A Psychohistorical Critique in Honor of Friedhelm Nyssen

Review of Friedhelm Nyssen and Peter Jüngst, eds., Kritik der Psychhistorie: Anspruch und Grenzen eines psychologischen Paradigms (A Critique of Psychohistory: Appeals and Limits of a Psychological Paradigm), (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2003) ISBN 3-89806-222-8, pp. 363, 29,90 Euros.

Friedhelm Nyssen died late last year after an

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extended illness. Everyone who knew Friedhelm and read him will miss his superb scholarship and profound insights. This review honors this excellent scholar and human being.

The edition that Nyssen and his colleague and friend Jüngst created last year is an important appreciation and extensive critique of psychoanalysis and history. As such, it focuses on the theories and expositions of a number of authors, their value and their limits.

The Kritik is divided into four parts: An opening overview by Nyssen of the contributions to the book, entitled “A comparison of the ‘independent psychohistory’ and the contributions…;” Nyssen’s theoretical overview of an “independent psychohistory;” four chapters on historical themes by Peter Jüngst, Hartwig Weber, Evelyn Heinemann, and Edmund Hermsen; and four chapters on contemporary themes by Wolfgang Prieß, H. Kallert, Evelyn Heinemann, and Marion Bornhoff-Nyssen. Without diminishing the importance of the other contributions, I will concentrate on Nyssen, Weber and Heinemann. For a review of an earlier and more extensive version of Jüngst’s contribution, see Clio’s Psyche (Vol. 10, No. 4 [March, 2004], pp. 158-159).

Nyssen’s main argument in the introduction emerges clearly in the following sentence: “What is so much in need of criticism in deMause’s variety of psychohistory is its lack of complexity. This deficiency is actually a greenhouse spawned desire to elevate one factor as determinant in every conceivable problematic situation” (p. 26). “As usual with deMause,” reports Nyssen, “once he has established a central concept, then he applies it without hesitation to all periods of history and phenomena” (p. 35). (All translations are mine.) Nyssen goes on to illustrate with specific examples. As he understands deMause, he sees the reason for high child mortality in the past and in poor countries today connected to one factor, namely parental child-abuse and child-neglect. “‘Untoward circumstances,’ like poverty, illness, and neglect do not enter the argument” (p. 26). That is why there is only, according to Nyssen, “one solution to all political problems, education of parents in ‘Parenting Centers.’” DeMause ignores an approach that would include, aside from parental childrearing, such givens as improvements in diet, housing, working conditions, health care, etc. Another aspect of this reliance on one seemingly valid interpretation is that all political activities in the past and present are determined by group fantasies that grow out of childhood experiences. Nyssen similarly interprets deMause’s response to 9/11. DeMause saw the cause of it in the less than fortunate upbringing of terrorists in a psycho-genetically less advanced areas of the world. Implicit is that we in the West, especially the U.S., are far ahead of this part of the world in our childrearing and that we would not perpetrate such acts. Never mind, Nyssen counters, that our form of capitalism and militarism is creating a worldwide dilemma for poorer countries and their inhabitants.

In Nyssen’s contribution to the volume, he takes on deMause’s “‘independent psychohistory’”—[as] a permanent abstraction” (pp. 79-134). Nyssen’s principal critique is again that deMause places the relationship of parents and children at the center of all historical evolution. After explaining the psychogenetic history of childhood, Nyssen maintains that the improvements in the relationship between parents and children cannot have taken place in a static environment. As deMause has seen in my critiques as well, one must include political, economic, social, medical and other realities in considerations of historical evolution (p. 87); that is, the horror of childhood in the ancient world or the change toward intrusion in the sixteenth century cannot only be explained through relationships of parents to their children. As Nyssen points out, the Black Plague of the 1330s did not emerge in connection with poor childrearing. Similarly, in my opinion, one cannot ignore the image of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus on childrearing, nor the experiences of children and adults with art, music and literature.

As we know, deMause sees a gradual improvement in the way parents treated their children and explains this improvement as functions of certain psychoclasses; that is, groups of parents who relived the traumas and difficulties of their own childhoods and consequently set out to improve the relationship with their children. Importantly, this improvement moves history. Or, as Nyssen formulates the theory, it moves from history of childhood to history of psyche and from there to history in general. Because the history of childhood is filled with misery, one must not automatically assume that the history of societies, politics and culture are only influenced, if not determined, by the trauma of childhood and youth (p. 94). Nyssen sees the problem in the assumption that more traditional societies have arrived at earlier forms of childrearing and will thus be constituted by a pool of unhappier peo-

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ple than the societies that have arrived at later stages (p. 99). If one were to follow this argument, then we would have to maintain that the well-adjusted U.S. vanguard, that is the one that has reached deMause’s Helping Mode would have prodded the rest of our society into a happier and more humane society than the one we are obviously now designing.

Although he does not mention deMause, Hartwig Weber’s “Child Sacrifices in the Old Testament and in Christianity” (pp. 185-210) could have prompted a powerful debate about deMause’s ideas regarding infanticide and its influences on society. Weber’s thesis is that “The existence of myths about the sacrifice of children documents that people were reluctant to undertake what they perceived inevitable—to put out their children and to kill them. When they had overcome their resistance [to the act], feelings of guilt remained. This is the basis of myths about child sacrifice” (p. 210). While Weber discounts specific tales, say of first-born sons being sacrificed because they cannot be proven—and would have been suicidal for societies—he does not doubt infanticide as a phenomenon. But he asserts that the myths served the purpose of excusing a murder by maintaining that a god/goddess ordered it.

