My Conversations with Paul Elovitz, the Phenomenon

To better understand Paul-the-phenomenon, I will share some excerpts from one of my (Inna Rozentsvit, IR) conversations with him (Paul H. Elovitz, PHE). Below is the most recent one (end of June 2024), which illuminates who Paul is, what’s important to him, and why he is doing what he is doing.

IR: What do you want to be remembered for in 100 years? I remember reading an interview with my hero, Oliver Sacks, in which he was asked this question. He wanted to be remembered that he bore witness. Sacks was what I call an active witness to his patients’ lives, and his passion was to relieve suffering and make others understand these people without judgment.

PHE: I most want to be remembered for bringing people together through applied psychoanalysis, that is, psychohistory, to further it, deepen it, probe different aspects of it, and apply it to all parts of life. As for my patients, those 30 years of practice were excellent. It was good training and work. I never felt I was the

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greatest therapist (yes, I do have a strong tendency to denigrate myself), but I helped my patients. Regarding my teaching at all levels, I hope some of my students who I worked with intensely will remember that I cared enough to broaden their horizons and help them grow as individuals. Generally, in life, I try to make people and things better.

I greatly value life and humanity. I’m often smiling, thus inducing smiling in other people because that’s my way. As I walk through the supermarket and see people, I try to guess what’s going on with them. What does their body language tell me about them? What is behind their facial expression? What is their history like? I’m curious. I see newborn babies, toddlers, or little kids, and I wonder what their lives will be like. I look for their interaction with their mother and parents, which sometimes reveals something about their life. So, I’ve got this endless curiosity. I’m not always the best listener in the world. My wife Geri is a better listener than I am when she is not in severe pain from her Parkinson’s and arthritis, but I use what I hear and engage with the person.

IR: What are your hopes?

PHE: I hope my family does well in the future, with all the ups, downs, and mishigas (craziness) involved in all families. Because my wife’s medical condition makes travel difficult, I see less of my loved ones than I would prefer; I have such a hunger to be with them more often, especially the younger members who are our future.

I hope that more and more people engage in self-analysis, and even better, in the psychoanalytic process, to work out their unconscious conflicts and repetition-compulsions, to understand their ego defenses, and to be liberated from judgments, reactivity, and unnecessary suffering.

I also hope that Clio’s Psyche and the Psychohistory Forum will survive and thrive. It is not easy—many associations and journals die with their founder or barely survive, but we are going strong and adding things to our meeting list and publications. Now, we not only meet almost every other month for the Work-in-Progress meetings, but we also gather for the Lifetime Achievement Awards and meet alternate months for the Psychobiography Reading Group. I like those awards honoring the living as opposed to the remembrances I have published over 60 of, mostly written by me. It is important and a joy that we celebrate the lives of the liv-

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ing contributors, even if they are not in great health. While I have written so many testimonials for the deceased to say, “thank you for your contributions” and “farewell,” I don’t like writing them.

IR: I know, and I feel that. Since we are talking about the negative, I wanted to ask about other things you do not like or enjoy?

PHE: I do not like doom-and-gloom negativity and rigid ideological or theoretical approaches. I analyze what’s happening and my contribution without judgment or pointing fingers. I don’t like one-upmanship, disloyalty, and ungratefulness. I am also very protective of the people I love and am upset when they are hurting. I will always be on the side of my friends and will diplomatically tell them the truth, even if they don’t like it. I sometimes suggest going into psychoanalysis to those who are getting hurt repeatedly. I believe that analysis has made my life so much better. It helped me to work out my “father issues” that bedeviled me as a young man, as well as my problems disclaimed anger and envy. Currently, I’ve gone back to analysis with a woman analyst, and I am working out my very early “mother issues.” In analysis and living with Geri, I learned to face my fears and move on. The Socratic ideal of “know thyself” is a key part of my philosophy.

IR: What are your worries?

PHE: I worry about the future of our struggling democracy, that people are overwhelmed by the rapid rate of change. There is not enough support for children, parents, and the needs of the elderly. I appreciate your work on parenting. Currently, I am working on a Clio’s Psyche Call for Papers on the Psychology of Aging, Health, Longevity, and Retirement.

