Resistance and Transformation in Psychohistory

When Paul Elovitz and Bob Lentz handed me the very first issue of Clio’s Psyche in June of 1994, I came across an interview

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with “Psychohistorian David Beisel” by Bob Lentz. The impression I got of Beisel’s personality and work was that of a brave pioneer of psychohistory who had continued to research, write, teach, and edit in this developing field despite strong resistance and negligence from scholars who were unwilling to expand their views. A passage in the interview crystalizes Beisel’s cooperative, unpretentious, and diplomatic attitude: “I think we should just try to do our work and not be pugnacious, argumentative or defensive in our writings. Simply put forward our findings on the basis of the best logic and the best psychology”—which, at that time, was not cognitive psychology but psychology going deeper into the unconscious (6).Until then, I had not read much by Beisel, but gradually I recognized that he had many subjects among which resistance especially attracted my attention. Beisel analyzed it insightfully while simultaneously developing the field of psychohistory and preparing his colleagues for multidisciplinary dialogues and self-transformations.

Lloyd deMause had set the tone for analyzing resistance to psychological issues and approaches in history and the social sciences. He even mentioned that psychotherapists were reluctant to express their appraisals on political and historical events and thus denied “the direct application of the insights of psychotherapy to history” (Lloyd deMause, “Psychohistory and Psychotherapy,” The New Psychohistory, 1975, 309). Traumatic historical and political events were distanced, de-emotionalized, and left to the social sciences. DeMause observed that “most of the theories of the ‘social sciences’ have been motivated by a flight from psychology, a vast defensive response to the growing discoveries of depth psychology” (310). Ten years later, James M. Glass asked, “Why are current political theorists reluctant to look at methodologies, terminologies, and perspectives directed toward understanding and analyzing internal psychological states?” (Delusion: Internal Dimensions of Political Life, 1985, 249).

David Beisel gave his contribution to analyzing resistance to psychology in his articles “Resistance to Holocaust Scholarship” (The Journal of Psychohistory, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1999, 124-135) and “Psychohistory and the Historians: 1970-2015” (Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 22, Nos. 1-2, 2015, 15-20). The former concerns resistance to psychology in Holocaust studies and the latter to history at large. Beisel has pinpointed that psychohistorians should be open to detect blind spots and evasions in their own and others’ research.

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Vigilant and truly transformative research endeavors are embedded in co-existing visions and co-constructing projects. Exclusions pave the way for arrogant doctrinal orthodoxy. Resistance to psychohistory is not restricted to its “opponents”; it also manifests among the psychohistorians themselves, in both individual and group-fantasies and processes. Different forms of resistance, transference, and countertransference in the intra- and interpsychically conflictual field of psychohistory can be identified. Beisel has stressed the multidisciplinary layers of psychohistorical research.

Beisel has identified five sources of resistance to applying psychological principles in Holocaust scholarship in his “Resistance to Holocaust Scholarship.” The first is the denial of psychology in an anti-psychological society. The second has to do with the real weaknesses concerning methods and psychological knowledge in psychohistorical scholarship. The third is that the distressing nature of such research produces defensive reactions. The fourth is the encounter with existential meaninglessness that has previously been part of psychological torture. The fifth is the total denunciation of psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychohistory that allows the denouncers to avoid psychological statements of their own.

John Fanton’s article, “The Logic of Psychohistorical Destiny” (The Journal of Psychohistory, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2001, 128-129),has recategorized Beisel’s five sources of resistance in the context of psychohistory. The first and fourth refer to large groups of people, the “psychoclasses.” The second concerns the psychohistorians themselves. The third and fifth show that the subject matter of psychohistory has intense emotional content, inflicting individuals with great psychological turmoil and strong, often quite inflexible defenses against it.

I have found Beisel’s analysis of resistance helpful in approaching the role of resistance and counter-resistance (see my article, “Resistances and counter-resistances in psychohistory,” Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2015, 209-213). Resistance has prevailed on both sides, in other researchers to psychohistorians, and in the psychohistorians themselves to the non-psychological historians and social scientists, thus making multidisciplinary dialogues and negotiations difficult. Psychohistorians’ countertransference can fuse with regressive states, implying, for example, impatience, arrogance, projection, and manipulative maneuvers that are directed against resistances to psychohistory, launched from other fields of

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knowledge. Such states that attack the “enemy” in research are a form of scholarly countertransference. I have conceptualized psychohistorians’ attacks on other fields as counter-resistance that may actually sabotage collaborative efforts and new insights. Beisel has given an example: “Sometimes psychohistorians brought the wrath of historians down upon themselves, defensively blaming historians for being ‘too defensive.’ One self-defeating example was Lloyd deMause’s essay, ‘The Independence of Psychohistory,’ published in… 1975, wherein he asserted psychohistory was a science and called historians astrologers” (“Psychohistory,” 2015, 15-16).

