A Psychohistorian in New Zealand

So far as I know, no one has taught any university courses in psychohistory in New Zealand. Nor has any colleague ever voluntarily expressed an interest in psychohistory. Yet, paradoxically, I became a psychohistorian precisely because of my coming to this country in 1970.

When I came from Canada 28 years ago, I had never heard of the field — it would have seemed bizarre. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a nascent psychohistory in my thesis and first attempts at publishing. I wrote about a 14th-century Middle English romance called William of Palerne, and there are two aspects to the study which tell me now why I would eventually be interested in psychohistory, sparked into an explicit enthusiasm because of my move to New Zealand.

The first is the subject matter of the poem: it is about lovers who are forced to escape from Rome to Sicily. Their flight is guided by a werewolf, a prince transformed by his step-mother to get him out of the Spanish court, and this creature, always called the “witty werewolf,” raises problems of the relationship between human and animal, reason and instinct, language and communication. I had to deal with childhood in the Middle Ages, definitions of humanity and bestiality, and the problematics of language and reason. Though I did not know it then, I was already dealing in psychohistory.

Rather than a straightforward literary translation from a French original, the poem seemed to be a transformation from a literate to an oral mentality, with the text recast into formulaic phrases and into new categories of thought, perception, and feeling. I am surprised at how radical my thesis was because in the mid-1960s the field of “oral dynamics” had just opened up, and virtually none of the major literary studies were published. Today, of course, many scholars are writing about the way in which oral literatures differ from written texts, going way beyond McLuhan’s notion that the medium is the message. Now it is evident that the way memory works; the reception mechanisms of traditional audiences; and the dynamic relationship between visual, tactile, and auditory perceptions largely determine what can and cannot be known, felt, and thought about. These are not absolute but significant minor distinctions, and therefore my early work on William of Palerne as a “translation” from a written French version strikes me as still on the cutting edge, and certainly open to further psychohistorical investigations. If I have moved on, it is less in terms of theory and methodology — which have increasingly turned to psychohistory for insights — than of specific content.

However, the only indication that what I had been working on was “abnormal” to “serious” scholarship came in the form of silence, the lack of response to my thesis: it was not referred to by anyone writing about William of Palerne, not even to dismiss it as ridiculous. The silence continued when I started to give papers in conferences or deliver guest lectures around New Zealand; and more so the silence existed among friends to whom I tried to speak of my interests. At that time I would not have used the words denial, repression,

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or even avoidance, but I did start to feel alienation.

Because of that I turned to new fields where I hoped to find intellectual and social comfort. First, I became interested in my Romanian family background and folklore — a discipline which seemed to pick up my previous interests in orality and to give me a perspective on group rituals, creativity, and performativeness. I took my family for a half year to Bucharest, and then spent four months at the Folklife Institute in Leeds in England.

Then, being in New Zealand gave me an opportunity to study Maori traditions and the new literatures in English starting to appear in the Pacific Islands. My interests were sparked by the interplay of oral and literary forces, the way in which pre-modern cultures were transforming into modern societies. The result was, however, more alienation — and a realization that I could not understand these other cultures (medieval, Romanian folk, or Pacific Island), let alone myself, unless I came to grips with unconscious forces in individuals and groups. Though I was writing and lecturing in terms of the insights that Eastern Europe gave to medieval literature, the judgement of my “peers” was that I was completely eccentric, trivial, and probably crazy. Similarly, my work with Pacific traditions, again having analogies to the formation of modern personalities and secular articulation in late medieval England, was dismissed with silence or scorn.

In later years, other fields (e.g., Jewish Studies) have been integrated into my research interests, all bound together by an overriding concern for history of mentalities and psychohistory, with psychoanalytic insights providing the driving power to the developments in cultural history. Though I have received recognition overseas and try to keep in touch with colleagues in many countries, my status in New Zealand is so marginal that I can only call it “pathetic.” I have suffered from a lack of promotion and being marginalized by administrators, academics, and students.

Perhaps my career could not be otherwise in New Zealand because this is a country where psychology equates to behaviorism, and psychiatry and psychoanalysis are rare. The unconscious is not a concept presumed here and the idea of a psychohistorian makes no sense to my colleagues. In attempting to deal with politicians or social workers nominally concerned with child abuse and domestic violence, there is silence or dismissive noise. Those actually working in areas where the insights of psychohistory would be most pertinent are “too busy” to listen. Since I am not a specialist in their fields, my voice is not worth taking the time to hear.

Nevertheless, I have never been asked to desist from my psychohistorical approach in teaching, and no one has formulated an alternative viewpoint to my comments. I continue to teach what I want in the way I want by not calling them “psychohistorical” or announcing a psychohistorical view of the world. In all my teaching I am most constrained by the generally low level of student preparation, the lack of proper library resources, and the restricted range of courses. Year after year, students say thanks because these courses changed their lives. They learned how to think.

My other achievement has been the development of Mentalities/Mentalites as a scholarly journal with international editors, contributors, and readers. While beginning this venture with European colleagues (e.g., Alexandru Dutu, Robert Muchembled, Emmanuel Le RoiLadurie, Carlos Barrios, etc.) deep into the history of mentalities, over the past several years, especially after meeting with psychohistorians in New York, I have nudged the focus more and more towards both a psychoanalytic and psychiatric approach, with articles on the unconscious forces driving historical events and on the history of the various depth psychology movements and mental health programs of the Western world. Yet this has not been at the expense of prior interests: my other more topical, especially textual concerns, have been enhanced by the juxtaposition — which, I might say, has become a mutual fertilizing process. I have always regarded psychohistory and the history of mentalities as at least complementary, never felt comfortable with any sorts of mutually exclusive paradigms.

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