Professionalizing Psychohistory and Other Issues (response article)

The diffusion and strength of psychohistory are evident as the commentaries on our five papers come from Finland, France, New Zealand, Canada, Wyoming, Florida, and New York. The content of these responses is an interesting mixture of optimistic and pessimistic views of our field. Joseph Ponterotto’s good news is that despite academic psychology departments’ traditional hostility to psychohistory, psychobiography is making a comeback. He wisely points out that “psychohistorical study makes for better clinicians” after the psychology students go into the field because “training in history breaks the divide often between theory and practice in psychology.”

Trevor Pederson, the youngest of the commentators, presents an ambivalent view of psychohistory, which he is deepening his knowledge of and which he would like to connect to Marxism as have others since the 1920s. Through the years I have known a number of colleagues who are drawn to Marxism and psychoanalysis/psychohistory, but they have overwhelmingly relinquished their Marxism after making a major commitment to probing the unconscious. When Pederson declares that “professional recognition for psychohistory would be hard enough, but for psychohistories, it seems like asking for a bunch of insightful, but unconnected, aphorisms to be acceptable for a master’s thesis,” I find it demeaning to a field that welcomes many approaches and has created a very large and valuable literature that he appears unaware of. Many of his ideas about our field seem garnered not from this literature or from the double blind refereed studies of Clio’s Psyche and the now juried Journal of Psychohistory, but from the hit or miss posts on Clio’s Psyche’s Google listserv.

The lack of employment for psychohistorians, as psychohistorians is a major issue, is highlighted by Hans Bakker and taken to an extreme by Pederson when he writes that “it seems unethical to me to try to attract students to a discipline in which no future is offered to them.” Au contraire! Psychohistory has provided a wonderful past and continues to provide a fine future for me and many other colleagues. When I won the quite competitive Alumni Teaching and Leadership award at my college, it was precisely because of

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what I learned as a psychohistorian. When some of David Beisel’s fellow historians were being de-tenured during a major budget crisis, it was his overflowing psychohistory classes that protected his position, along with his willingness to fight for his field and position. Beisel is an extraordinary scholar, editor, colleague, and professor who has taught psychohistory to over 8,000 students.  Regrettably, he is too concerned about the failure of the leaders of the historical profession to embrace psychological history. We need to simply do good work and not devote our energy to the naysayers, who are far more prevalent in academia than the clinical world.

When Juhani Ihanus regrets that “neglected as a companion of psychohistory is positive psychology,” I like the impulse to not be focusing on psychopathology. However, I would like to bring his attention to my over three decades long push to build a psychohistory focused on adaptability, childhood, coping mechanisms, creativity, empathy, innovation, personality, psychobiography, and overcoming trauma, rather than on psychopathology. We in psychohistory need well-researched psychobiographies and other in depth studies, far more than new theorists and theories, as we have already seen a dearth of both.

It is a remarkable turnabout that the Journal of Psychohistory, long associated with Lloyd deMause’s advocacy of psychohistory as a separate discipline and scientific field, is now edited by David Lotto, who agrees with Robert Jay Lifton’s advocacy of psychohistory as an approach rather than a separate field of inquiry. I am totally in agreement with his tolerant big tent approach to the field in terms of theories and methodologies. My main concern is that the institutions of psychohistory be maintained and grown because they serve as a hothouse of inquiry, spread the word of the approach, and help to establish standards of investigation. Also, interested colleagues are more likely to be drawn to a field or discipline rather than simply an approach.

The demise of Lifton’s Center on Violence and Human Survival, Volkan’s Center on Mind and Human Interaction (and the journal of the same name), the Group for the Use of Psychology in History (GUPH), and the Psychohistory Review are unfortunate. All but the last were a result of retirements. Fortunately, the valuable Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society came into existence in the 1995 and has created a fine journal, Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. In England, Psychoanalysis and History was created in 1999. Contrary to Norman Simms’ assertion,

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the U.S. is certainly the center of psychohistory, but psychohistory is thriving in Germany, where there may have been as many people attending last April’s conference in Heidelberg as this year’s IPA in New York City. In France, Marc-André Cotton has 100s of people attend his talks on childrearing.