Psychohistorians have often been the objects of anger and rage, their pursuits reviled and neglected. They have been wounded, shamed, and ridiculed. For them, psychohistorical interpretation may have become an act of self-defense, a secure sanctuary. Psychohistorians may have also turned to the repression of criticism, the enemy chase and subsequent retaliation, and the unfounded fantasies of purification and salvation. A loving (non-possessive) reception of the other is hard to develop, but it would make mutual relations more constructive (see Juhani Ihanus, “The Repressed and the Projected in Psychohistory,” in Ludwig Janus et al., eds., Symbolik, gesellschaftliche Irrationalität und Psychohistorie [Author translation: Symbolism, Social Irrationality, and Psychohistory], Jahrbuch für psychohistorische Forschung [Author translation: Yearbook of Psychohistorical Research], Vol. 5, 2005, 250).

The phases or cycles (of history, abuse, group fantasy, etc.) that psychohistorians study are not solely “out there” but are discernible among themselves and in their internal world. To be prospective is to be inventive and imaginative in temporality, to experiment with futurity. Such an experimental approach transforms the “fated” future—the depressed futility state with a short time perspective and short-range plans—into a more open and potential “destiny” (on fate and destiny, see Christopher Bollas, Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom, 1991). I am thinking here of the “flourishing” profusion state with a long temporal perspective and long-range plans.

The playful proleptic, and positively projective and prospective in the psychohistorical discipline are not reached without recognizing manifestations of the repressed and highly narcissistic group protectiveness under severe and prolonged stress. These protective maneuvers include the pursuit of dissent, strict

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polarization between the in-group and the out-group (accentuating the positive characteristics of the in-group), the safeguarding of the disciplinary blocks, and social control over the group members, ranging from subtle group pressures to fierce punishment against the violators (Ihanus, “The Repressed,” 2005, 250).

Psychohistorical knowledge can be both liberating and illusory, including the sequences of insights and fabrications. The psychohistorical endeavor can be made to carry the burdens of our human predicament and its inherent aggression, depression, anxiety, humiliation, submissiveness, and narcissistic wounds. In psychohistorians, as in all human subjects, various flows of new information are often drawn into the unconscious, repressed “infantile attractors”—childhood feelings, object representations, memories, associations, and fantasies (Stanley R. Palombo, The Emergent Ego: Complexity and Coevolution in the Psychoanalytic Process, 1999, 182-184). Psychohistorians can explore the attractors’ mode of operation in the current situation and the outer world; among themselves, individuals, and in small and large groups; as well as in historical, social, political, cultural, economic, and technological contexts. It is through psychohistorical interpretations that the attractors acquire complexity, dimensionality, and differentiation (Ihanus, “Repressed,” 2005, 250-251).

Thus, cognitive faculties become less stale and rigidly determined, and the “grammars” or the rule sets of the attractors are more flexibly extended. This process of flexible exploration also applies to the theoretical and methodological patterns of research. By reaching out for reciprocal and fertile multi- and cross-disciplinary relations, psychohistorians can make advances. They work as promoters of knowledge and understanding in action, caught in the act of forming and transforming, semantically, somatically, intellectually, and emotionally. The multi- and cross-disciplinary futures of the psychohistorical project call for transmigratory and transitory identities. There will be new emergent structures (intrinsic to the structures of the human passions and of the mind/brain systems of the psychohistorians) built at the higher levels of self-organization (Ihanus, “Repressed,” 2005, 251, 256).

In recent years, David Beisel, with other fellow psychohistorians, has developed poetic approaches to history (see his “Poetry as a Psychohistorical Source,” Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2013, 292-298). A landmark of such poetry is John Allman’s work Clio’s

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Children (1985) where the writer “can project himself into the circumstances and personalities of history and express himself in the terms of an historical moment” (John Allman’s “Preface” in Clio’s Children, xi). Such meditation on history through imaginary, metaphorical, and symbolic means has also been realized in Wounded Centuries: A Selection of Poems (2015), edited by David Beisel, including Allman’s and fellow psychohistorians’ poems. In his “Preface” for Wounded Centuries, Beisel mentions that those poems “deal with the history of emotions, with issues of identity and memory, with blind spots, obsessions, hidden motives, and irrationalities writ large and small” (viii).Without being “pugnacious, argumentative or defensive,” poetic psychohistory is an area between the arts and science that can bridge knowledge and emotion as well as enable developmental and creative transitions and transformations.

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