The Builders of Psychohistory

This special issue reflects the breadth, depth, and special insights of psychohistory. It was always my intention when Routledge published the first history of our field, The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (2018), to solicit as many articles as possible from my fellow builders of the field. This two-part special issue is the result of this endeavor. Over 25 of my colleagues have written about their journeys including their major challenges, accomplishments, experiences, and ongoing projects in psychohistory. The majority of the contributors may not see themselves as psychohistorians, or as primarily psychohistorians, but these colleagues contribute significantly to the growth of our field.

While reading the lives and the psychological scholarship of these colleagues—in a few cases others have written about their journey in psychohistory—the reader should keep in mind that there is a much larger number of people who have contributed to the field who are not included here or in-depth in my history of the field. Among those are David Bakan, Andrew Brink, Don Carveth, Nancy Chodorow, Norman Cohn, John Demos, Dan Dervin, Alan Elms, Avner Falk, Lewis Feuer, David James Fisher, John Forrester, Lawrence Friedman, Carol and James Gilligan, Melvin Goldstein, Jay Gonen, Lynn Hunt, Juhani Ihanus, Norman Itzkowitz, Thomas Kohut, David Lotto, John E. Mack, Elizabeth Marvick, Bruce Mazlish, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Stanley Renshon, Paul Roazen, McKinley (Mac) Runyan, Eli Sagan, Todd Schultz, Anthony

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Storr, Jacques Szaluta, Robert Tucker, and Victor Wolfenstein. Fortunately, for the majority of these, Featured Scholar Interviews or obituaries may be found in back issues of Clio’s Psyche on cliospsyche.org.

There are many contributors I would have liked to include but they were either too busy with other projects, weren’t comfortable writing an autobiographical piece, were infirm or deceased, or I just didn’t have the time to contact them individually. Lawrence Friedman is a prime example. He is the outstanding psychobiographer of the Menningers, Erik Erikson, and Erich Fromm. Regrettably, he is uncomfortable writing about himself and is much too busy completing his book on the leaders of the one world movement prompted by the nuclear age. Friedman’s former student, Mark West, who has 15 psychohistorically informed books to his credit, planned to write about Professor Friedman, who had served on his dissertation committee; however, the tragic shooting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he chairs the English department disrupted his life to the point where he had to drop this project. The psychological historian and psychoanalyst David James Fisher is another example of a respected colleague who declined writing.

I have great admiration for those who disseminate applied psychoanalysis and psychohistory. Vamık Volkan did wonderful work at his Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (1987-2002) as well as Robert Jay Lifton and Charles Strozier at the Center for the Study of Violence and Human Survival (1985-2003). Arnold Richards created a productive psychoanalytic publishing house and the blog/website InternationalPsychoanalysis.net, which even led me to the complete works of Freud online. His house prints JASPER: The Official Journal of the Society for Psychoanalytic Understanding Through Research, Burton Seitler’s valuable new journal that publishes psychohistorical research, among other things. Michael Maccoby, an expert on narcissistic leaders and a quite successful sociopsychoanalytic consultant who started his career working with Erich Fromm, is currently revising his submission.

Richard Koenigsberg earned a PhD in social psychology and makes his living primarily through the Library of Social Sciences. Every year I refer to and urge students to read his Hitler’s Ideology (1975) and I admire his psychological focus on the horrors of war, WWII, genocide, and sacrifice. Lately every day I get

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two or three book or newsletter notices regarding these from the publicist he hired years ago, but I could not get him to write for this project, or even be interviewed. I tried unsuccessfully to engage Richard, starting many years ago when he used to personally run book exhibits at psychoanalytically informed conferences, but he is not receptive. Nor was he open to an invitation from a Psychohistory Forum member who is one of his personal friends.

Some colleagues played such an important role in the Psychohistory Forum and in psychohistory generally that I welcome the opportunity to have them included even though they were briefly mentioned in my previous book, The Making of Psychohistory. Thus, Judith Colp Rubin writes about her father Ralph Colp and Mark Bowker, a talented young psychohistorian, on his mentor Fred Alford. Judith Harris is writing on the life of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Even though he was featured in my book, the talented independent scholar Debra Hayden writes on her good friend Professor Rudolph Binion. As with other non-autobiographical articles, these pieces will appear in Part II of this special issue in the Winter 2020 issue.