Ken Fuchsman deserves credit for originating the idea for the “Psychohistory at the Crossroads” symposium and soliciting colleagues for it first as panel discussions and then in its present form. Furthermore, Ken is an advocate of creating a psychohistorical training program, which was an intense subject of discussion after one of the panels.

This led me to consider how people become trained as psychohistorians, since there is no degree given in the field. Peter Loewenberg and Peter Gay had solid training in history and political science and careers as historians prior to their postgraduate training in psychoanalysis. Loewenberg had the added training in probing the unconscious that comes from control analysis (intensive, one- on-one long term supervision) when seeing patients. David Beisel was intensively trained as a historian, had a lengthy personal and group analysis, and then the added expertise from his decade-long stint as the editor of the Journal of Psychohistory. Lloyd deMause did graduate work in political science and had some training in psychoanalysis prior to devoting himself full time to his business and a scientific approach to psychohistory.

My own training started with three degrees in history followed by sitting through several semesters of history courses taught by a psychological historian. After I taught Western Civilization at Temple University, a new world was opened up to me as I audited my colleague’s Western Civilization class focused on personality and the unconscious. I read—actually, devoured—every psychoanalytic and psychological study of historical individuals and events I could find in English. Next, I attended psychoanalytic seminars on biography, cinema, and dreams offered at training institutes. This was a good start but far from enough. To become what I considered to be a well-trained psychohistorian, I needed and got a lengthy personal analysis, group analysis, seven years of psychoanalytic courses, ten years of control analysis, and over a quarter century of analytic practice.

My personal and control analyses taught me about my own projective field, making me a better psychobiographer. Personal

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analysis was the single most important part of my training. Organizing and running psychohistorical seminars as a midwife of psychohistory for 39 years and 21 years as a psychohistorical editor have deepened my education, which was then furthered by researching and teaching psychohistory courses since 1972. The stimulation of being a part of a psychohistorical community has been an enormously powerful part of my education as the psychodynamic paradigm was developed as a collaborative effort in discussion and debate with colleagues I met at our different organizations. In looking back on my career that began in the 1960s, I greatly value formal classroom education, personal analysis, collegial interchange, and learning by doing and teaching.

There are many routes to becoming a psychohistorian. The late Henry Lawton was a prodigious worker who became a fine scholar of our field with only self-analysis, although after I finally talked him into going into personal and group analysis, he realized how much he had missed with only an intellectual understanding of the unconscious and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history.

Those who come to the field from a clinical background have much to offer but often have little sense of the rules of evidence that historians are steeped in. Psychohistorical journal editors and referees serve as important educators of would-be authors when they take the time to explain why work is rejected or can be accepted only after extensive changes are made. Whether psychohistorians begin with a background in psychology or history, there is a steep learning curve to complete their education.

There have been various attempts to formalize psychohistorical education, most of which have not gotten off the ground. Historian George Kren and psychologist Leon Rappoport worked hard to establish a graduate program in psychohistory at Kansas State University, but it failed because of inadequate student enrollment. At UCLA, Peter Loewenberg arranged for history graduate students to also attend classes at his psychoanalytic institute, but most failed to establish careers in history departments because of a slack market for historians and anti-psychoanalytic prejudices.

The issue of psychohistorical training and certification that figures so large in Fuchsman’s approach is a good idea that I welcome as someone who has worked to bring people to the field for four decades. The problem is that these are unrealistic at the present time. Without there being a way of making a living in the field it-

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self, few would sign up for these potentially valuable activities. The interesting work for psychological inquiry that Fuchsman lays out would require hoped-for legions of new psychohistorians that just aren’t there. The sheer variety of responses to the “Psychohistory at the Crossroads” symposium support the fact that psychohistory is alive and well, with practitioners from various backgrounds coexisting reasonably well, while developing our field. Whether one believes it is a field or simply an approach, it is this kind of lively debate that has built and continues to build the psychohistorical paradigm. Although a formalized certification program figures into several colleagues’ hopes for psychohistory’s future, I doubt that at this time, especially looking back at previous failed attempts, it is a viable course of action.

As editor I would like to thank my colleagues for their many valuable contributions to this symposium issue.

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