The Judicious Psychohistory of John Demos

Early American historian John P. Demos, this issue’s featured Distinguished Psychohistorian, was born in 1937 and received his PhD in 1968 from Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard, Brandeis University (Chairman, Department of History, 1982­84), and Yale University (since 1986), where he is currently Samuel Knight Professor of American History. He was a Fellow at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973­74, under Heinz Kohut, and served on the Carnegie Council on Children, 1972­77.

Dr. Demos’ books informed by psychohistory include A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (Oxford University Press, 1970), Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1982), and The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1994). He has twice been a National Book Award Finalist (in History for Entertaining Satan and in Non-Fiction for The Unredeemed Captive). He and his wife, Virginia, a psychologist and therapist, have two children. Dr. Demos (“JD”) spoke with us (“CP”) from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he is on fellowship. His cautious use of psychohistory came through in his well-considered responses.

CP: How do you define psychohistory?

JD: I’ve always seen it very broadly and loosely: any careful attempt to apply psychological concepts and methods to problems relating to the life of the past.

CP: Do you regard yourself as a psychohistorian?

JD: At an early stage of my own life as an historian — basically the beginning and mid­ sixties through the seventies — I thought of myself as a psychohistorian in a fairly specific way. I spent a good deal of time and effort trying to learn all I could about relevant branches of psychological theory. I spent several years in the sixties studying especially the work of Erikson. And before that, Sigmund Freud himself. I did course work with Erik Erikson — I thought of myself as being something of a disciple of Erikson’s. Then in the early to mid-seventies I spent two years as a special student at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and came under the influence of Heinz Kohut who was then leading the movement that became known as self-psychology. All the time I was learning these different theoretical systems or points of view I was trying to apply those points of view in my own work in a fairly direct way. After the seventies, certainly since the early to mid-eighties, I have ceased to try to learn more in the general direction of psychoanalytic psychology and to make direct applications of the theories in my work. However, I don’t mean in any sense to recant or abjure my previous efforts as a psychohistorian. It’s just that to some extent the center of my interests as a historian has shifted and I feel content to let the psychology and psychohistory I’ve learned and done in the past just percolate into my newer work.

CP: Were there specific reasons that you moved away from directly applying psychology to history?

JD: No, it was more like a drift, rather than a specific turning away. For reasons that have nothing directly to do with psychohistory I have become very centered in the last eight to ten years in my work on problems of historical writing — on the literary aspect of historical work. It just doesn’t seem that the language of psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychohistory is conducive to that.

CP: You’ve written that “public history” should be aimed at and “accessible” to the “educated general reader.” And you’ve referred

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to “history as art versus history as science.” Will you elaborate on the literary aspect of writing history?

JD: Well, I think there is something of a movement underway now — in which I hope to participate — to sort of reconnect historical scholarship with literature which after all was very much part of the past for historians. During a couple of decades of very fruitful advance in scholarship during the sixties and seventies historians resorted more and more to techniques and methods which required a sort of formalized — and from the standpoint of public and popular perception of their work a more arcane — kind of language. Psychohistory was part of that, as was demographic history, economic history, and even the new political history or political theory. Bridges were being built between historical scholarship as practiced day-by-day by working scholars and other social science disciplines. History was becoming more scientific. But that was all achieved at some loss of access in the more popular kind of readership. It raised questions about the way the words go down on the page. One aspect of the recent movement to reconnect history with literature is surely the hope that we can once again reach a broader audience.

CP: Of which of your works that are psychologically-informed are you most proud?

JD: The most sustained effort I made in psychohistory was my book on witchcraft [Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England]. Some chapters were really very heavily infused by psychological — more specifically psychoanalytic — concepts and methods and language. A year ago I had occasion to do a little teaching from the book and I cringed a bit at some of the language in the more fully­ developed psychological chapters. But perhaps I achieved a depth there that I could not have achieved without a quite straightforward, explicit use of psychological concepts and terminology.

CP: And your newest book, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America?

JD: The Unredeemed Captive fully expresses the wishes I said a few minutes ago to go in the direction of a more literary-minded kind of history.

CP: Is it psychologically-informed?

JD: It definitely is. It’s the story of a New England Puritan woman who was captured by Indians as a child and never came back, which is why from the standpoint of her New England family she was “unredeemed.” There’s a key episode in this story where she has a very specific and direct chance to come back to New England and she refuses. An emissary arrives in the Indian village where she’s living to make the case for her return. She entirely rebuffs him, mainly by way of remaining almost entirely silent in the face of two hours of entreaties from him. By this time I think she’s been fully assimilated to Indian life and ways, and that certainly is part of the explanation for her unwillingness to return. But I think there are other parts as well, having to do with complicated and deep feelings she had, especially about her own birth family and her father back in New England.

