Resistance and Reconciliation: Some Personal Thoughts on Psychohistory

On many occasions during the first three decades of my career in some dozen disciplines, I have found myself in the struggle, and occasionally the resolution, of the enigmatic words Beethoven wrote prefacing the final movement of his last string quartet, Opus 135: first, “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?), then,”Es muss sein” (It must be). What for so long seemed—and still seems—to be self-destructive factionalism within psychohistory (as well as in countless other scholarly and clinical disciplines), reveals itself to be “culture” or “group fantasy” in the guise of “science” and “scholarship.” As we are invited to contemplate (once again) the future of psychohistory, I direct our attention in this essay—via retrospection—not only to public and academic attacks from without on the wide and profound legacy of Sigmund Freud, but also to the undermining from within the ranks of those who espouse the psychoanalytic study of society and history. What others may do to us and wish upon us is bad enough; the carrying out of the destruction among ourselves is infinitely sadder.

If I accept what has happened (“Es muss sein”), I also wish to understand it so that it does not have to continue happening (repetition). Psychohistory itself comes to resemble, at least in some features, the historic eras and cultures we study. We need to ask: How much of this conflict history is about our science, and how much of it is about fundamental human group issues that we live out? Issues played out in the theater of psychohistory’s own history: death, annihilation, separation, autonomy, sexuality, aggression, dependency, rebellion, and so on. I draw from four experiences as vignettes.

In the early 1980s, I received a phone call from Charles Strozier, editor of The Psychohistory Review, inviting me to join his editorial board. While recognizing my contributions to psychoanalytic anthropology and to psychohistory, he added that I would have to resign from editorship of the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology (JPA) and also renounce any association with Lloyd deMause and the Institute for Psychohistory. I was as incredulous as I was torn: I could not believe the ultimatum. Why, I remember asking, did the choice have to be either/or, absolute loyalty and absolute disloyalty, and not both/and? After all, I refereed manuscripts for many fields and journals already. Strozier stood firm with his offer and with its conditions. I declined, though he subsequently published an essay of mine in his journal.

Even after nearly two decades, the sting of this conversation remains, and with it the biting question, “Did this have to happen?”—and for the future, “Can we foster human conditions within psychohistory in which an event such as this doesn’t have to happen?” I did not continue editorship out of loyalty to deMause or to specific theories of his, but to the work we were doing, separately and together. I felt, and continue to feel, deep gratitude to him for the opportunity to serve as editor. The eight years of editing from 1980-1987 the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology were among the most alive, exhilarating, of my life. In Strozier’s proposal I felt as if I were being asked to betray myself, and receive in return greater official respectability due to the differing, though overlap-

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ping, intellectual communities that deMause’s and Strozier’s journals served. I sought neither the status of insider nor outsider—merely to edit a journal. To draw upon W. R. Bion, I sought to do “work”; yet I felt I was being asked to surround that work in, and subordinate it to, “basic assumptions.”

In this episode, I hear a psychohistorical echo of the split between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein (and their respective followers, schools, theories, and periodicals). What was at stake could not be spoken—maybe even articulated—in the armed intellectual and clinical camps and the war of words.

By 1987 or so, my former wife, Margaret Sheehan, JPA managing editor, and I had brought the journal from being two issues behind (in 1980) to being two issues ahead at the publisher’s office. I had received many compliments on the quality and range of the articles. Then I received a phone call from Lloyd deMause, editor of the Journal of Psychohistory and publisher of both journals. He said that subscriptions to the journal I edited had markedly dropped so as to make further publication impossible even with his generous subsidy. (As he spoke, I thought: The Reagan decade had been unkind to both journals; there was less interest in reflection, more in action.)

Besides, deMause continued, there was no history of childhood material, only group psychohistory, in JPA. I had not realized that it had been the journal’s—and my—mission to employ anthropology to supply socialization data for psychohistory, as though JPA were merely an auxiliary source. I knew from the outset of deMause’s admiration for Arthur Hippler (which I share), whom he chose to be founding editor of JPA and who had published seminal studies of Australian parent-child relations. Still, when deMause invited me to take over editorship of the journal, he encouraged my autonomy; he did not ask me to become someone else.

DeMause promised to bring the final two issues (if I remember the number correctly) to publication, at which time JPA would cease to be an independent journal and would be “folded into” and “absorbed” into the Journal of Psychohistory. These words stuck with me.

