clinicians trained in both history and psychoanalysis, I am puzzled by the implication of this statement. Do you mean to imply that I can’t use what I have learned as an analyst to provide a better understanding of a historical personage or situation?

JWS: No, I don’t mean that at all. It’s precisely your psychoanalytic training that lets you read for the unconscious, lets you introduce notions of incoherence and irrationality into your analysis of history. But if you were to write a full historical account, I wonder what kinds of framing you’d choose, what causality you’d opt for, what kind of closure your story would have. It’s there that the tensions are manifest, not simply in offering a “better understanding of a historical personage or situation.” That suggests a kind of small addition to the big story; I’m referring to how you’d tell the big story, and I assume it would be different from the way a traditional historian would tell it.

PHE: I find your questions to be thought provoking. My first thought was that the framing would depend on the topic and that for my work on the history of psychohistory it would be what you would expect of a traditional historian. I do believe that I need to be more open to letting in my psychoanalytic self in how I tell the big story. In struggling to gain the acceptance of my fellow historians for applied psychoanalysis, I am sometimes resistant to allowing my psychoanalytic perspective to frame the big picture. In terms of resistances, what led you to move beyond your resistances, as stated in The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011)?

JWS: There were things I couldn’t explain in the work I was doing on gender and women’s history. There was a group of feminist

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scholars at Brown University (where I joined the faculty in 1980) who were immersed in psychoanalysis, post-structuralism—theories I hadn’t encountered before and that seemed to offer better ways of approaching the persistent inequalities between women and men, the fantastic claims made about sexual difference in the course of history.

PHE: You associate psychoanalysis applied to history with madness and profound passion. However, have you encountered colleagues before me who are devoted to applying psychoanalytic history to understanding childhood, coping mechanisms, creativity, emotions, group behavior, historical change, innovation, overcoming trauma, and personality rather than pathology?

JWS: Yes, of course. If I only associated psychoanalysis with the study of pathology, it wouldn’t be much use beyond extreme cases. But, I wonder, do you think profound passion is pathological? I don’t.

PHE: Yes, profound passion need not be pathological, but it can be. It isn’t for Jimmy Carter, who formed a reaction formation regarding violence as a small boy and whose passion for peacemaking is a part of his personality. It was for the chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), whose fantasy of being descended from aliens from outer space fueled his passion for science, but also left him vulnerable to narcissistic injury as he aged and people considered him to be strange. Have you come across similar cases in your own work?

JWS: I don’t think so. This isn’t the kind of thing I look for, I guess.

PHE: Although I was trained in a fairly traditional analytic institute, the heart of psychoanalysis to me is about a methodology of listening to the individual to help clients understand their own emotions and conflicts, not to find categories to fit them into. What are your thoughts on this, and does this fit in with your current sense that humans are “mutable”?

JWS: I don’t think historians who apply psychoanalytic categories (or diagnostic labels) to their subjects are doing work of a kind that interests me. It’s the processes (displacement, condensation, projection, fantasy, identification, etc.) that I find useful for thinking about behavior in the past (and the present). As for the mutability of humans, that’s a different issue, isn’t it? I offered it as a histori-

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cal concept. I think we are all products of the interactions of cultural norms (myths, rules, etc.) and individual psyches (formed in families and groups), which grapple with those norms—obey, adapt, transgress, resist them. The norms are mutable for all sorts of historical reasons (not all of which are explained by psychoanalytic theory). So, in that sense, humans—in the long perspective of time—are mutable.

PHE: You appear to find the psychoanalysis of Lacan and other French theorists to be more amenable to you than the psychoanalysis of what you describe as the Anglo-American School, which includes Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan. Is this accurate and, if so, why is it?

JWS: Yes. The psychoanalysis that interests me (Freud should be included along with Lacan, Laplanche and de Certeau) is, as I said above, the one that focuses on the operations of the unconscious (understood through language). It also posits sexual difference as a problem, not as something known or to be taken for granted. The fixed oppositions between men and women, masculine and feminine, are challenged in the work I depend on. Those oppositions tend to be reified in Object Relations theory, which also often focuses on more sociological explanations and solutions. I think the operations of the unconscious (fantasy especially) are more complicated and elusive than sociology can explain.

PHE: As psychoanalytic historians we readily use the concept of fantasy, but in my experience it is not commonly used by other historians. So it puzzles me that you write about The Fantasy of Feminist History. Why do you use this concept? Does it make some of your feminist colleagues uncomfortable?

JWS: Why are you puzzled? I thought I made it pretty clear in the introductory chapter why fantasy was a concept I wanted to work with. It calls into question the idea that representation necessarily corresponds to material realities; it suggests there are desires that are expressed by people that theories of “interest” can’t account for; it assumes that gender is an attempt to rein in fantasy. I’m sure it disturbs some feminist historians, but my work has disturbed them for a long time. You can find any number of articles attacking my “poststructualist turn,” calling into question my credentials as a feminist and a historian. I don’t write for those who refuse to engage the critical work I think I’m doing. This doesn’t mean I’m immune to criticism—I actually find criticism extremely

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useful in sharpening my thinking and improving my writing. It does mean that there’s a difference between refusal and engagement.

PHE: Have you have experienced an in-depth therapy which could readily change your perspective on issues like psychoanalysis generally and fantasy in particular?

JWS: Yes. But I think the effect was indirect, as perhaps it always is. I’d say that equally important was reading the work of the feminists at Brown and elsewhere that I’ve already mentioned. Seeing the kind of insight they gained was tremendously exciting. In the Pembroke Centre I learned to think in new ways; that exposure, as much as my own analytic experience, has had a profound effect on my thinking.

PHE: How does postmodernism relate to psychoanalysis and psychohistory?