As I read and edited the various articles, I was reminded of both the extremely important role that Lloyd deMause played in nurturing psychohistory as well as a number of people who were specifically driven away by his ideas or actions. In the category of those with positive feelings about deMause, there are Marc-André Cotton, Juhani Ihanus, Brett Kahr, Denis O’Keefe, and Howard Stein. Those with more mixed feelings toward Lloyd include David Beisel, John Hartman, and me. The colleagues with very negative views include Geoffrey Cocks, Peter Loewenberg, and Martin Quitt, although this is not necessarily spelled out in their articles.

As I read through the many submissions to this book, and the commentaries on my Making of Psychohistory, I came to appreciate more my own role in validating psychohistory by reaching out to people, getting them to write repeatedly, and calling what they’re writing psychohistory even before they had acknowledged that it fit into this genre. I work to validate the field. Of course, I’m not alone in this endeavor. This is one of the most important contributions of Lloyd deMause and then so many people like David Beisel, the late Henry Lawton, and Denis O’Keefe who have laid the foundations of the organized field. Ultimately, I don’t consider it to be essential that people who do good psychohistory consider themselves to be psychohistorians, psychobiographical historians, or to

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fit into any genre. It is ultimately the work that counts much more than what we call ourselves.

In reading and editing the articles by my talented colleagues, I’m reminded of the important role that Lloyd deMause played in bringing psychohistorians together, starting in the 1970s at the Institute of Psychohistory, the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA), and The Journal of Psychohistory. Colleagues I met through deMause’s efforts include Herbert Barry, David Beisel, Marc-André Cotton, Eva Fogelman, John Hartman, Juhani Ihanus, Brett Kahr, Allan Mohl, Denis O’Keefe, Martin Quitt, Howard Stein, and Vamık Volkan. Regrettably, deMause also drove away colleagues from the Institute for Psychohistory and the International Psychohistorical Association by poor editorial judgement and his unproven and sometimes unprovable theories such as the fetal origins of history and poisonous placentas. He was bad mouthed to the point where talented colleagues doing psychological history refused to have anything to do with organizations he was associated with and even those who were seen as his associates, something I often encountered.

As I wrote in The Making of Psychohistory, resistance to our field has far more to do with factors other than deMause’s missteps. Academic psychology and history closed their doors to our field, although it is widely used without crediting what we do. I was affronted when another contributor to Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Professor Rob Boddice, declared that psychohistory was dead and “Peter Gay was a rare survivor of a defunct subdiscipline” of history with his 1998 volume (149). This historian of the emotions, medicine, and science chose not to acknowledge the continued existence of psychohistory, to say nothing of its vitality. The short histories of our colleagues are a repudiation of Boddice’s commonplace disparaging of what we do. While some of my colleagues like Robert Jay Lifton and Vamık Volkan have written their own autobiographies, which are primarily histories of our subject, I’m hopeful that some of the authors in this special issue and book will go on to write full accounts of their own incredibly engaging and invaluable lives in psychohistory.

It is a great pleasure to have Ken Fuchsman write, “Our field has many challenges and a promising future. Personally, after many troubled times, my life has evolved into a glorious journey.” In 2019, Ken, through his hard work as president of the IPA,

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increased attendance at our annual conference to the highest level ever achieved. Charles Strozier, upon retiring from teaching, but not scholarship and psychoanalytic practice, concludes, “I can’t imagine a better life than the one I have been privileged to enjoy in psychohistory.” David Cifelli, a young student who I mentored and befriended, also expresses some of the joy that has been a hallmark of my life in psychohistory. Denis O’Keefe writes “I cannot imagine a future without psychohistory” since our field transformed his world view. This sense of a special knowledge and pleasure is explicit or implicit in the writings of other colleagues.

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