A Memoir of Psychohistory

It all started with Steve Feeback. Steve was tall and languorous with long, straight hair parted in the middle like Jesus. At 24 years of age in 1972, he looked out inquisitively at the world. He heard about a new university in Springfield, Illinois that granted the M.A. in history that he sought. Radical in politics but a bit dreamy about life, Steve was a perfect fit for Sangamon State, then hiring the best and brightest in a post-Vietnam collapsed job market. Everyone on the faculty at that point had been shaped by the culture and politics of the 1960s. The new fledgling history department was of course student-centered in the spirit of the times, and Steve had read Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth (1969). He spoke up at meetings and convinced his professors that any self-respecting department of history had to include a psychohistorian. Miraculously, they agreed with enthusiasm. Canvassing the country for names of people to interview, the search committee reached out to Peter Loewenberg, who recommended that they talk with me.

So it was that I came to occupy the first, and probably the

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last, officially designated tenure-track line in psychohistory. Perhaps it is my fault there are no others. When I was hired at Sangamon State in 1972, I had just returned from two years in Europe and a PhD on a 19^th century figure in Polish history. I was looking for something new and very different to work on. In Springfield, it is hard not to notice the presence of Abraham Lincoln. After getting up to speed on the Lincoln literature, I realized there was no serious psychological study of him. That became the focus of my work for the next decade and led to Lincoln’s Quest for Union in 1982, published by Basic Books. It got a rave review on the front page of the second section of the New York Times. I was a bit speechless with joy.

Another project in the 1970s was to edit a psychohistory newsletter with some friends that turned into The Psychohistory Review. It was quite a solid intellectual enterprise, even though, like the field, it was a bit ragged at the edges. I never felt fully satisfied with the journal. I lacked the time or, honestly, the energy to give to it that such a publication deserves. I also had no real support and kept confusing the journal funds in one pocket with my boys’ scout funds in the other. I was also constantly annoyed by the bad press given to our field by the irresponsible early work of Lloyd DeMause. It unnecessarily complicated trying to establish a new interdiscipline.

I also began psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis after 1973. My training analysis was in St. Louis, but the real point of it all was to start classes at the institute in 1976 and work with Heinz Kohut. He brought me into the outer edges of his circle. It was an amazing experience. I never considered writing about Kohut when I knew him, but after his death in 1981 a light bulb went off in my head and I determined to write his biography. It only took me 19 years to complete. The project aroused the determined opposition of Kohut’s widow and most of his cult-like followers (except for my good friends, Arnold Goldberg and David M. Terman). Who asked me, they muttered with disapproval, to write Kohut’s biography? But I am stubborn, and the determination, criticism, and malicious gossip steeled my resolve. The book, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2001, received widespread acclaim and is seen now as definitive. It will certainly be read long after I return to my maker.

In the early 1970s, I came into contact with Robert Jay

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Lifton. I asked him to join the editorial board of The Psychohistory Review and he replied with enthusiasm the next day. In 1974, I began attending his Wellfleet psychohistory meetings with Erikson and other luminaries. I felt I had died and woken up in heaven. I soon found Lifton was an amazing mentor/guru in our forever and constantly evolving relationship. Everything I ever wrote or thought about after Lifton entered my life bore his stamp of support, insight, and highly intelligent critical assessment. He also saved me from wilting in the Midwest into my dotage. In 1985 Lifton left Yale and came to John Jay College of The City University of New York from Yale. He intended to create a research center and was able to secure a chair in the college to hire someone to work with him. One day in 1985 out of the blue he called me in Springfield and wondered if I wanted to come to New York to work with him and be a tenured full professor at the college. That offer took about five seconds to consider.

Lifton and I worked on any number of projects after that, including a huge grant from the MacArthur Foundation that was the basis for a number of books I wrote or edited in the 1980s and 1990s (Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America [1994]; The Psychology of Leadership [1985]; The Year 2000 [1997]; Trauma and the Self [1996]; and Genocide, War, and Human Survival [1996]).

I was also changed personally after 1992 when I began my psychoanalytic practice. I had actually been a research candidate at the Chicago Institute and some friends at a self-psychology institute in New York drew me into their orbit after 1986 and with a bit of supervision made me a colleague. I was 48 in 1992 and it felt like I was starting all over again. At first I had no idea what I was doing but soon discovered I did therapy well and, to my surprise, those under my care got better. After a couple of years, my wife said one day to my startled surprise that I was a better person. I also became convinced that some personal therapy and acquaintance with the clinical world is a vital part of doing psychohistory. Until I immersed myself in therapy, I believed otherwise. I was wrong.

In the spring of 2001, my Kohut biography was published and Lifton retired and left New York for Cambridge. I was adrift. Then 9/11 happened. As I stood there outside my therapy office in Greenwich Village watching the towers burn, I knew I had been born to study this disaster. I got accelerated Institutional Research Board (IRB) approval from the college and began interviewing the

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week after the disaster. For years, however, my project languished. I couldn’t find my voice, even as I published many articles on other subjects and another book, The Fundamentalist Mindset in 2010, with some good friends. Lifton actually saved me from myself. During one long breakfast around 2007, he saw I was stuck and needed help. He also wanted me to help him in turn with his memoir he was then writing. So we struck a deal to dive into each other’s book. I’m not sure I helped him, but there is no question he got me off dead center. Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses came out in time for the tenth anniversary of the tragedy in 2011.

I was eager, then, to do something that didn’t relate to violence and death, so I decided to return to Lincoln. One of my insights about Lincoln was the significance of his friendship with Joshua Speed. The story of their friendship had constituted a chapter in my first book, but I had long felt the topic had not been given the attention in the literature it deserved. So I embarked on a new book with a colleague, Wayne Soini, as my research assistant and collaborator. That book, Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, came out in 2016 from Columbia University Press (which had also published my 9/11 book). I feel with my two Lincoln books I have created a legacy in the field. I am sure many will disagree with me, if not most, but psychohistory in this case can’t be ignored.

One of my projects at John Jay College after 9/11 was to create a Center on Terrorism. In 2014, that work brought me into contact with John, Lord Alderdice, who was a key figure in the peace process in Northern Ireland that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Alderdice is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst who implemented his remarkable professional talents in his troubled land by using empathy to understand and mitigate the sources of violence in humiliation, despair, and trauma. By 2014 he was spending most of his time as a leading voice in the British House of Lords and founded a Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University. I invited him to speak at my Center on Terrorism and I spoke at Oxford. That led to our collaboration on a project in peacemaking that we launched in 2016. At the moment, all we need to save the world is some money.

But my friendship and collaboration with Lord Alderdice also led me to my new book: The Miracle of Peace: Northern Ireland, John Alderdice, and the End of the Troubles. I have about a

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third of it written but much more research still needs to be conducted. That project takes me often to Belfast and the archives there as well as to Britain.

I retired from teaching in the spring of 2019 but I am continuing my psychoanalytic practice. I have more time now to write and think. I can’t imagine a better life than the one I have been privileged to enjoy in psychohistory.

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