Hartman Replies

I wish to thank the commentators, Binion, Booth, Carveth, Elovitz, Fuchsman, Lawton, and Shneidman for their thoughtful, articulate, and well-reasoned reactions to my paper. Space will not permit me to do justice to each of the complex arguments, so I will not respond directly to each commentary. Instead, I shall address some of the issues raised in the commentaries which bear on the general questions I wanted to address in the paper.

Specifically, I shall offer some thoughts about the following: 1) What constitutes the proper domain of inquiry of psychohistory (or what defines it as a discipline)? 2) What method or methods are best utilized to further the goals of the discipline of psychohistory? And 3) How do we decide between different assertions about the same historical phenomenon as to the way the assertions and evidence fit in relation to it? This last question was the main issue I wished to raise in the paper, but I believe that my example from social psychological empirical research, with its particular methodology, obscured this particular aim.

First, the domain of inquiry: I did not have the explicit intention to define what psychohistory is or ought to be. I did not mean to imply that the laboratory is the proper domain of psychohistorical inquiry. It was rather that social psychology may inform some historical questions or offer some basis for what we observe on the larger historical scale. Psychohistory is a new hybrid discipline with an ambiguous domain of inquiry which has not been explicitly agreed upon. My definition was perhaps off-hand and general, if not off-base. But the fact of the matter is that there is no agreed-upon domain of inquiry for psychohistory other than “history itself.” The same problem exists in psychoanalysis, and this continues to cause a number of epistemological and other problems. The problem it seems to me is that the domain of inquiry may be very much determined by how a set of historical “facts” are contextualized and interpreted. The key contribution of psychology to an understanding of history lies, as Binion cogently observed, in the area of motivation in and between large groups. It is in this crucial area that psychohistory is only as good as the psychology contextualizing it. (Historians would say rightly that psychohistory is only as good as the history underpinning it.)

This problem leads inevitably to the question of psychohistory as science (natural or social) or as art (humanistic, cultural, hermeneutic). This same dichotomy vexes psychoanalysis, and I suspect it is an issue in some circles of historical thought as well. It is clear where my paper stood on this issue because it illustrated a methodology most appropriate to agreed-upon standards in social psychology. These standards may or may not be appropriate for psychohistory.

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However, when it comes to issues involving motivation and other whys in history, I think aesthetic, intuitive, empathic and other “humanistic” criteria for the evaluation of interpretations are inadequate by themselves. That’s my opinion because of my training and outlook both as a social psychologist and as a psychoanalyst. While I have my own idiosyncratic orientation to this question, my intended point was that the field of psychohistory would be advanced by an articulation of any criteria which makes for a convincing psychohistorical argument. We should be able to make explicit how we judge the truth claims of an argument through the fit between the assertion and the contextualized data. This is often lacking in the psychohistorical literature as it is in psychoanalysis.

Once this is accomplished, then open-minded colleagues can argue about which assertion-interpretation fits the evidence best. I thought it fascinating that the art-science dichotomy surfaced so readily. We don’t necessarily have to choose between these approaches, but we might have to integrate and make explicit what our methodological assumptions are.

I suspect that historical analysis faces this same epistemological challenge that psychoanalysis does. There must be criteria for what constitutes an assertion-evidence fit in history, but I doubt that it is has been made explicit.

Two, the methods of inquiry: it naturally follows from the art-science dichotomy that the methodology employed in tackling a psychohistorical issue will differ according to one’s view of art, science, or some integration of the two. My intention in the paper was to demonstrate an analogy between findings in social psychology and psychohistory, including both the possible advantages and disadvantages of such an analogy. Psychology is now part of biology (even if it began as part of philosophy) and psychoanalysis is part of psychology, and psychohistory occupies this ambiguous position between history and psychology. I believe that psychoanalysis has been led astray by Freud’s aversion to systematic natural science research in psychoanalysis (despite his beginnings as a bench scientist) and by the mutual alienation of psychoanalysis from academia. I believe that the future of psychoanalysis as a discipline lies in a rapprochement with developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and brain research. None of this is necessary for the practice of psychoanalysis with a patient. However, the basic concepts of the theory or theories which inform practice must, I feel, be informed by science utilizing natural science methods.

The most important developments in psychoanalysis are coming from confirmations and disconfirmations of psychoanalytic theory from cognitive neuroscience. It was in that spirit that I offered my research example and its possible relevance for psychohistory. One can and maybe should practice psychohistory with a different methodology from that of natural science just as the working psychoanalyst does. That is, intuition, empathy, and intersubjectivity can be used to organize, relate to, and interpret. But this methodology, too, should be made explicit along with its particular criteria for evaluation so that the general audience may have some criteria to choose between competing truth claims. Otherwise, deciding which interpretation is most useful falls to solely subjective, aesthetic, or ideological criteria. When it comes to general theories and basic concepts involving human motivation, I believe that natural and social science methods will better inform this issue than any other approach. I am making a distinction then between the application and practice of psychohistory and the validation of basic concepts which underpin it.

Three, the criteria of evidence: I have already anticipated this last and main point. My preoccupation with what constitutes evidence stems from a concern not only about wild psychohistory (of which there is quite a bit) but the more general question of validating assertions in psychohistory. Conjecture, speculation, intuition, and other processes have a place in the formulation of assertions but not in helping colleagues, let alone the intellectual community, evaluate competing truth claims. I can see my own example was problematic in a number of ways. My assertions were several, complex and, at each step, posing difficulties matching the assertion with the evidence.

The assertion that all groups change in relation to experienced distress is hard to prove on the one hand but hard to disprove on the other. What group at some point in its history has not experienced distress? The more interesting questions, it seems to me, are when, why, and what do groups do with their distress? The historical record, just as individual his-

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tories, shows that they do a great many different things depending on a variety of conditions and circumstances. It is the job of both history and psychohistory to make these explicit. But even at the individual and small group level we lack ways of evaluating the interpretation of these factors. The historian’s point is that causation in history is very specific to the historical group, the historical period, etc. This is true of individuals as well. Everyone, even identical twins, is unique. Psychologists, however, are looking for general propositions about human motivation amongst the unique circumstances of each individual, group, or historical period. Why can’t psychohistory be both art and science, utilize a variety of research methodologies, and still seek to be explicit and systematic about how we go about evaluating the truth claims of our assertions?

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