Psychohistory at the Crossroads of History, Science, and Art

Though I started to call myself a psychohistorian more than 25 years ago, I could never bring myself to see it as the major influence in my life. I always tried to use it within the parameters of the history of mentalities, to understand the individual and group mind as including the development of art, rhetoric, and other cultural studies. Thus the debates on whether or not psychohistory is a sci-

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ence or a humanistic guide seem fruitless and pointless: From my perspective, it is not meant to treat and heal either individuals or society. It uses those tools, just as it draws from cultural anthropology, cultural history, and discourse analysis. What sets psychohistory apart lies in its stress on the evolutionary growth of consciousness, language, and creativity; and therefore, of the formative development of the brain. I reject strict, rigid paradigms of Darwinian progress and the determinist concepts of genetic programming.

Even more, when reading through the five essays on psychohistory up for discussion, several points stand out which bother me, and have always bothered me. At almost the same time, I have thought of myself as a historian of mentalities, a cultural historian, and a Jewish expounder of text to the goyish (gentile) world. These essays make me see why I value psychohistory as a significant approach to human experience and why I see major drawbacks to it as an academic discipline.

The first thing that got my hackles up is the writers’ assumption that America is the intellectual heart of psychohistory. This seemed utterly irrelevant to colleagues at universities outside North America in the countries I am most familiar with—France, Romania, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. Generalizations and paradigms created to make psychohistory into some kind of predictive social science or grid for understanding group phenomena does not fit with experiences and evidence from other parts of the world. There are special considerations and circumstances about American civilization, but the U.S. is not the rest of the world and its history has a different trajectory than that of other nations and cultures.

The essays offer many insights from many years’ experience. Yet Fuchsman fears that psychohistory will remain a black sheep because its credentials are suspect; it seems to fall between the stools of psychoanalysis of historical events and political persons, and a healing art able to predict scientific results. These are mostly American institutional standards. Lotto widens the scope to literary and cultural studies, yet claims it is not the subject that matters but the approach (i.e., methodology and theory). Still, the subject shapes the approach, and psychohistory could learn from philology, iconology, and cultural-anthropological research. Elovitz’ first essay is a defense of his work and approach, but still concerned with how to integrate psychohistory into academe and earn professional bona fides. In my view, it would be the value of the insights gained and the results obtained in practical applications that justify

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his efforts. Then Beisel and Elovitz’ second essays survey 45 years of tension between professional historians and psychohistorians, without describing radical shifts during that period in post-modernist and politically-correct theories in universities and professional bodies, as though the arguments were strictly intellectual.

After receiving my doctoral degree, everything I had prepared myself to undertake was stopped by the emergence of new kinds of epistemological theories: structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and similar politically correct versions of anti-intellectual and anti-western trends in scholarship. As they started blowing through the hallowed halls of academe, I fell back in horror. It became painful to attend conferences or literary meetings. Not just the jargon, the ready-made paradigms, and the arrogance of the devotees, but the very texts to be studied and the themes considered appropriate—gay and queer studies, feminist and gender approaches, post-colonialism and Orientalist ideology, and theory for its own sake; and all this to the exclusion of solid philology, intensely sensitive close-reading, wide-ranging comparative literature, and historically-based cultural anthropology.

Thus, in self-defense, I found myself going to psychohistory meetings, psychiatric conferences, religious studies congresses, and seminars in Jewish studies around the world. Still, if asked to categorize myself, I would usually say some sort of psychohistorian. No one was ever satisfied, certainly not me.

Then, to continue the assessment of Elovitz’ collection of essays on psychohistory as a science, there is the problem of other models for research, such as Aby Warburg’s Kulturgeschichte (cultural history), and how they square with various types of Romanian and French Histoire de mentalités, Anthropologie culturale, or Sciences de l’homme as approaches to the study of how human language, consciousness, and perception develop in various cultural zones. The boundaries between history of mentalities, psychohistory, cultural anthropology, folklore, and iconography faded away.

While there is a truth out there, it is not easily accessible by the usual American academic disciplines and can be reached through constant dialectic of analysis and interpretation, reading many signs, hints, or metonymies—words, images, and gestures in various texts, discourses, works of art, dreams, and archaeological ruins—through teasing apart; saturation in contextual events and documents; drawing on seemingly far flung analogies; complex

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metaphors; archaic songs, dances, and festival masquerades; and very close analysis of confessions and diaries from many different times and places.

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