Revisiting Mazlish’s Essays

Bruce Mazlish’s essays spanning the years 1968 to 1987 were published in The Leader, the Led and the Psyche: Essays in Psychohistory in 1990. Now, this work has been reprinted, giving us the possibility to reflect on Mazlish’s views and conclusions concerning psychohistory and how they have stood the test of time (almost a quarter of a century).

It must be noticed that Mazlish has not primarily seen himself to be a psychohistorian but a historian who applies psychoanalysis and sees the psychohistorical perspective as a necessary tool in the historian’s (and the political scientist’s) work. In his important essay “Leader and Led, Individual and Group,” first published in The Psychohistory Review in 1981, Mazlish maintains that the “next” “next assignment” for psychohistorians is to study both leadership and followership in leader led relations and to concentrate on political identity rather than on personal identity. The leader and led select their selves from “the available psychic repository, the shared culture.” Mazlish thinks that such selection is codified and frozen by ideology but “is made real and alive to the led through the leader’s image” (p. 260). There is no reference in this work to the history of childhood or Lloyd deMause’s psychogenic theory of history.

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In his new preface, Mazlish has commented that research on leader-led relations has been male-oriented and should pay more attention to women leaders (x–xi). The growing social media and the importance of net relations are also changing the leaders’ image into the tailored and manipulated image fit for the media and the globalized (and at the same time more fragmented) audience. Perhaps it is not only large-group psychology, demanded by Mazlish, that is needed, but a new kind of media psychology: the Internet and virtual reality psychology.

Psychohistorical research can help evaluate the roots of psychoanalysis and its theories. For Mazlish, psychoanalysis has its roots in the natural sciences (especially Darwinian evolutionary biology), in the “the novelistic tradition” and in the social sciences (p. 9). Mazlish has been open to the new ego-psychological (Eriksonian) and self-psychological (Kohutian) variations of psychoanalysis, but clearly he did not yet grasp the more intersubjective, relational, and communicative versions of psychoanalysis.

Looking back at the role of Freud’s psychoanalysis, Mazlish evaluates that Freud’s work “keeps losing the battles, but he has won the war” (x). By this statement, he means that though there are disagreements about the constructs and functions of the unconscious, be it the dynamic, cognitive, neural, linguistic, or cultural, its impact on human motivation and action has been recognized even in various branches of hard-data sciences. Mazlish is expecting that the neurosciences will shed further light on the brain-mind-body interactions. However, this link is mentioned in one sentence only, and the connections between psychohistory and the emerging fields of neuropsychoanalysis and social and cultural (cognitive-affective) neuroscience would deserve more attention in the future.

In his essays, written in a clear and enjoyable style, Mazlish gives examples of how to examine both political (e.g. Nixon and Khomeini) and intellectual (e.g. Marx, Freud, and Weber) leaders and how to apply more problem-oriented than life/biography-oriented history. Concerning research on large groups and their behavior, Mazlish has noted that individual psychological and clinical psychoanalysis, as well as Bion-type small-group theory, offers little in the way of effective tools for psychohistorians. Attitudinal polling is one way of collecting responses representative of a large group in a given context, but this is just one hint given by Mazlish. In his later article, “The Past and Future of Psychohistory,” in The Annual of Psychoanalysis in 2003, Mazlish proposes “the construction of a theoretically strong and integrated psychohistorical social psychology and its implementation in detailed, diverse studies” (p. 261).

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Since The Leader, the Led, and the Psyche was first published Mazlish has not continued active psychohistorical research. His later interests have included, for example, history of science and technology and global history. Still, even today his critical theoretical and methodological musings and proposals for further developments in the fields of history and political science are worthy of reading and they remind us of the very basic and vital values of psychohistory.

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