Mindsets of Psychohistory (response article)

With great pleasure, I read the five symposium papers that included wide-ranging reflections on the fundamentals of psychohistory. The papers reveal that there cannot be any stable identity in store for psychohistory. However, several changing identities are needed in order to navigate through the disciplinary landscapes that sometimes tend to hide minefields. Whether we call psychohistory an interdiscipline (Ken Fuchsman) or an approach (Robert Jay Lifton/David Lotto), the passionate and critical questioning of the agendas, theories, and methods of psychohistory is the best guarantee for the future-oriented mindsets of innovative psychohistorical researchers.

When figuring out the future mindscapes of psychohistory, we have to recognize not only the historical and current mentalities of nations, large groups, and individuals as research subjects, but also the choices concerning the topics and views made by psychohistorians themselves based on their subjective inclinations, motivations, and personal developments. There are competing narratives of psychohistory, some of them sticking to stereotypic storylines dictated by “chronically accessible constructs” (John A. Bargh’s term) and belief systems, some of them more prone to accepting the role of discontinuities, resistance, and ambivalence in the social construction of research enterprises, communities, and organizations.

Opening up for new psychohistorical cooperation and multi-

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ple realization demands from us sensitive, vigilant, and empathic relations to other conceptions of reality. Psychohistorical research cannot be led by any self-indulgent schemes or delusions about our uncontested success in interpreting the historical facts according to our liking. A relational and reflective mindset can be a beginning for a meaningful and creative flowering. The achievements and insights of psychohistory are available and accessible, not chronically but in several creative ways. Of course, there will be risks and conflicts involved when we have to give up some of our cherished pieces of knowledge and let others come to the scene when we have done our due share.

Outlines of the history of psychohistory often tend to repeat stories of the same kind about contradiction, exclusion, trauma, and repression. There are less stories about mutual and collaborative efforts at understanding different researchers and approaches. Psychohistory has been variably located between the social sciences, the behavioral sciences, the humanities, and the method sciences (statistics, philosophy, and so forth). The weakest connection has so far been to the natural sciences, besides the evolution theory (or evolutionary psychology) bind. If psychohistory is to be taken, as David Lotto suggests, with a “broad, inclusive, and tolerant stance,” several theoretical views of human behavior and motivation can be applied, not just the oft-repeated psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, and social psychological ones.

There are new inter- and even cross-disciplinary fields of knowledge to be approached. Here are some more additions to those mentioned in the symposium papers. Should we not, critically, try some of them in enhancing the human-science profile of psychohistory?

One area that has been neglected as a companion of psychohistory is positive psychology, an heir to older humanistic psychology. That area, although still scientifically somewhat unsound and idealistic, can give a certain balance to frequent psychopathologizing (criticized by Paul Elovitz) and depicting the traumatic history of humankind by paying more attention to the histories of joy, enjoyment, excitement, awe, bliss, and happiness, or at least to the incessant striving of humankind toward them. Like psychology, psychohistory may need help and may need to reformulate its questions from pathogenic to “salutogenic,” as according to Aaron Antonovsky in Health, Stress, and Coping (1979), and its disease model toward the health/wellbeing model, taking into account and culti-

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vating human positive capacities, virtues, and values. As Antonovsky reminds us, “All those familiar with the history of science are aware that important advances come with the formulation of new questions. The question is the breakthrough; the answer comes with difficulty, but it is the new question that is important” (14). Martin Seligman (with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), in his American Psychologist article “Positive Psychology: An Introduction,” has mentioned that positive psychology “is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play…positive psychology does not rely on wishful thinking, self-deception, fads, or hand-waving; it tries to adapt what is best in the scientific method to the unique problems that human behavior presents…in all its complexity” (2000, 55, 7). Some doses of that kind of mindset may give impetus to psychohistorical metanoia (the change of mind and the renewed sense of coherence).

On the side of the natural sciences, some candidates for collaboration can be named. Some examples include evolutionary biology, epigenetics, pre- and perinatal psychology, and neuroscience. It is not purely cognitive neuroscience but increasingly affective (e.g., Jaak Panksepp, Antonio Damasio, Allan N. Schore), social, and cultural neuroscience that deserves the intense attention of psychohistorians. I earlier proposed that we could build, in the wake of neuropsychoanalysis, a new approach, called neuropsychohistory, combining the efforts of mind-brain-body research and psychohistory. Lloyd deMause has already made some initial steps in his scattered references to neuroscientific research. Mirror neuron studies (e.g., Vittorio Gallese) are also a new promising field where intersubjectivity is seen as a neurodevelopmental cognitive-affective-biosocial process of many-layered attachments, attunements, and embodied simulations. In the field of consciousness research, there are promising attempts at mapping the developments of mentalization and the theory of mind.

What I call psychohistorical mindfulness means taking care of the well being of the psychohistorical project and its many increasingly global resources and workers. Instead of frustration, aggressive transference, the enemy chase, blaming the opponent, and self-defeatism, there can be hope, empathy, self-confidence, optimism, and faith in a future that will cultivate the best seeds of psychohistory. Such qualities can prepare us for flexible survival, flowing on, and not bound for apathy or sectarianism.

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