I thought long and hard about how to present that event in my book and I actually went through a process of trying to understand her position by way of psychoanalytic theory. I wrote a three or four-page analysis of her decision in the concepts and language of psychoanalytic theory. But I never intended to put that directly into the book. It was useful to me as a way of working out a framework, a way of thinking about her situation. I subsequently sat down and completely rewrote it in ordinary, everyday language with no overt trace of the kind of psychoanalytic thinking that I had brought to bear on the problem in the weeks before. So, the book is informed by my long years as a psychohistorian but does not express that experience in a direct way.

CP: How did you come to psychologically-informed history?

JD: I had some inkling from very early on in my graduate training that there was a whole range of historical problems which were psychological in nature and to which historians often brought a kind of common-sense psychology. But that seemed to be often unsatisfactory. Social scientists — anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists — had made a lot out of the family as a target of study, whereas historians to that point had barely noticed it. I felt that a more systematic engagement with an understanding of psychological ideas and theories might be helpful. Specifically, there was the almost serendipitous factor of my being assigned to

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write a paper about the history of witchcraft in early America. As I got into that project it seemed to cry out for a kind of psychological approach: why were these people feeling and doing as they were? The really deep and interesting questions were actually psychological ones. It also seemed to me that the numerous previous attempts to treat witchcraft had barely scratched the surface of the psychological dimension. So that made a powerful impression on me, as an opportunity for psychohistory. And, there are other factors, such as my having married in my mid-twenties a psychologist — my wife’s influence was very important over a great many years. So, there’s no one thing. It’s kind of a convergence of personal and intellectual experiences.

CP: What impact did Erik Erikson have on you? What is his legacy?

JD: Well, I’m surprised and dismayed by how much Erikson and his work seem to have receded from the consciousness of scholars as a whole. I find that when I mention his name to current groups of graduate students they barely know who he is. And in the work of scholars who are well-past graduate school but not past middle­ age, Erikson just doesn’t very much appear, at least not in any formal sense. Perhaps it’s because Erikson’s ideas, for example, the identity crisis, have permeated the culture at large so widely and deeply that we don’t identify Erikson’s own particular influence anymore. But I don’t think there is much attempt anymore to use his ideas in a specific and directed way which was certainly what I did in a section in my first book on the history of early New England family life [A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony]. I still feel that that was a useful exercise.

CP: What do you see as the importance of childhood to psychology-applied-to-history?

JD: In so far as formative patterns for human experience — adult experience — are laid down in childhood, there can’t be any doubt about its importance. The history of childhood is an important sub­field for psychohistorians, just as childhood experiences are important for clinicians. Actually, we’ve learned quite a lot about the history of childhood — if one could only remember how little we knew about it in 1960, one would feel fairly good about achievements we’ve made in that direction.

CP: You mentioned studying under Heinz Kohut in Chicago.

JD: Well, I was very struck by Kohut’s ideas. I felt a peculiarly close correspondence between his theory that has since been called self-psychology and my particular target of study which was early American Puritans. Puritans were people with really powerful issues around narcissism, the centerpiece of Kohut’s work. Perhaps the correspondence between Kohut’s theories and other historical issues, other historical periods, may not be nearly so great. But for me, working on the Puritans in the early seventies, Kohut was a revelation and really very important. In many ways my witchcraft book — at least the psychological part of it — is founded on Kohut’s work.

CP: What were the roles of Harvard, Brandeis, Yale and other institutions in early applying psychology to history?

JD: Well, I don’t think there was much academic institutional support in the early days. Any reaction from those institutions to my own growing interest in psychohistory was skeptical. But midway through my graduate years at Harvard I stepped off track from the history doctoral program and took a year in what was then called the Social Relations Department where I mainly studied psychology. That was thanks to a fellowship grant from the Social Science Research Council. The SSRC was one institution that was sympathetic to this sort of interdisciplinary enterprise.

The two years, 1973­1975, I spent in Chicago were very important and I feel extremely lucky to have had the support of the Institute for Psychoanalysis and an organization called the Center for Psychosocial Studies. The Center was truly a brave new effort to marry the interests of psychoanalysts on the one hand and academic social scientists, including historians, on the other. It was a free­standing research institution with support from the Institute, individuals at Chicago­ area universities — especially the University of Chicago, and also one or two very generous philanthropists in the Chicago area. I started out as a Research Fellow at the Center and then in my second year I became the Acting Director. It was a very lively place to work and provided institutional as well as intellectual support for what I was doing.

CP: What about individuals at the

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universities?

JD: My teachers at Harvard were not particularly favorable to my doing this and, in that, they mirrored the attitude of most established historians at the time.