JWS: I don’t do postmodernism, so I’m not sure how to answer this question. My exposure was to what is called post-structuralism, to the emphasis on language, the critique of metaphysics, the critical work of scholars like Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray (all French, I’m afraid!). A certain kind of Freudian reading figures in all of their work. As for psychohistory, I’m not sure what that is beyond the moment in the 1970s when it proclaimed itself a sub-field in the U.S.

PHE: When you report finding “the uses that some psycho-historians made of Freudian concepts reductive and unhelpful,” I have to agree. Just as there is bad economic, labor, political, social history, there is bad psychohistory. Why is psychohistory tarred so completely by work poorly done, while other historical specialties are not?

JWS: I think it has to do with the anxiety that thinking about the unconscious produces among conventional historians. Or with the idea that there’s nothing that can be firmly proven about a psychoanalytic reading of some event or behavior in the past.

PHE: As the son of a union organizer and a politically activist mother who was jailed for demonstrating for free school lunches during the Great Depression, I am predisposed to question things that many other historians would not. I wonder about the impact of having leftist parents on you and your scholarship.

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JWS: I think my parents predisposed me to being a critic, but—as I suggest in the small autobiographical piece I wrote, “Finding Critical History” (in James Banner and John Gillis, eds. Becoming Historians, 2009)—my relationship to my father was also formative in a different way. The dynamic with him (this I did learn in my analysis) was complex. I at once sought his approval and resisted his authority. (Oedipal? Maybe, but I understand it better as a contradictory dynamic.) In any case, critical engagement was what I learned consciously at the dinner table and (in another register entirely) psychically in family dynamics.

PHE: Several times in your chapter you cite Peter Loewenberg of UCLA, a member of the Editorial Board of our journal. Do you have any personal association with him and what do you think of his scholarship, beyond his work on the Langer brothers that you mention?

JWS: His work was very helpful to me when I was writing the article you referred to at the beginning; I learned a great deal from his writing—of which I read a lot. I don’t know him personally.

PHE: You have done a great deal for women’s history in both your career and scholarship. What do you consider to be your greatest contribution in this area?

JWS: Keeping the question of gender an open question instead of as a known relationship between women and men.

PHE: In writing about gender, have you paid considerable attention to childhood in the development of your subjects?

JWS: No.

PHE: Why does wearing the veil in French schools evoke such strong emotions?

JWS: French republicanism is a very strong ideological position. It insists on the universality of its principles. It takes Islam to be a dangerous violation of French secularism. There is a long colonial history at play here, which took Arabs to be an inferior race; there is racism both past and present in the portrayal of immigrants from North and West Africa as dangerous classes. There is also an interesting displacement of “religion” onto Muslims, even though this secular nation still celebrates Christian holidays as national holidays, supports church buildings as part of the national patrimony, and contributes to private religious educational institutions. In fact,

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in some of the anti-Muslim rhetoric, Christianity has become synonymous with secularism!!

PHE: Of which of your books or articles are you most proud?

JWS: My favorite article is “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity” (Critical Inquiry, 2001). I like all of my books—they were adventures; I learned new ways of thinking as I wrote them. I don’t have a single favorite.

PHE: What are you working on now? What is its importance and when do you expect to have it published?

JWS: A book on secularism and gender equality. It’s a sequel to The Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, 2007). In it I return to the second-wave feminist scholarship of the 1970s and ‘80s and to post-Colonial scholarship as well to argue that gender equality and secularism were not, historically, synonymous. The aim is to deconstruct the current “clash of civilizations” argument that the secular Christian West guaranteed gender equality while the religious Muslim East did/does not. My aim is to take apart that binary opposition and introduce some complexity into the debate. I’m writing now; it should be done by the end of the year. Princeton University Press will publish it.

PHE: What is your primary intellectual affiliation?

JWS: I don’t know how to answer this question. I guess I’m a historian, but a critical historian.

PHE: Have you published, or do you plan to publish, a full autobiography?

JWS: I mentioned the article I have done; I have no plans to do any more autobiographical writing.

PHE: What do we, as psychoanalytic historians/psychohistorians, need to do to strengthen our work and make it more acceptable to mainstream academics?

JWS: I wonder if making things acceptable to mainstream academics implies that we give up on critical thinking. My position has always been contestatory—I don’t want to be acceptable to mainstream academics, I want to critically engage them.

PHE: I certainly do not mean to imply that we give up on critical thinking or bend over backwards to become acceptable. In asking the question what I had in mind is how to not put off main-

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stream academics by being more careful about avoiding technical psychoanalytic terminology, simply applying diagnostic categories to historical personages, and so forth. Asking this question is one way of trying to engage academics. I would love to engage in debate with academic historians, but they tend to want to avoid a dialogue. This is the case at my college and the AHA turns down my colleagues’ proposals for panels. Perhaps I need to try some other venues. Do you have any thoughts as to where?

JWS: Well, there’s my journal, History of the Present!! I agree with you about wanting to engage academic historians and to demonstrate the usefulness of thinking psychoanalytically. I don’t think it’s entirely hopeless; you just have to go out of the mainstream, find people like yourself who are working on these issues—and they do exist. There’s a whole group of younger historians who are engaging these ideas and doing it imaginatively and with great originality. There are people in literature who are doing the same. The AHA is probably not the place to look for an entry, but there are other venues and conferences that will be open to the kind of work you are talking about. While we were doing this interview I got an email from someone at Tel Aviv University who is thinking along the lines you mention. So there are people out there, it’s finding them, creating occasions to meet, and engaging them that’s the challenge. That’s why my friends and I founded History of the Present—to provide intellectual space for exactly the kinds of encounters you are looking for.

PHE: Good luck with your new book, which we would like to review in our journal. Thank you for an interesting interview. 

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