George Kren: A View from Kansas

George Kren, this issue’s featured, distinguished psychohistorian, lives and works in that other Manhattan — Manhattan, Kansas — where he is Professor of History at Kansas State University. He treasures the academic freedom and social community around the University as well as the psychoanalytic expertise of the Menninger Foundation in nearby Topeka. George is unique among psychohistorians in having a long-time collaborator, Leon Rappoport, a Kansas State University social psychologist. Their two psychohistory volumes are Varieties of Psychohistory (as editors) and The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior. Among George’s other works, including seven chapters in books and thirty-eight journal articles, are a book, Scholars and Personal Computers, and four articles on microcomputers in the social sciences and humanities. He is also quite an accomplished photographer. George expressed his straightforward views on psychohistory, psychoanalysis, and what our culture defines as “normal” from his home in Manhattan.

CP: How do you define “psychohistory”?

GK: Psychohistory brings psychological studies to history. It’s a recognition that major motives and therefore major actions are determined by the subconscious and are not immediately accessible to direct observation. I do not think psychohistory is or ought to be a separate discipline. Rather, it has the potential of significantly increasing our range of understanding history generally.

CP: Of which of your psychohistory works are you most proud?

GK: The major one is The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior, which is now out by Holmes and Meier in a revised paperback edition with a couple new chapters. It is a joint work, done with Leon Rappoport, who is a social psychologist. It uses psychohistorical concepts as a means of comprehending the Holocaust. We had started out with the question of how people can do these things. We ended up recognizing that the individual perpetrators tend to be by any standard definition quite normal. So then we moved to how groups behave and were led to a recognition of the centrality of Hitler, and an examination of the Hitler psychobiographies.

We came to the fairly unpalatable conclusion that the people who do the most horrible things are eminently “normal” — that almost anybody can, with a fairly minimal amount of external conditioning, be made to participate in the most horrendous acts. We were at first strongly influenced by writers such as Theodor Adorno and Henry Dicks who had emphasized the authoritarian family, the prevalence of corporal punishment, or a domineering father as explanatory principles of why individuals commit atrocities. Since then the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo has shown how easy it is for “normal” people to engage in destructive behavior. We need to recognize that normalcy is a cultural construct, not an objective statement of fact, in the sense that cancer is an objective statement of illness. The problem is that our culture regards any number of acts of violence (see any film on Vietnam which includes scenes of the interrogation of prisoners, or depicts “search and destroy” missions) as normal and legitimate.

CP: What are you working on now?

GK: I’m writing a general book on the Holocaust for students. It will be published in about a year-and-a-half by Harlan Davidson. At this time I’ve finished the first draft and now I’m taking account of all sorts of new literature that has come out, and also making sure that it doesn’t sound as if it were translated from the

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German as all my first drafts do.

CP: About your youth — you were born in Austria in 1926. Will you share the story of your coming to America?

GK: My experiences were fairly typical for European Jews of my generation, however, in terms of their effects on me, significant! They include being the object of very explicit anti-Semitism, getting beaten up in school, experiencing the Anschluss (the absorption by Germany of Austria) in March of 1938, attending a Jewish boarding school near Berlin where during Kristallnacht Storm Troopers came in and busted up the school. I recall going to live with an aunt and uncle in Berlin after the school closed. That night my uncle was arrested and sent to Oranienburg. In April of 1939 my sister and I were sent to England, where I lived in a youth hostel until the outbreak of war in September, 1939. I was then evacuated to an English working class family in Sussex. I came to the United States in 1941. My parents had arrived some months earlier.

CP: How did you end up in Kansas, at Kansas State University?

GK: After a few beginning college teaching positions in Ohio and Illinois, the idea of teaching at an university appealed to me. There was a job opening at Kansas State and I applied without really knowing where Kansas was. And I said, “Oh, for a few years, this wouldn’t be bad.” And I ended up staying in Kansas. Though the quality of students was not what it was at Oberlin (my first job), teaching here has been enjoyable and rewarding. I’ve had a chance to teach and explore what I’ve wanted. Nobody has complained about my doing psychohistory and said that it’s not blue chip. I could teach anything I wanted to as long as I could get students. I could teach courses in psychohistory and the history of childhood, sometimes cooperatively with Leon Rappoport.

CP: How did you come to psychohistory?

GK: Well, my own major work was in intellectual history. In that context the role of Freud in European thought was important to me. I looked at Freud from the point of view of cultural history. But I really got into psychohistory by working on the Holocaust.

CP: Who was important to your development?

GK: I got my PhD in history in Madison at the University of Wisconsin with George Mosse who is one of the preeminent scholars in the United States. Mosse, my Doktorvater [doctor/father role model], was decisive in my development. Not that we always agreed! He would certainly speak of Freud’s influence in intellectual history but emphasize cultural rather than psychological factors. Thus, he would explain Hitler primarily in terms of the long tradition of German anti-Semitism and the long tradition of German racism without even mentioning Hitler’s childhood.

