Larry Shiner, Editor of The Psychohistory Review (article)

It will no doubt startle some readers to learn that the editor of The Psychohistory Review is not himself a “working psychohistorian.” Larry Shiner notes that both his early training and the preponderance of his career since has been devoted to the study of philosophy and related intellectual issues. Prior to becoming editor of The Review in 1988, Shiner had produced only a few book and essay reviews that could be classified as psychohistorical. Even today, Shiner teaches “mostly 18th- and 19th-century cultural and intellectual history.”

But Shiner sees an advantage to this in his editorial role, asserting that it is therefore easier for him “to keep some distance” from the work submitted to him. He can be “more even-handed” in his evaluations and editorial advice, since he himself has “no stake in any school of psychohistory.” Rather, he is interested in maintaining “the intellectual and academic standards of The Review.” Of course, he adds, he leans strongly upon his Board of Editors and others “with special expertise” in making decisions about acceptability of both the solicited and unsolicited articles. He notes that The Review must reject about “75% of what comes in.” Often, rejected articles are good enough to be published, but are only tangentially-related to psychohistory.

Interestingly, Shiner and his colleagues have confronted the question of whether or not to change the name of the journal, which some have viewed as “a burden” especially in light of the assault upon psychohistory on the part of such eminencies as Jacques Barzun, David Stannard, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. It was felt that the “bad press” about psychohistory had made many young scholars, particularly in the academic community, “afraid to come out of the closet as ‘psychohistorians’.” But, Shiner notes cheerfully, psychohistory is still in fact a well-established and positive “identifier” the only interdisciplinary term that suggests a relationship between clinical psychology and history. “It implies a real attempt to integrate these disciplines,” he says, “to make use of clinical models, frameworks, and theories to enlarge our understanding of historical issues.”

Psychohistory may be “a red flag” to some, Shiner states, “but it is what we do, and what we have been doing now for almost twenty-five years.” Indeed, the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of The Psychohistory Review will be published as the Fall/Winter edition of the 1996-1997 year. Charles Strozier, Lawrence Friedman, Peter Loewenberg, Peter Gay, Robert Jay Lifton and various members of the Board of Editors have agreed to produce articles for the landmark issue.

“We hope to demonstrate the fact that psychohistory is alive and well in the 1990s,” Shiner says. As a field and a discipline, he adds, it has survived all the controversies and attacks. “Today, many of the ideas proffered by psychohistorians have made their way into the work of historians identified with other approaches and specialties.” He cites as an outstanding example Lynn Hunt’s Family Romance of the French Revolution which “makes a very direct use of psychoanalytic and other psychological theories in trying to understand the passionate nature of the anti-monarchical sect.” This and similar works, he says, clearly demonstrate the fact that people of respected standing in history are no longer afraid of psychohistory. “We are no longer ghettoized no longer an isolated community, talking to itself,” he asserts.

The sixty-one-year-old Shiner is a Mid-westerner who studied history as an undergraduate at Oberlin and received his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Strasbourg in France. He believes that his dissertation work gave him an early insight into the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that is essential to the doing of psychohistory. He was studying the work of Frederick Gogarten, a German theologian who, following World War II, had been a leading radical thinker in German theology, clearly under the influence of Martin Heidigger. When Shiner delved into Gogarten’s work of the 20s and 30s, however, he found that Gogarten had been associated with the German Christian movement, including “a brief flirtation with Nazism.” For Shiner, the crucial question was: “How someone so modernistic after the

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war could have been committed to politically-reactionary authoritarianism? Why would [such a man] have joined up with the Nazi fellow-traveling group?” Looking back at it now, Shiner reflects on the psychohistorical questions he might have pursued had he been acquainted with the discipline as a young scholar. After visiting with Gogarten (then almost 80) and his wife Gottingen, Shiner had been left with a profound methodological question: “How do you know, and how do you find out, what a person really thought?” But he believes now that he would have been led by that question not just to writing a psychobiography about Gogarten himself, but rather to study the psychodynamics of the entire class of German intellectuals, Heidigger included, who were so attracted to racist ideology.

Following his first teaching post (in the philosophy department of Cornell College in Iowa), Shiner did post-doctoral work in France, working on the unpublished manuscripts of Edmund Husserl. He looks back on this period (the 1960s) with some amusement. Instead of having a good time in the cafés of Paris, “I spent hour after hour toiling in the basements of the Sorbonne.” He also felt at times a little anachronistic. His phenomenological technique was already considered out-dated by followers of the new deconstructionist school. He friends told him “to get out of the basement and go listen to one of Derrida’s lectures.” Nevertheless, his work on Husserl led Shiner to develop his own thinking on “the secularization of history” the redefinition of historical time and space after the Middle Ages.