Most of my colleagues at Brandeis were not primarily interested in psychohistory. The exception is my old friend and colleague, Rudolph Binion, whose interests from a subject standpoint were quite distant from my own. He is an enormously original and valuable Modern European historian whereas I’ve always been an American historian. But we did intersect a lot around broader questions of psychohistory. We didn’t always agree. My own instinct as a psychohistorian was essentially to try and follow the footsteps of one or another of the major theorists, for example, Erikson and Kohut. Rudy Binion’s instincts seemed to be to proceed in a much more eclectic and ad hoc fashion, borrowing bits and pieces of theory from here and there as he found them useful — even to some extent creating his own theory and positions.

After I moved to Yale in the mid-eighties I felt very fortunate to have Peter Gay as my colleague. Peter is now by any standard one of the leading practitioners and defenders of psychohistory through a whole variety of writings. To have been at all close to Peter these last nine to ten years has been a reminder of how much is still to be gained from the psychohistorical viewpoint.

CP: You earlier acknowledged your wife, Virginia, who is a therapist and a psychologist. How has being married to her affected your work?

JD: Well, there’re so many ways. First, and most specifically, as an adviser and critic on specific projects of mine. That was probably most important of all in the early years when I was working in a very directly psychological and psychoanalytic vein. More broadly, I think just the close, everyday contact with her own life and effective work as both a clinician and a developmental psychologist has meant a lot. Virginia has for quite a number of years now made the work of Silvan Tomkins central to her own research and clinical work. Tomkins is the leading theorist about emotion in recent years. His theory of the primary affects — primary emotions — has been important to me through Virginia’s work. It had a direct place in my witchcraft book and other things I’ve written as well. Although most of my interest and activity as a psychohistorian has been by way of psychoanalysis, Tomkins has been different — basically a non-psychoanalytic theory which I also found important. And I always assumed, by the way, that a psychohistorian could, and probably should, seek out other methods and approaches than the strictly psychoanalytic ones. For example, I am surprised at how little effort historians have made — even family historians like myself — to engage seriously with family systems theory which is one of the major new trends in psychological theorizing over the last 20 or 25 years. That’s a theory which should be applicable to a variety of material from history, especially family history.

CP: What has been your experience with teaching history-informed-by-psychology?

JD: That’s something I tried to do off and on for close to 25 years, mostly at the level of advanced undergraduate courses or graduate courses. Any cross-disciplinary course like that is hard to do within the framework of an academic term. It necessitates engagement with two separate disciplines plus finally an effort to bring them together somehow into a fruitful interaction. One issue that I feel up against every time is how to give the students in the course a sufficient kind of baptism, so to speak, in psychological theory, or psychological theories, so that they can start to be effective as psychohistorians. I take the first several week: of a course and give the students a quick immersion in psychological theory, mainly psychoanalytic theory. It’s difficult, it’s challenging. But I always enjoy it and feel it’s worth doing, I just always come out feeling sort of exhausted.

CP: What psychological training should a person entering the field today pursue?

JD: In my own experience, it was a combination of three things: I certainly did a lot of reading on my own before I ever took any course work. But then I did feel it would be valuable to take course work and I did that in my year in the Social Relations Department at Harvard and at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. The most important kind of training that I got as an aspiring psychohistorian was actually by way of participation in clinical conferences at the Institute. There really is no substitute for listening to experienced clinicians

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talk about clinical material. I do think that the fundamental analogy that we have to make as psychohistorians is from clinical psychology.

CP: What about personal analysis?

JD: Well, that was certainly an important part of my own life, too. I cannot say that I went into analysis mainly for intellectual reasons — I think I went into it mainly for personal reasons. But I really can’t imagine having attempted this sort of work without having some personal experience with it. I think it’s a combination of personal analysis and participation in clinical case conferences that’s made me feel confident about working this way.

CP: In Entertaining Satan you describe your multi-dimensional approach — “the four corners of one scholar’s compass, four viewpoints” biography, psychology, sociology, and history. How do you regard your multi­dimensional approach today? Is it the approach of choice for the historian researching and writing over, say, the next decade?

JD: Well, I think one could mix and match, work other disciplines into the mix. But, really, the main point that I was trying to make there is that I’ve always seen psychohistory as not a separate discipline or sub­discipline set apart, but rather as a piece of a much larger package I call “social history.” I’ve always thought that if I had to pin one label to myself I would say “social historian.” In my work as a psychohistorian I always saw myself as operating in a part of my way of operating as a social historian — but not the only part. I was always distressed with what I saw as a kind of counter­tendency in some other psychohistorians to sort of segregate the effort of psychohistory from other parts of history and to give it a special status. It seems to me it fits in quite well in fact with other parts of our activity as historians.

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