Neglected Works in Psychohistory

The opening line in Gore Vidal’s little memoir called Screening History goes something like this: “All I know about history I learned at the movies.” The line came back to me while looking through my collection of books and papers on psychohistory. I rediscovered some favorites that I’ve enjoyed and used in the past in relevant courses, but which concern the topic of movies, which doesn’t seem to get much attention lately in mainstream psychohistory (if there is such a thing).

The first item is Paul Monaco’s 1976 book, Cinema and Society. It was based on a dissertation he completed at Brandeis under Rudy Binion, who will come up again in this article. (I had forgotten that Monaco had published an article about his dissertation in the History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory in 1974.) Briefly, two things from Monaco’s book still impress me and perhaps deserve emphasis as “pathbreaking.” First, he carefully specifies the psychological and physiological similarities between dreaming and viewing a film ­ a point that carries obvious implications for the study of group fantasies. Second, all movies are the result of a complex, collective effort involving a mix of people representing technical, financial, and artistic skills. In other words, it is necessary for a variety of people to share and

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invest themselves in a group fantasy before they can produce one for public consumption. One need only read Peter Bogdanovich’s biography of Orson Welles to see how profoundly addictive the shared group experience of filmmaking can become.

Also on my shelf is Henry Lawton’s re­view essay, “Towards a Psychohistorical Theory of Film” in a 1992 issue of the Journal of Psychohistory. It is a more eclectic effort that suggests a tentative paradigm for psychohistorical analysis of movies. Based on his study of 17 diverse works about the art and meaning of film, it is densely packed with useful insights and interesting personal comments, not the least of which is his narrative of how important movies were to him as he was growing up. This was true for many of us, including me and, on the testimony in his book, also Gore Vidal. But just how all of us were influenced by our frequent movie going (and/or television viewing) remains an open and challenging question.

The vast literature on the Holocaust, psychohistorical and otherwise, was for many years a major focus of study for me and my recently de­ceased friend and colleague, George Kren. Among the many excellent works we learned from, two stand out as relatively neglected or unfairly criticized. The first of t h e was Tom Segev’s 1977 dissertation, The Commanders of the Nazi Concentration Camps, later published in 1987 as Soldiers of Evil. Based on interviews with these former SS officers, a remarkable achievement in itself, it showed very clearly that their behavior was not due to any certifiable form of psychopathology. Indeed, as we now have seen confirmed in more recent work by Christopher Browning (see Ordinary Men, 1992), Segev’s finding that normal, regular guys are capable of just about anything was correct, but at the time, few people wanted to hear it. (Just as few people today want to hear the same truth about terrorists and suicide bombers.)

It may not be accurate to call Rudy Binion’s 1975 psychobiography Hitler Among the Germans “neglected,” because its publication did receive a good deal of attention. Unfortunately, much of it was in our (George and my) view overly critical and somewhat dismissive. Yet it seems to me now that despite the subsequent and more detailed studies of Hitler that have appeared, there is little or no evidence to suggest that Binion’s discussions of Hitler’s relationship with his mother, the Jewish physician who treated her for cancer, and his gassing in WWI as critically significant for his later career were flawed. Nor is there anything to contradict Binion’s description of Hitler’s charisma “among the Germans”.

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