Commentaries by the Makers and Psychohistory’s Next Assignment

Review Essays on Paul H. Elovitz, The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), ISBN 978-1-138-58749-6, 138 pages, paperback, $38.95, hardbound, $140.

It is an honor to have 13 talented colleagues comment on The Making of Psychohistory (2018), providing additional insights and questions. My book is a history of the field that has so much to offer and with which I have had over a half-century-long love affair. As one psychohistorian among many, my knowledge has been broadened by their essays. I look forward to some of these same talented collaborators in the vineyards of knowledge writing for the 2019 Special Issue and the edited book, The Many Roads Taken by the Builders of Psychohistory (2019). Incidentally, the reader should also know that when typing the title of my volume, I often slip into writing “Makers” rather than “Making,” since despite my coverage of institutions and movements, I see our field mostly in terms of separate individuals and their contributions, personalities, and struggles. Regrettably, limitations of space don’t allow me to comment on almost half of those who took the trouble to write on this history of our field. It should also be pointed out that the request for comments on my book stressed that colleagues discuss what was not included in The Making. I will conclude my response to these generous commentaries with what I see as psychohistory’s next assignment.

Some commentators, like Dan Dervin, make me blush with their effusive praise. This prolific colleague sees me as an “invaluable emissary for our field” as well as an “advocate, creator, editor, historian, organizer, and researcher of psychohistory.” He sees my book as “indispensable.” As a veteran colleague he is aware of the gaps in what I have written. I agree with him com-

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pletely when he regrets that I do not have a special place for the “outstanding pioneer builder, renowned teacher, scholar, and congenial colleague, David Beisel.” Indeed, David’s contributions are worthy of a full chapter! Professor Dervin thinks I have placed Lloyd deMause, Robert Jay Lifton, and Vamik Volkan in “the top tier of prominent psychohistorians” and Peter Gay, Rudolph Binion, and Peter Loewenberg in “the second tier,” which was certainly not my intention. I simply discussed the latter three colleagues in the category of historians and I set enormous store in their contributions.

Geoffrey Cocks, Ken Rasmussen, Nick Duffel, and Christina Stern take exception to the many omissions in my book. However, how much can I squeeze into 125 pages of text? Furthermore, there is also a tendency to sometimes miss what actually is included. Thus William Meyers, in his extremely positive review, complains that “What is missing from The Making of Psychohistory is a clear statement of what exactly is so off-putting about psychohistory, something that perhaps no one knows….” This immediately troubled me because I spelled out the following reasons:

• Historians are generally reluctant to accept new approaches and methods
• Denial of the very idea and existence of psychohistory
• Denial that psychological assumptions underlie historical statements
• Unease upon hearing the word psycho, thinking it must be the psychohistorian who is “psycho”
• The preference of scholars for their own amateur psychologizing of history
• The belief that psychohistory is based simply on reductionist psychopathologizing of individuals
• The equation of psychohistory with the denigrated and allegedly disproved Freud and psychoanalysis
• The equation of the field with Lloyd deMause’s least provable theories
• The historical profession closing ranks (and journals) against it and academic psychology never being open to it (Making, 24-26 and elsewhere)

Clearly, I did not convince Bill, which means I should consider deepening my study of resistance to psychohistory. After all, in my eight plus years of analytic training I learned so much about understanding resistance and this knowledge has been an invaluable

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tool in doing psychohistorical work (e.g. interviews with the Carters) as well as in therapy. While I search for additional reasons for resistance, I also want to point out that those of us who are open to the enormous insights provided by depth psychology have trouble understanding how others can reject out of hand such a rich instrument of knowing.

Several commentators think I have not given Erik Erikson his proper consideration. I disagree. Of the eight contributors I focused on he has the second most notations in the index and is credited and discussed at length. While it is true that I am more critical of Erikson than most others, I think an issue is that his name did not appear in one of the chapter titles. Professor Herbert Barry’s statement that I provide “derogatory information about Erikson” is too strong. I disagree with Erikson on a number of points, and like the great majority of historians, find Freud wanting as a historical researcher. I wish Herb, who kindly agreed to drastically cut down his commentary because of our problem of just too much material for this issue, had mentioned our longstanding and valuable collaboration on presidential psychobiography and what he taught me about the role of birth order.

Geoffrey Cocks and Ken Rasmussen are two talented colleagues and erudite commentators on my book. However, Ken is off base when he says I did not cite Alexander Mitscherlich and his The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour (1967) or Society without the Father: A Contribution to Social Psychology (1963) since I do on page 116. This claim seems to be based on a misspelling of Mitscherlich’s name, which I have sometimes done myself. I agree with Ken that it would have been good to have written about “the attempted marriage of Marx and Freud” by the Frankfurt School, and I will be pleased to read it with interest if he does this. John Demos, Fawn Brodie, and Thomas Kohut are three respected colleagues, who Geoffrey and Ken wish I had highlighted. I regularly reference and assign Fawn Brodie’s books and do point out in a footnote that I organized the “Fawn M. Brodie 25 Year Retrospective” in 2006 with articles by 11 authors. Fortunately, both these eminent colleagues accepted being interviewed as a featured scholar and Kohut wrote about his dual training in history and psychoanalysis. Had Professors Demos and Kohut been open to my many subsequent requests after their 1995 and 2006 interviews to write and participate in meetings they were invited to, I would have written more about them based on more information

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and keeping them in mind. There was just not enough space and time to write in-depth about so many colleagues I would have liked to have covered. When Geoff and Ken write about their own roads to psychohistory, I am hopeful that they will fill in many of the gaps in my short volume.