IR: Tell me more about your curiosity and, I would add, benevolent curiosity. In my own family, curiosity was one of our major human values. My late Mom would always tell me the story about her teacher, Liza Ilyinichna (I remember her name, although I never met this woman!), who was teaching Russian literature in a post-World War II classroom and promoting the values of curiosity and engagement in life as opposed to laziness. This came to my mind because these virtues characterize you. What else was and is important in your life?

PHE: I work to connect with colleagues from all over the world, get to know them personally, and solicit their thoughts and writing. Outside of work, I’ve mostly had a wonderful life in so many ways:

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I deeply love my family and have met many interesting and wonderful people along the way. At certain points, I hit dead ends, but with the help of family, friends, and psychoanalysis, I got past them. Having the love of a good woman is so important. It is not the immature fantasy-love I had in my first marriage when we were a young couple who didn’t know ourselves or each other as we created a family.

You heard my guardedly optimistic approach to life and our future at the recent Jon Mills’ End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate (2024) book celebration presentation. While I am proud of having organized an Environmental Studies Week for my students and colleagues at Temple University before the famous Earth Day, I never give in to pessimism about our future on this small planet.

IR: What do you enjoy in life the most besides everything we have discussed so far?

PHE: I take such delight in nature’s growth, from the grass to the evergreen and other trees as well as the multitude of plants and flowers on our deck. The new growth comes out with a little bit of green at the end, extends, and then darkens and becomes just part of the regular evergreen branch. Plus, the fall foliage is specular. Also, I have such joy in helping my wife, feeling her love, and giving her a lot of love. Giving and receiving. As an adult, I love examining feelings and giving joy to others. As a young man, I didn’t know what to do with my envy and anger, and I felt so inadequate before my father. Fortunately, I worked past these problems. I love encouraging people to talk about their feelings in their writing for Clio.

I tend to befriend people. Psychohistory has attracted a few inappropriate people, such as an astrologer, a guy who only wanted to pick up women, a sociopath, and a totally unrealistic dreamer. Overwhelmingly, psychohistory has brought a large number of very fine people into my life, some of whom I miss terribly after their deaths because they had become my personal friends as well as admired colleagues. I value friends, those who I can speak with honestly and openly, who I can laugh and be serious with, and who can point out your foibles and theirs too without fearing that the friendship will end.

Perfection and friendship do not go together. We humans do not do perfect. My motto is “making things better” for friends, for everyone. A friend is someone you can talk and listen to at a

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great length, someone you want to help and who you want to protect you. A friend is someone you want to spend your time with and experience life together, even if you don’t have a lot of it, because you’re committed, and maybe you should be committed—I mean, to a mental institution! That is my attempt at humor. Humor helps.

When I was younger, I sometimes made friends because I was in awe of their abilities, which I wished I had. My friend, Mathew Hayes, a retired doctor who now has dementia, was a college graduate, fearless, adventuresome, and defiant of military authority when we were draftee friends in the Army together. I wanted an adventurous life like my father, but in reality, I was fearful of authority because I was raised by my mother to be a secular, not worldly, Yeshiva Bocher (religious scholar). I wished I could be like Matt. After I was in analysis, my good friends became psychohistorians and analysts like David Beisel, Henry Lawton, Peter Petschauer, Inna Rozentsvit, Jeffrey Rubin, and Burt Seitler—good people to talk freely to about feelings and subjects that interest me and us most.

As its editor, I work to keep Clio humanized, focusing on people’s emotions, motivations, and personalities with minimal distractions by arguing from authority. I want to hear the authors’ voices, passions, ideas, and conflicts, not the recycling of theories we know. I bring passion to what I do, although I don’t necessarily show it to most people.

IR: You and I both love humor.

PHE: My humor e-mails that I regularly send out to a list of colleagues is mostly done for me because I love to see and think about people smiling and laughing, even if some of the attempted humor is corny or falls flat. The humor list turned out to be a wonderful instrument for keeping many Forum members involved with me and it.

IR: Turning to your family, what about your Mom, who you spoke about so openly at your Work-in-Progress Psychohistory Forum meeting last January? At your session, there was so much love and sadness that I felt it in every fiber of my soul. It evoked feelings about my parents, who are also long gone.

