What Psychohistory Means to Me

I was born in 1946, one year after the ex­tent of the Holocaust became fully known and nu­clear weapons were first used. I am Jewish, American, male, and white. I was an only child for my first 10 years, a good student, and curious about how the world worked. My favorite subjects, in school and out, were history, science, and math. I went to the Bronx High School of Science and graduated Brandeis University as a physics major. Sometime during my undergraduate years at Brandeis, partly in response to my father’s severe depressive episode during my freshman year, my curiosity about understanding how things work shifted to understanding why people act as they do.

I had some wonderful teachers at Brandeis. I most remember Richard Jones, a student of Erik Erikson, whose major area of interest was dreams. He introduced me to Freud and psychoanalysis. Herbert Marcuse was on the faculty at Brandeis, although he left before I could take a course with him. His book Eros and Civilization along with Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death were important in inspiring my passion for psychoanalytic thought. My interest in psychoanalysis was not primarily clinical, but more as a way of under­standing contemporary political realities and historical trends and events ­ in other words, psycho­history. This was in the mid­1960s at the start of the anti­war movement and the emergence of the radical politics of the New Left. I felt that psycho­analytic concepts were the most powerful, sophisticated, and satisfying tools for understanding entities larger than the individual ­ groups, governments, nations, and institutions ­ in order to better understand what was going on in the world. This is when I started seriously reading Freud for the first time, particularly his books dealing with history and `civilization’: Totem and Taboo, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Future of an Illusion, and the motherlode, Civilization and Its Discontents. In clinical psychology in graduate school at the University of Chicago and later at York University

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in Toronto, where I transferred after Nixon ended graduate school draft deferments in 1968, I was a student of David Bakan, author of Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958).

I have always strongly identified with Freud’s claim that he was more interested in under­standing than in therapeutic change. In particular, I have always wanted to be able to understand what motivates people to do things like drop atomic bombs on cities full of people and to commit the atrocities of the Holocaust. I have also been drawn to those thinkers who have emphasized the importance of the outer world, the stage of history, politics, and current events, in determining who we are and what we do. This steam of what is usually called “applied” psychoanalysis has its roots in pre-World War I Freud, with his papers on da Vinci and Michelangelo, and was expanded later in the books I mentioned earlier. The tradition was continued by Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, Geza Roheim, Wilhelm Reich, Erikson, and Fromm, to name just a few of the many analysts who have dabbled or devoted themselves to “applied “ psychoanalysis. To me, all of this work falls within the realm of psychohistory, although none of the authors above, with the exception of Erikson, used the term psychohistory or considered themselves to be psychohistorians.

If we consider psychohistory the enterprise of seeking to understand any and all aspects of historical or contemporary realities with the help of psychoanalytic or psychological modes of thought, then the domain of psychohistory is vast. Anything from biography to literary, film, or art criticism, to history of ideas, to analysis of current or past political and cultural events that uses any psychoanalytic or psychological concept properly falls within the realm of psychohistory.

The potential topics or areas open to psychohistorical exploration have expanded greatly in recent years as the number of psychological and psychoanalytic schools of thought has proliferated since Freud’s death in 1939. To name just some of the more influential newer perspectives in psychoanalysis, there are object relations, interpersonal, self-psychological, and attachment theories; Lacan; relational psychoanalysis; and trauma theory. In addition there has been an explosion of develop­mental observation and theory, particularly with regard to early development, that has occurred within psychoanalysis over the last 50 years, which has also opened new territory for psychohistorical investigation.

Given this broad expanse, choosing a small number of books that could be considered classics is a daunting task. So I’ll limit myself to mentioning three of my favorite authors who are perhaps not as well-known as some other psychohistorians. The first is Richard Koenigsberg who wrote two short but insightful books: Hitler’s Ideology (1975) and The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution, & Nationalism (1977). The second is the classical scholar Eli Sagan whose books, particularly his Cannibalism (1974), At the Dawn of Tyranny (1985), Freud, Women, & Morality (1988), and The Honey and the Hemlock (1991) are all gems: thoroughly researched and well documented studies written from a sophisticated psychoanalytic perspective. Finally, Dan Dervin’s Enactments (1996) is an excellent and erudite systematic analysis of the field of psychohistory.

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