Free Associations on Attending My First Psychohistory Conference (response article)

At the “Psychohistory at the Crossroads” International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) June 3, 2015 discussion of how we should conceive of psychohistory, or where it should go, I strangely found very little reference to the sociological trends of our time. In a climate in which established disciplines within the humanities are having their funding cut, or having their departments merged with others, the idea of lobbying for academic recognition of a new program seems unrealistic. Additionally, even if it were possible, it seems unethical to me to try to attract students to a discipline in which no future is offered to them. In the questioning period, this developed into a suggestion to create an essential reading list available for those who’d like to enter the field and have a competent grasp of the basics. It also further developed into the idea that training could be held before or after the conference, but many were skeptical about the interest of others to do this given the paucity of youth at the conference.

Attention was given to the fragmentary status of psychological and psychoanalytic knowledge. However, given this recognition, it would have been more accurate to not talk about psychohistory, but instead psychohistories. Respect for psychohistory will always be derivative of the respect afforded to psychology and psychoanalysis, and as long as they remain fragmented with no way to distinguish whose claims are true, then psychohistory will not be considered worthwhile. Professional recognition for psychohistory would be hard enough, but for psychohistories, it seems like asking for a bunch of insightful, but unconnected, aphorisms to be acceptable for a master’s thesis. There was little discussion of this plural-

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ism as a problem. With the references to Erikson and Freud at the conference, it seemed as if the move to tolerating pluralism was perhaps a recent advance there. Thus, the problem of pluralism may not be salient while it still has the luster of novelty in the community.

Does this mean that psychohistories should be encouraged, like art for art’s sake? Some of the panel seemed to advocate for this. The sentiment was that good psychohistory is just more interesting than other studies, and there are journals that will attract, and only select, the best writers, so any would-be psychohistorian could test his mettle or find the quality research she is looking for there. However, this sentiment co-exists with the fact that the IPA has insufficient new blood, and that young academics won’t write psychohistory if they never know of its existence. So, the conversation in the question and answer period developed into why psychohistorians haven’t linked themselves to other groups—psychosocial studies, cultural studies, psychoanalytic studies of culture and politics, etc.—when a merger might be mutually beneficial. The reigning sense, for an outsider, was that the “narcissism of minor differences” is as rampant here as anywhere else. Fear of references with which one isn’t fully familiar, of being swallowed and becoming the other organization, and simple pride that others should make the first move, probably lurks behind the scenes here. It may seem ironic, given that these kinds of group fears are a major part of the subject matter of psychohistory, that their organizations might be just as inhibited by them as any other group. However, it’s common to see people who give great advice to others in therapy groups, but who are never able to take it themselves.

There was no further discussion of practical steps to gaining new members, and I’d like to make a suggestion here. There’s another discipline that answers the “why” of history and is also out of favor in academia. This is Marxism. It doesn’t examine the unconscious or group fantasies, but instead examines very conscious motives of power at the level of class conflict. Marxism also looks to how technology and the inventions of humankind change how we interact, along with noting the very slow and bloody changes to class dynamics in history. In a time when there are many competing schools of psychoanalysis—let alone the wider disagreements within psychology as a whole—it seems to me that examinations of the conscious aspects of motivations to possess and retain power in history might allow for ways to make sense of the competing

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claims of the different factions. Take the institution of marriage, for example. It has existed from the era of the most primitive political economies, and we currently see it manifest as the ideal of commitment to someone with whom one has romantic love. However, for most of history, one wasn’t free to marry based upon romantic love. This leads to questions of whether romantic love is a recent cultural creation, or whether romantic love existed and was inhibited or suppressed by the institution of marriage for the bulk of history. Clearly, conscious intergroup aggression, along with consolidation of property within classes, will be part of the examination of history. However, studies of fantasies related to marriage, being against marriage, and representations of sexual relationships across cultures could help settle some debates.

If psychohistorians could become curious about their Marxian competitors and seek to make bridges with Marxian scholars, this should lead to some reciprocal interest. Since there are major differences between the approaches, hopefully the narcissism of minor differences wouldn’t apply. While the prevailing hope at the panel was that psychohistory would gain more respect, I think it has a better chance of growing by banding with other outsiders and creating more exotic and interesting works.

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