PHE: Yes, I now feel very close to my mother, who died so long ago. Today, I accept her wisdom regarding what I should do with

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my life and greatly respect her courage in facing death from cancer. Her family had converted from Judaism to communism, although she had become a liberal Democrat by the time I was born. She remained an idealist, which I have tended to carry on. I’ve written so much about different aspects of my life. I am writing my autobiography and encourage people to write about themselves. It is very hard to get some people like you to write about their own lives; it is like pulling teeth, but I have made some progress with you and others.

IR: Do you feel you were fortunate to have special opportunities as a professor at a new college and as psychohistory blossomed in the 1970s and 80s?

PHE: I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to be part of the organized field of psychohistory and become an institution-builder, which is an enormous amount of work but also a great opportunity. In education, I was a founding faculty member at Ramapo College of New Jersey (1971-), which was designed as an interdisciplinary student-centered institution. In my specialty, I became an early member of the Institute for Psychohistory (1975-there’s no clear date for its ending), established and chaired the Saturday Workshop of this Institute (1976-1982), and was one of the founders of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA, 1977-), at which I have presented a paper at all 47 annual meetings and continue to serve on its Leadership Team. As you know, I established the Psychohistory Forum (1982-), Clio’s Psyche (1994-), and co-established the Psychobiography Research and Publication Group (2021-).

IR: What about your teaching of psychohistory—your midwifery of knowledge?

PHE: I taught psychohistory and psychohistorically at Ramapo College throughout my entire career there, sometimes despite the opposition of some colleagues. From 2022-2024, thanks mostly to your organizational abilities and encouragement, I taught four-to-six-month-long courses on the introduction and principles of psychohistory as well as on creativity and psychobiography. I will write at length about this in another context. Some of the not-yet-published psychobiographical case studies were offered to the students by the carefully selected guest speakers. Teaching is very important to me, especially teaching psychohistory to clinicians. So, even if I am tired because of my other responsibilities, I would

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miss the opportunity to teach, connect with people, and help them apply psychoanalytic principles to the history of individuals and society.

IR: Let me now turn to the subject of psychobiography, which we have worked so hard to advocate for and put in the pages of Clio as well as in the forthcoming edited book Psychobiographies and the Autobiographies of Psychobiographers (10/1/24 submission deadline). What is your approach to psychobiography, and do you accept other approaches that are not psychoanalytic?

PHE: I love to know all about people: family background, childhood, coping mechanisms, education, emotions, interests, interpersonal relations, life struggles, motivations, personality traits, and so forth. Personally, as a psychobiographer, I always start from a bottom-up position of knowing as much as possible about the individual I’m researching and writing about. While my intellectual framework is psychoanalytic, I’m quite pleased as an editor, whether of Clio’s Psyche or a book of autobiographies, to have colleagues write from other perspectives. Indeed, I very specifically solicited psychobiographical articles that do not start from the same place I do. In looking at Clio’s Psyche’s psychobiography file, I noticed that six articles are psychoanalytic in their approach and seven are not. The latter are by academic psychologists and two colleagues from the counseling field. So, my answer to your question is an unequivocal yes to accepting many different approaches.

IR: What is your approach to the study of major personalities in psychoanalysis and politics?

PHE: This is an extraordinarily important issue that I have struggled with throughout my career since 1976. I have written little about psychoanalysts, and in teaching, I don’t usually focus on differences in theory, which tend to divide people along theoretical lines. My goal is to help students and others focus not on these theories but on how important analytic thinkers can contribute to our understanding of the unconscious, childhood, defense mechanisms, personality issues, dealing with life’s traumas, and so forth. In lecturing about Freud and others with whom he broke, my focus is overwhelmingly on their positive contributions.

In political terms, our entire family disliked Nixon. (My father never trusted politicians, and my mother abandoned her family’s communism to become a Truman-Stevenson Democrat.) Yet, I was able to write empathetically about our 37^th President by con-

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centrating on his childhood struggles as I sought to understand his motivations and personality. While I am inclined to vote Democratic more than Republican, I register as an independent, unaffiliated voter and like to split my ticket in the voting booth. In 1996, I started writing psychopolitical and psychobiographical comparisons of the presidential candidates in an even-handed way and taught similarly. It would not be easy to determine my political preference in the classroom or the long comparative articles I wrote for The Journal of Psychohistory because I worked so hard at being even-handed. Trump’s candidacy would result in my becoming public about my political preferences.