One of the influences I picked up purely by accident while I was in college was a brilliant little magazine called Politics, edited by Dwight Macdonald. There I first learned of Wilhelm Reich whom I found interesting, not because I found his hobbies that congenial, but because of his notion that the psychological dimension can play a major role in history.

CP: What impact did Erik Erikson have on you?

GK: More the specific Luther biography than the theoretical work, though I’ve used his childhood material in the history of childhood course. Erikson’s Young Man Luther shows that his theology is not something purely abstract but really responds to specific human needs. Luther could not deal with the authoritarianism and the judgmental nature of his father. Hence, his re-creation of God as the kindly, forgiving father who was different from his own. And the example I use to illustrate psychohistory to my students when we talk about Erikson, is that in Roman Catholic theology the Virgin Mary figures as a major intercessor between a sinner and a judgmental God. If you look at a typical German family, that is not an unknown role for the mother, who frequently mediates between the son and the father. The father wants to punish the son but the mother will say, “Oh, he didn’t really mean it, forgive him this time.” But Luther’s mother by all accounts was quite the opposite. When Luther’s father hit him, she’d say give him a few more for her. And Luther got

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his revenge, didn’t he? Look at the role of the Virgin in Protestant theology! In other words, the concept of the Virgin Mary as the intercessor is grounded — is not simply invented — in a typical family situation. Similarly, Protestant theology can be connected to Luther’s own experience. These kinds of things in theology I’ve found very useful in saying, “Here’s what you can do with psychohistory. You can get away from simple issues or reductionism and determinism. Here are other ways of looking at the situation.”

CP: What is the importance of childhood to psychohistory?

GK: For about half-a-dozen years Leon Rappoport and I taught a course on the history of childhood which was fun to teach but which was not altogether popular with mothers who found the emphasis on the history of corporal punishment and the notion that it is not an ideal way of raising a child very offensive, since most believed in it. There was a general sense that all this concern over corporal punishment is complete nonsense — it’s basically good for children. I did a smaller class in the seventies, in which I had students write their childhood biographies. You could make a case, on the basis of their descriptions, that some of the things that had been done to them could be properly labelled abuse. But none of them resented it. They said this is how we’re going to bring up our children. The one book that influenced me on childhood is Joseph Rheingold, The Fear of Being a Woman. It’s an analysis which argues that women at times have a real hatred for their children, and that this accounts for child abuse. It’s worthwhile noting that childhood is not the ideal experience, and that everything ranging from punishment to abuse is not accidental but is grounded in some psychological need.

CP: Was there any special training that was most helpful to your becoming a psychohistorian?

GK: No, I wish I had had some more. I’ve not had an analysis and now strongly regret this. I wish I had had more of a chance really to work in a clinical setting. I’ve learned primarily by my own readings and talking with people.

A major thing was the monthly seminar group at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, about 50 miles from here. The Mid-America Psychosocial Study Group lasted for about 20 years. Very simply, about 10 or 15 or 20 people got together to discuss papers. That was significant in that it brought me in touch with some psychoanalytically-oriented people. Paul Pruyser was a key figure in this program and I learned a great deal from him.

CP: Please tell us about your experience teaching psychohistory.

GK: For a while in the seventies, when psychohistory was popular [at Kansas State], Leon Rappoport and I taught it, which allowed us to introduce students to the literature. I think people who had taken our courses have begun to see the world a little differently. Then interest dropped and we couldn’t get students.

We tried to start a psychohistory program at Kansas State with the Menninger Foundation, a great source of psychoanalytic expertise. (It’s still one of the major centers in the country.) Graduate students would do history courses and write a dissertation in psychohistory at Kansas State and also take courses and do some clinical work at the Menninger Foundation. We got some funding which allowed me to bring everybody who was anybody in psychohistory in for a lecture; it was a wonderful year! We had Lloyd deMause, John Demos, Peter Loewenberg, Rudy Binion, and Bruce Mazlish. The program didn’t make it because of one problem we could not solve. We could not get money to support the graduate students. Neither one of us now teaches a psychohistory course, but I devote a substantial amount of time to it when I teach historiography to graduate students.

CP: Why do you feel interest in psychohistory dropped?

GK: A number of reasons. One, Freud and psychoanalysis are very much part of the liberal ethos, the notion that one’s own personal problems can be solved by rationally analyzing them. Freud attempted to rationally comprehend the irrational. A great humanistic faith in the individual coupled with a very explicit anti-religious ideology is, I think, central. The New Conservatives sneeringly call it “secular

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humanism.” And, the political and cultural shift to the right has succeeded in undermining secular liberal values of which Freudianism is a part.

The second reason is the general decline of psychoanalysis as we move towards an increasing pharmacological way of dealing with therapeutic issues. Third, the general failure of people in psychohistory (with a few exceptions) to establish themselves successfully in academic life. They never got a real foothold. In the seventies any number of colleges and universities were offering courses in psychohistory — now very few do [to the best of my knowledge].

And, the other thing, of course, is that the at-times acerbic differences within psychohistory have not helped. It sort of reminds me of the 16th-century Anabaptist sects! In Kansas, whenever you disagree with somebody, people find it almost ill-mannered or offensive. But, certainly, having divergent views and debating them and seeing alternative interpretation is all for the good. I’ve just never been pleased with the lack of civility that has appeared at times.