A further effort to understand the relationships between history and psychoanalysis is Evelyn Heinemann’s “Projection and Reality? The Contribution of Psychohistory and Ethno-psychoanalysis to the Understanding of Cultural Phenomena” (pp. 211-62). Freud, Lyndal Roper, deMause, and Peter Gay are among the authors she discusses in some detail. The development of the superego plays a major role in the elaborations. With Freud, she took up Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheistic Religion, coming to the conclusion (p. 221) that Freud’s “first work, Totem and Taboo, was still characterized by an empathic and empathetic attempt to study the strange (Fremde) and to interact with and understand that existing reality with the help of psychoanalytic insight. By contrast, the later works reflect an increasing neglect of reality in that they contrast unproductively analogies and developments of progress.” She moved on to revisions and analysis of Freud, concentrating mostly on totem religions and witchcraft, both of which she sees Freud as misunderstanding. But rather than critique him from the contemporary context, one ought to understand him in this context, that is, that of the end of the 19^th and the first half of the twentieth century. While he may have been aware of the insights of contemporary anthropologists, he based his findings on them and his own insights, neither of which were modified by our late twentieth century anthropological understanding.

Heinemann is particularly critical of Lyndal Roper. “Sadly,” she writes of Oedipus and the Devil (1995), Roper misunderstood the relationship between the victim and the torturer in the witch processes. Heinemann thinks she “is so stuck on Freud’s theories that her work will of necessity increase the resentment among historians” (p. 230). Evelyn Heinemann continues with psychohistory and deMause and praises him for the use of sources to solidify his theories in that “he tries to integrate the actual cultural development into his theory. But historical phenomena are more or less brought in as verification, or falsification, of his psychogenetic theory” (p. 240). By contrast, she finds Gay’s approach in Freud for Historians (1994) more useful because he sees psychoanalysis as a tool to reconstruct developments that would otherwise elude us (p. 241). She agrees with him that it is less important to simply apply psychoanalytic insights to the study of historical phenomena than to study and apply both carefully. In her concluding discussion of “Holiness, Possession (Besessenheit), and Hysteria” (pp. 248-60), Heinemann argues once more through the careful study of the holy, possessed and hysterical women in the Middle Ages, that grand psychological and psychohistorical theories do not serve us well in the understanding of historical phenomena.

Any review of these contributions, especially Nyssen’s approach to deMause’s concepts of group fantasies, ought to be moderated by these final considerations. No doubt, group fantasies exist, but like Nyssen, I doubt that one ought to link them exclusively to childhood experiences; in addition, I doubt that one ought to stick to the political realm. Jüngst shows with his studies of the San of the Kalahari and other tribes that groups/societies adjust themselves to their surroundings based on many different givens, like mountains, deserts, cold, large tracts of land, shortages of arable land, etc. and use childrearing as one of the ways to do so.

I will conclude my review by applying the ideas of Nyssen and Jüngst to two areas of group fantasy. Many members of American society jumped with abandon into the war with Iraq; by contrast, most Germans, Frenchmen, Russians and many other Europeans, in spite of the stance of their

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governments, did not. I doubt seriously that this difference has as much to do with childrearing as it did and does with WWII; that is, it is less associated with childrearing than later life experiences. For almost all European age groups, “the war” to this day is WWII; and for good reason. The comparisons alone are amazing: America lost about 300,000 people; Germany lost more than 4 million, and Russia more than 25 million (Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at War: A Global History of World War II [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], pp. 894). Of the most striking subtotals, Germany lost 600,000 civilians and more than 14 million homes; at least two thirds of the Russian losses were civilians, and Russia lost most of the housing in its Western regions. Very few Americans who are alive today recall WWII—or even Vietnam it seems. By contrast, every European, except the very youngest, recalls some aspect of “the war,” even if only in a story of calamities to a family member. That is, almost every single survivor and most families have been traumatized in some fashion. The opening of war for Americans in 2003 was like an adventure; the idea of war for most Europeans remains a genuine threat. Our American group fantasy was and is based on peace and success in war; theirs was and is based on unspeakable disaster and total mayhem, even in victory.

The second example deals with urban and other development. American urban planners have little influence as to where the next development will be placed in or near a city; developers usually make the decision for placement. German urban planners generally determine ahead of time where developments will be placed and then developers proceed to build in that area. To say that such cultural preferences are determined by good or bad childrearing should stretch the loyalty of almost any deMausean. What is true is that these two societies have different values on this issue, and many others, and that they bring these values to their children, and adults. All the same, they have fantasies that have grown out of experiences other than with parents.

What is important in this short reflection is that men, women and children in both societies carry on conversations about what should or should not be done; in other words, they have developed, through conversation, media, advertising, etc, images in their heads about how certain situations should be handled. They confirm these decisions by acting on them. At least in the above cases, and I suspect in many others, fantasies about what should and should not be done in certain situations have less to do with childrearing and more with later life insights that stem from direct experiences and insights; surely these insights are transmitted to children.

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