IR: What are the ethics of psychobiography, especially when using diagnoses of presidential candidates and presidents?

PHE: Ethical issues are enormously important, even though I often complain about talented colleagues obsessing over them when their time could be better spent doing psychobiography. Focusing on ethics is sometimes an excuse for not writing or greatly delaying writing. Hours before I was scheduled to give my first psychobiographical presentation on presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, the renowned psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton told me I couldn’t present because it would be unethical to do so without at least a personal interview and Carter’s written permission. Despite my enormous respect for Lifton, I went ahead with the professional presentation that I had committed to present at the 1976 National Psychohistorical Conference. I dislike the use of psychohistory to psychopathologize political leaders.

IR: Who were your favorite people to write psychobiographies of?

PHE: My favorite subjects were mostly some of the creators and innovators of the English Industrial Revolution (1760-1851). I found Sir Humphry Davy, James Nasmyth, and Thomas Telford to be wonderful subjects, although my writings on the second two were rather limited. On Telford, I only wrote an encyclopedia article, and on Nasmyth, I only published my work on him recently as part of a book chapter. Sir Davy was only peripherally part of industrial society, but he provided so many fascinating materials in his published dreams and memoirs. This brilliant, narcissistic chemist, public intellectual, and man of letters had the fantasy that he was descended from geniuses from another planet who came to our world to raise the level of the earthlings that he was born

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among. Altogether, I recollect doing eight articles, chapters of books, and professional presentations on him.

IR: How do we bring together personologists from the Murray tradition at Harvard and others who are uncomfortable with Freudian psychobiographical terminology with the psychobiography we do?

PHE: By doing what I’ve been working at throughout my career, especially in the last two decades. For example, I wrote “Separate Psychobiographical Tents, Separate Struggles” (The Journal of Psychohistory, 34[1], Summer 2006, pp. 83-93) as a very lengthy positive review of an academic psychologist psychobiography book in which Murray ignored virtually all the contributions that my colleagues and I had made at the Institute, in the IPhA, at the Forum, and in the pages of Clio’s Psyche. I’ve done many featured scholar interviews of academic psychology colleagues who have bad-mouthed or ignored what I and my friends have done. Ultimately, this has paid off. Partly through the connections provided by Jim Anderson and William McKinley “Mac” Runyan, I’ve broken through the resistance of many of these colleagues. All those typed letters and e-mails of invitation that I sent to so many are, in fact, working. Part of the resistance of academic psychobiographers to my efforts was based on their feeling like a besieged group within academic psychology that had disdained psychobiography for so long. However, they are now coming around thanks to the good work of colleagues like Joseph Ponterotto, whose The Psychobiographer’s Handbook: A Practical Guide to Research and Ethics should be in print when this issue is published.

IR: You’ve done this work for many years, like a running engine. What motivates you?

PHE: It is important, very valuable work that needs to be done. People will develop their own insights; we just need to keep at it.

We do it for people so they feel that their lives are important and meaningful. One of our members is a fine colleague and human being who has stage four cancer. I have always admired her because she is a mensch, a giving and sensible person. I asked her to write about her struggle for health, so she wrote a piece on not being fully defined by cancer. It is a good article, not psychoanalytic, but very personal and valuable, and most importantly, it made her feel better. This is “the bottom-up approach” to relating and writing psychohistory—from one’s personal experience, not theory

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or a diagnosis.

We do it for people, even if they are kicking and screaming that they do not want it, to talk about feelings, to be vulnerable, to be exposed—but you never can fully separate between what’s personal and what’s societal. My friend Dave Beisel, in his book of essays titled Forging New Paths: Reflections on History, Culture & Psyche (2024), added insightful personal revelations about his family background, influencing his scholarly work on WWII, which he wouldn’t have done years ago. I like to think that my example was a factor in his doing this.

IR: Yes, I understand how important it is to be there for people, to let them know and feel that their lives and what they do are meaningful. So, as I understand, the question for you is not, “Why?” but rather, “Why not?” Like in the Talmud, “You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to evade it.”

PHE: Agreed. It is also important to enjoy the process as well as the people you work with and meet along the way. Thanks for taking the time to converse with me and being such a wonderful psychohistorical colleague and builder of our special field of knowledge.

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