I was stunned by the call. I did not know how to evaluate the “business” argument. If true, it felt nonetheless only a part of the story. It felt disingenuous. Something felt missing, but deMause insisted that nothing was missing. I felt betrayed, but that I had no right to feel betrayed. I felt as if I were being killed off, if only symbolically. The imagery of enfolding and absorption conjured in me wild images of a womb’s re-absorption of its own fetus, of smothering an infant to death. True, these were my vivid “transferences,” but they felt induced, as by projective identification. As with Strozier’s invitation for me to join his board, here, too, I had no separate reality with which to assess my response. I had to depend on my inner reaction, my “countertransference,” to inform me about intersubjective reality. I felt as if JPA were being killed off in the prime of life, that it was somehow a sacrifice to an ideology and whatever that ideology meant to Lloyd deMause. But it could not be further discussed. Power was at stake, and whatever that power signified. Ultimately JPA was not mine to preserve. Its death, albeit symbolic, was a protracted one.

I was not an “insider” to the Institute for Psychohistory in the early years, and I do not know from direct experience what underlay the creation of the Psychohistory Forum in 1983 (and, subsequently, its journal, Clio’s Psyche, in 1994). At the time I heard repeated reference to words such as splitting, defection, orthodoxy, rigidity, dilution, and rebellion.

By the late 1990s, there were three established and flourishing journals explicitly devoted to psychohistory (alphabetically): Clio’s Psyche, the Journal of Psychohistory, and The Psychohistory Review. When in November, 1999, Paul Elovitz, editor of Clio’s Psyche, invited me to write an essay about the future of psychohistory, one of the unsettling circumstances which had prompted the topic was the demise of The Psychohistory Review. This was the first that I had heard anything about the Review ceasing publication. What, I wondered, is its psychohistory?

What is the future of psychohistory given these recent and past events—and their inner legacy? Is it not necessary to distinguish between (a) scholarship that goes by the name of “psychohistory” and is presented and published in explicitly “psychohistory” conferences and journals and (b) equally valid and challenging psychohistorical scholarship that goes by other names and is presented or published elsewhere? For instance, the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction; its director, Vamik D. Volkan, MD; and its quarterly journal, Mind and Human Interaction (now published by International Universities Press)

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come immediately to mind. Likewise, the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, which holds an annual convention, has welcomed psychohistorical perspectives on workplace culture and culture change. As with all social “division of labor,” we need to attend to the inner significance of the institutes and publications, and its consequence for research and publication.

For those of us “in” psychohistory, those who call ourselves “psychohistorians,” what does this do to notions of “the independence of psychohistory”? What’s in a name? Shakespeare asks. What kind of difference makes a difference? Gregory Bateson asks. Have we created our own groupishness, group-fantasy, etc., within the very discipline that has chosen itself (ourselves) to study historical groupishness? If so, what is its consequence for our scholarship? For instance, Who is invited, and who is not invited, to present at “our” conferences? Who is given voice and who is subtly silenced? Who is published, and who is not published, in our journals? Is it possible to be “in” a scholarly group without forming intense in-groups and out-groups based on a splitting of affiliative/aggressive self- and object-representations?

With these questions, we have thereby arrived at the doorstep of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, his concept of “repetition compulsion,” and his felicitous notion of the “narcissism of minor differences”—a narcissism that, under conditions of threat to identity, can become exclusionary if not downright vicious. Certainly, the fear of fusion and dissolution can foster counter-phobic differentiation and border-making. Leaders of psychohistory, no less than leaders of national or ethnic groups, can be delegated unconscious tasks by their groups. And certainly group leaders and followers (members) can enact in public settings private, childhood dramas. Why should all this not be the case in psychohistory? There is abundant psychogeography in psychohistory, that is, the group process that goes into the making and maintenance of borders and boundaries.

Ever since I participated in the first convention of the International Psychohistorical Association in 1978, we have been concerned with attacks upon psychoanalysis and upon psychohistory. A crucial historical and psychohistorical question is: What is similar, and what is different, now, over two decades later? An equally important question is: What are individuals’ and groups’ adaptations to the experience and perception of attack (insularity, search for legitimacy, etc.)? Further, how are we to understand the social process whereby psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic studies of social process are officially rebuked, but flourish in the “popular” culture and lay press—reminiscent of W. H. Auden’s point that “to us he [Freud] is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion”? If we are so finished with Freud, why do we continue to engage him in battle? If a society represses and dissociates in one realm, does not the dissociated and repressed return in another? If this is so, then the question becomes not whether psychoanalysis and its extensions are alive or dead or dying, but where they are each of these.

Can group-process analysis (such as occurs at the annual conventions of the International Psychohistorical Association) help to self-correct the very group(s) that studies(-y) historical and international group process? The answer to the question of the future of psychohistory is at least in some measure answered not by others’ attacks on Freud (or choose your own figure-hero-villain), but by what we do with those attacks in tandem with our own ambivalence toward psychoanalysis’ first century. When I finally surrender to accept what has already happened (“Es muss sein”) in my field(s) and in my life, I look to the future of our work and ask, “Muss es wieder sein?”—Must it happen again? Do we—human beings who happen to do psychohistory, or who happen to be psychohistorians—have the courage—based on the capacity to love—to peer into, and perhaps understand, and perhaps diminish, our own self-destructiveness? Among ourselves, can resistance fall and reconciliation flower?