In 1971, Shiner joined the faculty of Sangamon State University (now absorbed into the University of Illinois system) in Springfield, Illinois, excited at the idea of creating an innovative curriculum based upon an inter-disciplinary approach “teaching so many new courses with new colleagues in so many fields.” Shiner was drawn to history and became a member of that program, as well as the philosophy program. It was then that he met Chuck Strozier who was producing The Psychohistory Review as a newsletter. Shiner was drawn into the journal through doing book reviews and some work on methodology. In 1988, when Strozier was preparing to leave Sangamon for his present position at John Jay College, in New York, he asked Shiner to become the new editor of The Review. Since Shiner considered himself more of an intellectual historian than a psychohistorian, it was with a good deal of anxiety that he agreed.

Shiner had just finished a book after six-years study on Alexis de Tocqueville’s memoir of the 1848 Revolution in France (The Secret Mirror: Literary Form and History: Tocqueville’s Recollections, [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988]). Shiner notes that Tocqueville’s parents were awaiting the guillotine when Robespierre and his regime fell. “Had not the Reaction occurred, there would never have been an Alexis.” Virtually a product of the conflict between egalitarianism and liberty in a revolutionary democracy, Tocqueville’s view of the events of 1848 were inevitably a function of his personal history. Even now, Shiner remains tempted to undertake a more psychohistorical approach to Tocqueville, but he recognizes that it would be a formidable task. “It’s very hard to find Tocqueville in his works,” Shiner says, “he was very reticent about his inner life.” He would have to get to Tocqueville’s letters not readily available to American scholars. “But I’d sure like to rescue him from his intellectual guardians,” Shiner adds.

Shiner’s current project builds upon the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller a Renaissance specialist now retired from Columbia. One of Kristeller’s most influential books is The Modern System of the Arts in which he argues that the notion of “the five fine arts” is a construct of the 18th century. Shiner has been laboring for seven years to flush out Kristeller’s thesis and bring it into the 19th century. He foresees two-years more work. While Shiner once again is personally pursuing intellectual history rather than psychohistory, he certainly seems to have acquired a broad view of the field of historical investigation and has sought to enlarge the boundaries of interdisciplinary study.

Indeed, this need seems to be fundamental to Shiner’s approach to The Psychohistory Review: “We have attempted to broaden the journal to include history of art

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and culture.” There is a danger in this, which he recognizes: “It’s important that they remain historical pieces; there are other publications that deal with psychology of the arts.” Nevertheless, he asserts also that while it “has to be in the ballpark, we want to enlarge the ballpark.” Many of the manuscripts The Review receives, he notes, are psychobiographical. In response, Shiner has “recruited articles” in other areas of psychohistorical work gender studies and the “new cultural history,” for example, or, as in the case of a recent issue, Peter Stearns’ [Carnegie Mellon University] concept of “the history of emotion.”

Shiner is in fact particularly interested in soliciting work from, and seeking to reach, people who have not heretofore thought of themselves as psychohistorians. “Maybe,” he muses, “the ultimate aim of psychohistory is to put itself out of business by becoming an essential part of the doing of history which has forced historians to change the way they focus upon certain historical problems and has introduced new methods and new perspectives into the work of historians in general. It should be a goal of psychohistorians to open a dialogue with the entire field of history and with other fields, too,” he says, “with art history, with literature, and philosophy. We can help reverse the trend of dividing-up history.”

In achieving The Review’s goal of bringing together clinical psychology and academic history, the challenge, Shiner notes, is to maintain “the high standards of historical research that are appropriate to the discipline and to make sure that the psychological insights draw upon clinical models that can be articulated.” It is hard to expect an historian who specializes in the 15th century to also have a doctorate-level understanding of psychology, he observes, “but certainly one needs a good working knowledge.” There are, of course, a handful of historians who are also credentialed as clinical psychologists. “The rest of us do the best we can to master both areas.”

In conclusion, Shiner stated that if The Psychohistory Review has a “particular niche,” it is to be the journal that meets the standards of the historical profession while dealing responsibly with the methodology of the clinical profession. “That in a nutshell,” he concludes, “is what The Review has always been about.”

The Psychohistory Review is published three times each year. The subscription rate is $22 annually. Send inquiries to the Editor, The Psychohistory Review, University of Illinois at Springfield, Springfield, IL 62794-9243.

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