My Path to Using Psychohistory as an American Historian

On the basis of parochial advisors and my own interests, I did not take a psychology course in college or graduate school. I also did not take a course in economics, sociology, anthropology, law, or art history at either level. For a half century, however, I have raided the literature in these fields in order to advance my understanding of an historical problem at a given time. Although I’ve probably drawn more on psychology than other disciplines, I would no more consider myself a psychohistorian than I do an economic, sociological, cultural, or political historian. I am simply a historian who has written about various aspects of American politics, society, and culture from 1600 to 1865. American historians tend to be apprehensive about the use of any of the social sciences, especially psychology. One reviewer of my Stephen Douglas biography called me “an unabashed psychohistorian.” On the contrary, I know my academic audience; therefore, I draw on psychology cautiously, just as I do with scholarship in other disciplines.

Psychohistory as a term carries a pejorative connotation among most historians for two reasons. First, there is a noteworthy diffidence about the concept of a psyche and of psychology. For the past two decades, however, “emotions” have become an acceptable part of the lexicon and research agenda. That word does not appear to raise as many red flags as psychology does. In fact, one can read a monograph on emotional history without running across the word psychology or psyche. Second, which feeds into the first reason, is the extreme psychological determinism that characterized some of the more publicized works of the 1970s. For historians who rely on a solidity of evidence the willingness of self-identified psychohistorians to explain individual and even collective behavior on the basis of limited if not altogether shaky data about infancy and early childhood was quite problematic. Despite some excellent studies, the field and the term itself have never fully recovered among historians from early fringe works, particularly some that projected societal development from presumably common perinatal experiences. The historian Richard Lyman of Simmons and I, who together briefly edited a psychohistory newsletter, used to drive down from Boston with historian Patrick Dunn to

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attend an Institute for Psychohistory seminar until deMause introduced the idea of the poisonous placenta. That brought an end to our trips (see Paul H. Elovitz, The Making of Psychohistory [2018, 96]).

I came to psychology by way of birth order theory because it was relevant to a prosopographical study I made of nearly 400 men who were elected to the Virginia legislature in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. More than half were immigrants who were overwhelmingly younger sons from British families. My empirical data about these men was derived from probate and land records, birth and marriage registers, and genealogical compilations. The subtitle of my dissertation indicated the nature of my research: “the social, economic, and educational bases of political power.”

Later, when I thought about publishing the study, I became more curious about the immigrants’ familial and emotional settings. When sons received less at probate from their fathers, how did they feel about their parents and the world they left behind? What were their inclinations regarding customary ways they left behind in England and the disposition they brought to the New World? Only a handful of letters have survived from these immigrants. When I read them in the 1960s I interpreted them straightforwardly, which meant that I did not pay much heed to expressions of affect, only to economic and social information as well as to evidence of educational level. After I began to ask how immigrants felt toward their English families and culture, I became alert to what correspondence could reveal about emotions. For example, I analyzed letters that William Fitzhugh, who came around 1670, wrote to his mother, sister, and older brother. His greatest affection was for his brother, “reflected in his greetings, his expressions of warmth, and his repeated desires to see him. His contrasting coolness to his mother is evident in his homiletic responses to her hardships and impending death, his refusal to pick up on her criticisms of his brother, and his less than munificent offer of financial assistance, and the generally muted color of his language to her. When he called attention to his efforts to help her, he spoke not of filial affection, but only of obligation” (Martin H. Quitt, “Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 45:4, October 1988, 629-655, quote 632).

This analysis was not based on a particular work of psychology. Rather, it indicated my openness to finding an emotional layer

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of meaning in literary sources. My time spent in the 1970s with people brought together regularly by Lloyd deMause in Manhattan did much to sharpen my awareness of the psychological content of letters, diaries, and other personal writings. Of course, I studied a good deal of psychological theory, from Freud to Adler to Erikson. But it was Adlerian birth order theory that gave me a handle on approaching a large number of men for whom I had no direct literary sources as I did for Fitzhugh and all too few others. Younger sons are less apt to follow parental ways in contrast to more intensely (and anxiously) reared first born sons. Most birth order empirical studies were based on 20^th century college students brought up in a self-consciously egalitarian age. The findings seemed even more apt in the 17^th century when the favoritism toward first-born sons was a hallmark of landed families in England.

My approach to the use of psychology then and more recently has not changed. I follow the evidence, not theory. Theory and findings can alert one to issues otherwise missed. I seek sensitivity to what my sources might reveal, not a psychological theory of motivation. For example, during the current Presidential campaign season, an article in the Boston Globe points out the cognitive dangers of having someone “too old” in the White House. A particular risk memory scientists have found is “rosy retrospection” by which old people “falsely remember events from their past as more positive than they really were” (Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, “Too Old to be President? Science Says Yes,” The Boston Globe, March 8, 2019). This phrase, not the idea, is new to me but it will make me more alert to the role of age bias in autobiographies, diaries, and letters.

Some of the best uses of psychology have come from scholars who experienced psychoanalysis. I spent two stretches only in psychotherapy, for eight and six years respectively. The first period began in my 30’s after our first child was born when I hoped to become a good father; the second began when I was 65 and seeking to tame some intense emotional conflicts. Both tenures were with the same psychiatrist. Some issues remained very much the same. Psychotherapy was therapeutic but did not provide me a neat theory of what makes me tick. How could I then offer a neat theory about anyone in the past? At most, I am alert to psychological issues driving my historical subjects, but do not claim to offer a comprehensive explanation of their motivations.

My “thematic biography” of Stephen A. Douglas, Stephen

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A. Douglas and Antebellum Democracy (2012), was written during my second round of therapy. Douglas was an infant when his father died. He grew up in western Vermont in a farmhouse owned by his unmarried uncle with his mother and older sister. He was 17 when his mother left her long widowhood and married a man in upstate New York, taking her two children with her. Douglas left Vermont without regrets. His adolescence there had been difficult. He resented his uncle’s pressure to do farm work, which he loathed. He had an unrequited crush on a boy in his academy class. And he proved to be physically “too puny” to fulfill his early aspiration of becoming a cabinet-maker. He did not make peace with his native state until the presidential campaign of 1860 when he traveled there. In New York, he became an apprentice to a lawyer but realized requirements for the bar in the Empire state would have exceeded his family’s resources and his own patience. At age 20, he went west on his own. After 1,000 miles he settled in Illinois, where he enjoyed meteoric success virtually overnight. There he needed only to pass a test to become a lawyer. He opened his own office before his 21^st birthday.

Taken together this set of experiences was crucial, I argue, to Douglas’s career-long commitment to popular sovereignty and localism. He believed that America was a diverse country with enough room for local majorities to decide their own ways. Illinois gave him what he had not found in Vermont or New York—a sense of confidence in who he was. His articulated principle that there should not be a single national standard regarding slavery resonated with his deep affection for Illinois, his estranged feelings about his childhood and youth in Vermont, and his indifference toward his mother’s second home in upstate New York. As I responded to another historian who called me a psychohistorian after reading the book, if this be psychohistory, make the most of it.

I have always had trouble letting go. To phrase it more “rosily,” this disposition led me to take up psychology initially to deepen my understanding of the men I studied for my dissertation. Now I am digging deeper into the meaning of something I wrote about in the Douglas biography: his penchant for sitting on the laps of men in public settings. I am now in the fourth or fifth year of a multigenerational cultural study of bodily deportment that necessarily deals with the sensibility of each period. Again, I rely on no particular theory of psychology but on sensitivity to what some might call the zeitgeist of an age. I draw much on the new history

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of emotions. Again, if this be psychohistory, that’s all right with me.

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