[Editor’s Note:

At the recommendation of our referees, and with the full agreement of the editors, the three psychohistorians Howard Stein focused on were given the opportunity to respond. Lloyd deMause wrote on February 6 that he had nothing to add to the article, which is “accurate as far as events I know about are concerned.” He also expressed concern that the issue “might be divisive now” and noted collegial relations with Charles Strozier in more recent times.

Charles Strozier’s Response to Stein:

I would say, reading Stein’s memory of our conversation after 20 years, a conversation I do not remember but believe as entirely possible, that I

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was wrong, and only add that Lloyd DeMause had the distinct ability to enrage me. On the creative side, I began the Review very specifically to offer an alternative to him and what I felt was his sloppy and biased editing. The Review became, I think, a triumph of sensibility. It served us all well.

Paul Elovitz Responds to Stein:

Despite concerns about divisiveness, as a historian of our field I think it helpful to set the record straight by making the following points.

While not meaning to minimize the differences among psychohistorians (see my introduction for a categorization of these differences), it is noteworthy that more often than not we have cooperated. Chuck Strozier writes for Clio’s Psyche and presents at the Psychohistory Forum. He attends the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA), of which Lloyd is president, sometimes as a featured speaker. Lloyd deMause presents at the Psychohistory Forum and writes for Clio’s Psyche. I wrote for The Psychohistory Review, attend meetings at the Center Strozier co-directs, and regularly write for the Journal of Psychohistory. Sometimes we take different roads to psychohistorical knowledge and sometimes our roads converge.

Regarding Professor Stein’s speculations around the creation of the Forum in 1983, let me state the facts. In 1976 Alice Eichholz and I originated the Saturday Workshop Seminars with Lloyd’s enthusiastic support and under the auspices of his Institute for Psychohistory. After several years Alice moved on to other things in Vermont. In 1983, Lloyd planned to concentrate the Institute’s energies on outreach programs to larger audiences. As part of this new focus he decided to discontinue the Saturday program. At the time I would rather have kept the existing arrangement. However, it was a part of Lloyd’s Institute, meeting in Lloyd’s seminar room on Broadway in Manhattan, so I had little choice. At my request we met for lunch where I asked Lloyd how he felt about my plans to continue the small seminar format as a freestanding psychohistorical organization. He wished me well in the endeavor and became a paying member. The Psychohistory Forum has gone on to become an important contributor to psychohistory. Lloyd deMause and I continued to work together in the IPA, where I went on to become president in 1988. (Perhaps it is worth noting that David Beisel, Lloyd deMause, Henry Lawton (who was co-director of the Forum in its early days) and I are the only members of the IPA to have attended every annual meeting.)

Howard, who was in Oklahoma when these events occurred, heard the words “splitting, defection, orthodoxy, rigidity, dilution, rebellion” bandied about in relationship to the creation of the Forum. These words said more about the fantasies of the speakers than the realities. My account of the events mentioned above makes it clear that the gossip and speculations were far more wrong than right. The field is richer for the creation of new organizations and publications. Indeed, however much Lloyd and I have disagreed about fantasy analysis (I find it to be a promising but unproven methodology), the role of psychohistory (he sees it as a science and I see it as an art), and other issues, he has never stood in the way of new organizations and publications being founded by his co-workers in the IPA. (It is noteworthy that last week on the new online discussion group, H-Psychohistory, deMause even mentioned that of the 250 or so IPA presenters through the years he doubted that more than a dozen or so really tried to apply his psychogenic theory.)

Regarding Stein’s advocacy of a psychohistory of The Psychohistory Review, my concern is that it not be done in a manner divisive to our small field. At the moment I am not very optimistic about our being able to accomplish this without recriminations which would be disruptive of our creative work.

Concerning the demise of the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, I was saddened by this loss to our field, but I have no inside knowledge. I am quite aware of the financial difficulties of producing scholarly publications.

Regarding Howard’s report of the conversation with Chuck, I have no direct knowledge and therefore cannot comment directly on it. It is certainly better for the field that we not have an “us vs. them” attitude, something from which I have not been immune. With embarrassment, I remember starting to attend the inaugural 1977 International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP) meeting in New York City very shortly after our first IPA meeting. I felt so out of place that I left within the first hour. A decade later, I attended the ISPP and have enjoyed participating in some of its meetings. Struggling with my own exclusionary tendencies helped me to understand the importance of avoiding doing this in psychohistory and life.]

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