Fantasies Behind the “Realities” of History

Book Review of Peter Loewenberg, Fantasy and Reality in History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. vii and 235 pages, hardcover, $35.00.

If, in the history of the development of the psychohistorical method to this moment, it were deemed necessary to single out one individual whose work has been of predominant significance, in my opinion that person would be Peter Loewenberg. Certainly, there are a number of persons whose contributions to the development of the psychohistorical method have been of immense importance. Yet, in reflecting upon the definition(s) of psychohistory, and applications of such to the discipline of history per se, it is plain that Peter Loewenberg’s work has been of guiding significance to such an extent that even those who have taken issue with it, as this writer has on occasion, have had to engage this UCLA history professor and psychoanalyst on grounds the configurations of which have been determined by him.

Fantasy and Reality in History is a collection of essays most of which are appearing in print for the first time. Loewenberg starts out with historiographical considerations, concerned as he is with relating psychoanalytical concerns to broader ones of historical analysis. It is in the first essay, “Why Social Sciences Need Psychohistory,” that the author establishes a crucial relationship between problems of childhood eroticism and later political concerns:

If this [“debasement”] is so for erotic life, how much more is it so for political life? The avid quest for power and its accoutrements is compensatory for the traumas caused to the child by a familial political situation that relentlessly drives home his or her lack of power, impotence, and vulnerability due to smallness and weakness (p. 11).

Most of the essays which comprise Parts II, “Political Leadership and the Irrational,” and III, “Psychodynamics and The Social Process,” of the book are, to varying extents, informed by this salient observation.

Part I, “Psychoanalysis, Social Structure, and Culture,” is comprised of the historiographical essay mentioned earlier. Part II is concerned with Freud’s own psychosocial identity, and the accomplishments and underlying tensions engendered by the Swiss Burghölzli “scientific community.” In this context, by the way, the Freud-Jung relationship is described and analyzed in some detail.

As can be seen, Professor Loewenberg, in a

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kind of refurbished historicist fashion, proceeds from particular to general concerns and, in keeping with the tenets of this approach, is always concerned with determining the relationships between the two. Thus, we move from considerations of Freud himself; to what can be described as “psychobiographical” issues, with attention devoted to William Gladstone, Walter Rathenau, Karl Renner, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky; and then to yet more general concerns — “Anxiety in History,” “Racism in Comparative Historical Perspective,” “The Psychodynamics of Nationalism,” and “Crisis Management: From Therapy to Government and from the Oval Office to the Coach.” In the last essay, we have moved, somewhat, from regulative to constitutive hypothesizing, i.e., into that realm informed by those more predictive qualities associated with the “hard” sciences.

In my opinion, the most effective of the psychobiographical essays is the one concerned with Gladstone. Loewenberg successfully relates the statesman’s public positions on Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria to his own “instinctual drives and defenses, ones greatly colored by the bourgeois Victorian culture of the late nineteenth century” (p. 103). Plainly, Gladstone’s own concerns and fantasies, as captured by his personal diary and in his protesting-too-much efforts to “reform” prostitutes, were played out in his deprecations of the “cruel, raping, butchering Turks in whom he could see no positive functions for British diplomacy nor any good human qualities.”

In “Racism in Comparative Historical Perspective” Loewenberg does a masterful job of demonstrating the crucial role(s) of projection — in both Western and non-Western contexts. In “The Psychodynamics of Nationalism” he shows why any hypothesizing on the subject which does not link the psychodynamics of nationalism as grounded in familial concerns to broader issues must appear to be flat, one-dimensional, almost jejune [deficient]. This writer always has thought that the more structurally-organized approaches to nationalism presented by Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner were shallow and, ultimately, unsatisfactory. Now, he knows why.

The last essay, concerned with how issues and solutions raised in psychotherapeutic contexts could be applied in areas of international crisis management situations is perhaps somewhat utopian. Certainly, one cannot argue with Loewenberg’s assertion that “the impulse to resort to force as a first response instead of the last is a sign of inner weakness and low self-esteem, and it will not be effective in conferring security” (p. 223). Yet, in earlier essays he demonstrated that senses of “inner weakness and low self-esteem” were and are compelling forces in history, seeming to link what Robert G.L. Waite called “private neurosis to public policy.” The application of the compelling logic of Loewenberg’s impassioned statement would appear to be doomed almost from the start until human beings are able to engage in a form of psychodynamic transcendence which, up to this point, is unimaginable. Also, at times, the linkages between individual psychoanalytic concerns and more general ones, obvious to one who combines psychoanalysis and history, could have been rendered a bit clearer to those who will be introduced to psychohistory through this otherwise excellent work.

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