From Writer’s Block to Flourishing Psychohistorical Scholarship

My first personal encounter with Paul occurred in New York City at the International Psychohistorical Association’s Seventeenth Annual Convention on June 8-10, 1994. During the Convention dinner party at an Italian restaurant, he and Bob Lentz exuded enthusiasm when they handed me the brand-new Clio’s Psyche—at that time, a newsletter with the subheading “Examining the ‘Why’ of History.” It happened to be Volume 1, Number 1, with only eight pages. I still have that precious edition in which Elovitz’ inaugurating words state the journal’s goals that have amazingly expanded itself and the scope of psychohistorical writing and discussion over the years and as a refereed journal. The goals are still alive: to stimulate psychohistorical thought and research projects, provide a publication arena for brief articles, communicate with the members of the Psychohistory Forum (founded by Paul with Henry Lawton in 1982), assist the collegial networking, and communicate within the psychohistorical community and to the larger group of people exploring and developing the paradigm of psychology and history. The subheading of Clio’s Psyche was changed, starting in 1998, to “Understanding the ‘Why’ of Culture, Current Events, History, and Society.”

It is not a secret that Paul Elovitz, in the early phase of his career, had periods when writing was cumbersome to him—he struggled as he started his psychobiographical research on presiden-

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tial candidates and presidents. He was hesitant about writing a book on President Carter, a project he discarded after contributing the chapter “Three Days in Plains” to Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy: Psychohistorical Explanations (1977), edited by Lloyd deMause and Henry Ebel.

The politics of psychohistory—perhaps inevitable in any theoretical field—may have contributed to Paul’s struggles. There was friction between him and deMause; Elovitz was offended when words quoted from deMause’s article were repeated on the book’s flyleaf and in the press release that advertised it, giving the impression that all the authors of the edited work, including Paul, shared the same conclusion about Carter being “very likely to lead us into a new war by 1979” (deMause, 1977, p. 9). Paul also did not like the flyleaf’s announcement that the authors were supporters of Carter in the election.

Despite his frustration with deMause, Elovitz (2018) has acknowledged that deMause played a significant role in institution-building and organizing projects and publications in the field of psychohistory, as well as in launching Paul’s career as a presidential psychobiographer (p. 82). Under the auspices of the Institute for Psychohistory, Elovitz created and led the Saturday Workshops (1975-1982) to encourage psychodynamic research and publication. At that time, his project theme in the Institute of Psychohistory, according to deMause (1977), concerned transference problems in psychohistorians.

Paul has reminisced about his early writing dilemma: “Writing was a chore for me and I suffered from writer’s block” (Elovitz, 2018, p. 76). The roots of the writer’s block went deeper than that special occasion, as he has mentioned: “My first memories of writing were of not being able to do it: as a young child I was told to write a letter to my maternal grandfather, whom I didn’t know and my father disliked. When conflicted, self-doubt and writer’s block came easily to me” (Ihanus, 2015, p. 186). An academic mentor, Professor Sidney Halpern, his colleague at Temple University, helped our honoree navigate his conflicts in writing his dissertation by getting him to listen to himself and regain confidence in his ideas and in expressing them. Conflicts, blocks, and complexes often provide the cradle for autonomous creative processing and flexible coping.

Elovitz had an ambivalent relationship with Lloyd deMause.

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However, he found it important to support deMause’s organizational efforts to carry on the psychohistorical endeavor to explore the spectrum of human experience and history. While deMause’s leadership style had ingredients of authoritarian and uncompromising whimsicality and splitting, as well as truly helpful generosity, Paul’s is more collaborative, sharing, and nurturing. His assiduousness and heartful supportiveness give inspiration, empower, and enable colleagues to develop their views rather than accept the position of a loyal, unquestioning disciple.

Elovitz has grown and evolved since those uneasy early years. I have been surprised by Paul’s continuous productivity, effectiveness, and exactness, accompanied by reflective and empathic feedback. When he once prompted me to write an article and set a very quick schedule, he was pleased to find out that it worked out and welcomed the manuscript with a hilarious remark about strict deadline writing that “makes your juices going.” If somebody called it workaholic behavior, that would be a too-negative label and ignore his work’s creative and truly co-constructive effect. I esteem his versatility, which includes editing, revising, exploring, writing, rewriting, supporting, enabling, networking, collaborating, exchanging views—and “midwifery.” (On the metaphor of midwifery, see Elovitz, 2018, p. 74.) In addition, some of his colleagues have been lucky to get regular doses of grins, smiles, and humor carefully selected and sent by Paul to ease the burdens of our daily lives.

In the 1970s, besides going through the training program and other courses and seminars at the New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis (NJI), Elovitz also attended the meetings of the New Jersey Psychoanalytic Society, but that organization soon lost his interest because he saw no initiative among the participants to find new ideas in the Freudian exegesis (see Elovitz, 2018, p. 119). Paul does not take part in the burial of Freud’s work but sees it necessary to proceed from Freud’s legacy to new psychoanalytically inspired applications. He is, however, open to other approaches than psychoanalytic ones to support inter- and even cross-disciplinary psychohistory.

It has been a real exercise to try to write for Clio’s Psyche in non-technical, jargon-free language. Academics, as well as other writers, with their often abstract conceptualizations and theories, can have a useful learning experience when they need to express and explicate themselves in a more open and rethought way. In an

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interview, Paul commented that academic theoretical formulations could, at times, be invaluable, but most of the time, they are positioned far from the human experience and “serve to cut us off from people outside of our particular fields, sub-fields, and sub-sub-fields” (Ihanus, 2015, p. 185).

For Paul, the differences in approaches and interpretations and the ensuing debates are not something negative; instead, they advance psychohistorical insightful thinking, research, publication, and teaching, as well as build a sense of community. Variations of processing and presenting subject matters are to be respected. He has included this premise in the activities of the Psychohistory Forum and Clio’s Psyche. “Innovative ideas,” he states, “do not spring full-grown as from the head of Zeus, but are rather developed in stages” (Elovitz, 2018, pp. 74-75). For such ideas to flourish, they must be nourished, not abruptly stifled or cut.

The psychohistorical method favored by Paul demands that a researcher be ready to probe the self and carry on research by humanizing the subject, reflecting on and even dreaming about one’s past in a transference relationship to the subject. His approach is non-pathological, using psychological and psychiatric concepts not as labels but as suggestions for further elaboration. He has worked to expand the psychohistorical scene to the family constellations, childhood, developmental, motivational, and personality issues, defenses and coping styles, dreams, fantasies, memories, emotional interaction, leadership, power, and value dimensions.

Paul’s focus on nurturing creative resources and positive initiatives wires his colleagues to internalize and hone the skill and art of reading, writing, and exploring, thus removing blocks and cultivating emotion-based, intuitive, and rationally reflected knowledge and understanding about the human condition. His multiple contributions to psychohistory have envisaged various visions and routes to the precious moments of reaching the motivational underpinnings of human history and culture.

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