The Weight of the Unconscious (response article)

If our own humble blunders result from unconscious compulsions, why should not those of statesmen and grandees with warmaking powers? And if our memories are somehow self-serving, why should not those of groups recollecting or re-living some earlier collective trauma? David Beisel is surely right to complain that historians dismiss the unconscious too lightly, and that they would do well to search for the kinds of patterns of repetitive behavior that might suggest some powerful underlying motive for the antics and oversights of historical actors. The late Rudy Binion, who did so much to open this field of inquiry, would no doubt agree, and welcome the discussion that Professor Beisel has opened.

It does not necessarily follow, however, that the errors that so often contribute to the outbreak of wars or the precipitation of crises are unconsciously willed; still less that they reflect an unconscious urge to re-live an earlier disaster. To demonstrate this for an individual would require documenting some kind of repetition difficult to explain on any other grounds; for an entire nation, some kind of collective unconscious drive reasserting itself in circumstances that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Most of the examples that Beisel gives are of the second sort.

The successive entries of the major combatants into what would come to be called the Second World War indeed tells in part a tale of successive errors of wishful thinking by the most disparate decision-makers—by Chamberlain and Daladier, that Hitler could be contained by negotiation, then by deterrence, then finally by retaliation; by Hitler, that they might not go to war for Poland; by Stalin, that the French would resist longer and that Hitler would not

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attack the U.S.S.R. when he did; by FDR, that the Japanese would attack the Philippines, not Hawaii; by Hitler again, that he could defeat the U.S.S.R. before the U.S. could make a difference. Must each of these reflect an unconscious wish, when the conscious gamble or calculus, however flawed, speaks for itself? Perhaps, but failing reliable psychobiographical evidence, we are still in the realm of speculation.

Beisel suggests two related patterns in his recitation of American foreign policy disasters between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The policy-makers had done much to provoke them unconsciously, yet reacted with shock and indignation when they materialized; and popular renditions, in films and other vehicles, rested on a narrative of innocence and victimization. Denial came on top of denial, in short, first among officialdom and then among the public, from the Ur trauma of Pearl Harbor to the outrage of 9/11. It might be objected that the pattern does not apply very well to many of the others—not to the Cuban missile crisis, in which the U.S.S.R., not the U.S., acted irrationally by trying to violate a tacit understanding about the balance of power; not to Vietnam, in which the U.S. escalation reflected a fixation about the country’s credibility in the Cold War and deeply divided the country; not to the Iranian hostage crisis, during which many American public commentators pointed to mistakes in U.S. policy since 1953, and so on. The fundamental cesura, however, between the acts of the policy-makers and the creations of collective memory, is to my mind sound. Whether the two can be explained by similar psychohistorical factors, determining or over-determining both the crises and the popular transfigurations, remains to be seen. Many historians in recent years have been working on questions of memory, especially the memory of wars, in various parts of the world. They might do well to heed Beisel, and enlist at least social psychology as well as anthropology and sociology in their explorations.

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