CP: So, what is psychohistory’s future from here?

GK: I don’t see it doing very much as a separate field. But I don’t see this as negative. Its main thing is to leaven regular history. These days when you’re writing about anything which includes behavior, as history obviously does, I don’t think that you can write it, even if you’re not a psychohistorian, without some attention to psychology. Having said that Napoleon wanted to conquer Russia because he was ambitious doesn’t explain anything!

Now, there’s the risk that anything can be misused — and I guess psychohistory has a greater risk of being misused because of the lack of the kinds of checks and balances you have for more conventional history where people can recheck your sources. But I think it has left a permanent imprint. Historians are going to write differently about women then they did 15, 20, years ago. It won’t be, “the Americans went west, taking with them their goods, cattle and women.” Nobody’s going to say that anymore! And if someone states that he has a recurrent nightmare that he is at the front shooting a machine gun and that the bullets instead of shooting out just leave the barrel and fall to the ground, no one is going to reach for a manual on ballistics to see if that could possibly be true.

CP: Several times you’ve mentioned Leon Rappoport with whom you’ve been collaborating since 1967. You were a historian before a psychohistorian, he’s a social psychologist. Others say that integration or synthesis or convergence of history and psychology best occurs within one and the same individual. How do you view individuals from the different fields collaborating?

GK: It was not, is not, that I do the history and he does the psychology. I’ve done enough psychology so that I could do it on my own and he’s done some history. It was much more that we could both speak the same language and had worked out a structure where we could mutually explore new ideas, criticize each other and say, “Look, let’s try this more radical way.” And it gets us somewhere at times! For example, one of the statements we tried out in the Holocaust book, “Let’s suppose that the Holocaust and anti-Semitism are not connected.” On the face of it, a totally foolish thing — they obviously are connected. But it led us to explore the eugenic elements of the Holocaust — that people had a very positive view of race and sought to create a racial utopia.

CP: What do you feel psychohistorians need to do to strengthen our work?

GK: Psychohistorians need to write so that those with no training in psychohistory or those who do not accept psychoanalytic theory find the argument itself, in its specifics, convincing. That is not easy. I think Erikson did it to a significant extent. And secondly, there must be — the key thing in history — a real respect for the evidence. There’s a book, a psychobiography of Hitler by Norbert Bromberg and Vera Volz called Hitler’s Psychopathology, which comes close to being one of the worst psychohistory books I’ve ever read! For example, the book says that when Hitler was in the army during World War I he was court-martialled for engaging in homosexual activity with an officer. There’s not one iota basis of fact on that! Everything has to meet the conventional

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test of historical evidence and has to be convincing in its own right without reference to theory. You can not be deductive in psychohistory. You use whatever theoretical competencies you have as a way of organizing your material, as a way of developing an argument, but when you finally present it you leave the theory out.

CP: How can psychohistorians have more impact in academia?

GK: Just by publication of good psychohistory books. The psychoanalytic profession has lost interest in cultural and intellectual issues. The whole medicalization of psychoanalysis has created a gulf so that what’s happening in psychoanalysis only tangentially touches non-medical people. And, I think the general right-wing climate would suggest that psychoanalysis which had been the soil which had nourished psychohistory is on its way out. Because of the increasing cost of medical care it’s going to be a luxury that fewer and fewer people can afford.

CP: Should we still try to recruit new people?

GK: I don’t think we’re really going to recruit people. I think people recruit themselves to psychohistory, in terms of their own experience in one way or another. They see it, and simply as long as someone is there with books they can read or people they can talk to — can correspond with — that’s about as much as you can do, making collegiality available to them. I do not see programs like we tried with Menninger ever getting off the ground.

CP: And, in conclusion?

GK: The Holocaust has been central for me, led me to psychohistory and philosophy, trying to comprehend the nature of the human being — overall, a depressing journey. The general literature regards the people who ran the Nazi camps as abnormal, but the Americans who went and tortured people in Vietnam are defined as normal. I know of only one article that has ever raised the question whether torture in the service of a counterinsurgency has any psychological dimensions. In Varieties of Psychohistory, the anthology Leon and I did in 1976, we included an article by a psychiatrist who talks about a medic who ends up shooting an elderly Vietnamese farmer. If you look at the whole treatment of Lt. Calley and My Lai, nobody ever thought that any psychological dimensions were involved. The culture regards it as normal. Nobody has ever looked at an executioner as involving anything psychological. I’m curious about these people who inject others with lethal solutions. One of the things they do before the injection is clean the skin with alcohol, I suppose as a way of creating the illusion that they are being professional! We have separated private and public conduct and act as if acts done for the state, frequently involving doing harm to others, have no psychological significance, do not provide some kind of sadistic satisfaction. Perhaps the time has come that we define doing harm to others, whether done as a free enterprise activity or done as part of an officially-sanctioned activity, as not legitimate. Auden summarized this very succinctly in a poem written at the outbreak of World War II:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

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