Professor Marcia Newton finds The Making to be a “thought-provoking—autobiographical manifesto,” and in the spirit of my approach writes forthrightly about her own marital and parenting difficulties. I praise her following my example of personal revelation. She is surprised by my assessment that Freud was not a psychohistorian and that his attempts “were either extremely speculative or seriously flawed” (14). I wrote this amidst my effusive praise for the creator of psychoanalysis and I stand by this judgment. Indeed, Freud was apologetic about his historical writing. The talented psychologist Alan Elms writes in his defense, “Sigmund Freud: Psychohistorian,” which I cite on page 20 in footnote 3, and I recommend that Newton read it.

Sidney Halpern mentored me in psychoanalysis and psychohistory; Monte Ullman in dreamwork; and my analyst in listening and trusting my unconscious. Reading Nick Duffell’s statement that “my former mentor [was] deMause” is uncomfortable. Lloyd was certainly a strong influence on me for several years. However, if Nick had been in the U.S. rather than the U.K. when Lloyd had his greatest impact on me, I doubt that he would have made this statement.

The focus of several commentators on my difficulties with tenure and promotion may give the reader the impression that I am bitter at Ramapo College. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ramapo allowed me to fulfill my dream of teaching at a small interdisciplinary college, which gave me extraordinary opportunities to teach psychohistory and work closely with students. I stand by my statement that “I continue to love and proudly serve” Ramapo where I am the sole remaining faculty member from the founding faculty who started it in 1971 (123-124).

Beyond those mentioned above, there are various omissions and some errors in my book and I suspect as time goes by, I will find more that I will be able to correct if a second edition is warranted. Regrettably, for some unknown reason, Molly Castelloe’s first name ended up as Mary in one place, and Chuck Strozier’s birthdate is listed as 1940 instead of 1944. While it is spelled cor-

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rectly elsewhere, Fawn Brodie’s name is misspelled on page 83 with a “y” instead of “ie.” A number of items are missing from the index, which I oversaw the creation of by a most competent colleague. Regrettably, the publisher only allowed us a brief period of time to check everything for accuracy. In addition, from the featured scholars and editors table, the names of Frank Sulloway, Montague Ullman, and Vamik Volkan are omitted. If memory serves, I think it was a case of the printer wanting to fit everything onto two pages.

The University of Helsinki’s Juhani Ihanus’ discovery of the word Psychohistorie in an 1810 German text thrilled me because it is well before the 1840 English usage I proudly came across. For decades I have talked of writing an article on the early uses of the term and Juhani has agreed to co-author an article with me on the subject. Because our field is so rich, and I have worked so hard to know everything I could about it, I take mild exception to his saying that I managed to create my study “From bits and pieces.” He is a significant contributor to psychohistory and my study is built from an enormous opus of psychodynamic historical scholarship by Juhani and so many other contributors to rather than from “bits and pieces.”

The torch of psychohistorical insight may not shine as brightly as we would like, but nevertheless it continues to inspire many colleagues. As Thomas S. Kuhn pointed out long ago in The Structure of Scientific Inquiry (1962), the creation of new paradigms of knowledge requires a new generation since the adherence of the older model of knowledge are too wedded to what they learned and devoted their lives to proving. I look to a younger generation to pick up our psychohistorical torch. Our generation of psychohistorians need to focus less on the naysayers and more on the tasks that can benefit from our special insights and methodologies. Some of these are:

• The tension between our borderless electronics and state system
• The interconnectedness of our psychology and technology
• How to recruit a younger generation of psychohistorically literate colleagues outside of academia
• A psychohistory of comic books and comic heroes based on the reduced attention span of our youth
• A psychohistory of The Simpsons, Futurama, etc. and their audiences and creators
• The conscious and unconscious political uses of fear, anger,

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hope, and other emotions

• The relationship between the mood of the electorate and the leaders we pick
• The courage to examine our own “bad objects” and what psychic purposes they serve
• The reversal of the world-wide movement toward democracy and open societies
• The impact of psychohistory becoming more closely aligned with psychoanalysis than in the 1970s

In conclusion, I want to thank these generous colleagues and urge most of them to submit their own accomplishments, experiences, insights, and struggles to The Many Roads Taken by the Builders of Psychohistory (2019) Special Issue and book.

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