Volume 10 Number 1June 2003

9/11 terrorist attacks, American politics, collective trauma, George Bush, group trauma, Iraq, Osama Bin Laden, psychohistory, Saddam Hussein, terrorism, US-Iraq war

In this article, the author applies a theory of collective trauma to the American response to the 9/11 attacks and the 2003 war with Iraq. The author proposes that a traumatized group reacts in three ways, singly or combined: persistent painful recall, belated defense against the original blow, and unwitting reliving of the trauma in disguise. The author contends that the United States shows all three, pointing to continuing memorialization and mourning, counterterrorist controls focused on airports and immigrants, and a war on Iraq that echoes 9/11, including an opening aerial attack on Baghdad under the code name Shock and Awe. Drawing on the pattern that traumatized groups often relive events through leaders who are reliving traumas of their own, the author argues that George W. Bush’s course toward war was shaped by his relationship to his father, George H. W. Bush. The author sees the 1993 Kuwait car bomb plot, which local officials blamed on Saddam Hussein, as giving that relationship a target, and cites Bush’s Houston fundraiser remark about Saddam. The author is sharply critical of the war, citing its costs to American lives, civil liberties, the United Nations, international law, and Iraqi civilians, and describes the claims about terrorist links and weapons of mass destruction as unproven. The author concludes that the fit between this escalating course and patterns documented in historical case studies is a grave warning, and asks whether the nation will heed it.

American politics, Clio’s Psyche, George Bush, Iraq, Journal of Psychohistory (JOP), Middle East, Osama Bin Laden, Persian Gulf War, psychohistory, Saddam Hussein, US-Iraq war, war on terror

In this article, written after the 2003 war with Iraq, the author describes the war and offers free associations to it from a psychohistorian’s standpoint. He conjectures that fear of SARS partly displaced fears of terrorist biological and chemical weapons, and that people project their health fears onto the nation. He contrasts televised images of Iraqi civilians in the 1991 Gulf War with 2003 coverage, in which embedded reporters, retired officers as commentators, and a military framing directed attention away from civilians. He attends to the language of war, including the names given the Afghanistan and Iraq operations, targeting zones called kill boxes, and the bunker-buster bomb MOAB. He criticizes the administration’s expectation of a swift war and the gap between its stated aim of liberation and the effects of the fighting. He suggests that French, German, and Russian opposition reflected in part discomfort with the administration’s open aggression, and proposes that pollsters ask about reaction formation against violence. He also discusses the difficulty of addressing several audiences under continuous news coverage and the conflict between asymmetrical warfare and winning Iraqi civilians. He reports his own dismay when war begins, his 1991 emotions research project, and his Army service. He concludes by contrasting Iraq with postwar Germany and Japan, judging the prospects for democracy in Iraq poor while noting conditions favorable to a viable state, and questioning whether the United States will commit the funds and time for rebuilding.

American presidential elections, Calvin Hall, dreamwork, George Bush, Middle East, political ideology, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud, terrorism, US-Iraq war

This article, in the War with Iraq special feature, offers a preliminary report on dreams connected to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Extending earlier work on dreams and U.S. presidential elections, the September 11 attacks, and self-reported political ideology, the author maintains that some dreams bear meaningfully on urgent public and political questions in the dreamer’s waking life, and disputes the view associated with Sigmund Freud and Calvin Hall that dreaming concerns only private matters. The author recounts soliciting dream accounts through progressive publications, electronic forums, and colleagues, and receiving 25 responses, nineteen from women and six from men, all but three from opponents of the war. Noting the small number, the gender imbalance, and the antiwar tilt, the piece cautions that the dreams may not represent Americans generally, and discloses the author’s own opposition to the war and wish to make sense of it through the dreams. It presents one pre-war dream, of elephants bearing a house and of caged birds in an attic, that contains no explicit reference to war. It reports the dreamer’s reading of the dream as expressing his political views and a recognition of his own share of responsibility for wars. The article acknowledges that a single dream says little about broader patterns, proposes that a larger set of similar dreams could be useful, and promises fuller documentation later.

Civilization and Its Discontents, Holocaust, human suffering, Iraqi invasion, Middle East, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud, suicide homicides, terrorism, World War II (WWII)

In this article, the authors consider how the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and the 2003 war against Iraq were reported, setting aside the political, economic, military, and ethical perspectives. They open with Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and its three sources of human suffering: nature, the body, and relations among people. They maintain that progress has been slowest in relations with the other. They contend that two phenomena converge in the suicide-homicides since 9/11: the declaration of jihad and sensationalist media coverage. They characterize jihad as offering a fantasy of negating death and a place in popular memory as heroes. They contrast Aristotle’s account of tragic representation and katharsis, which depends on reflective distance, with television news, which they argue presents real tragedy as staging. They cite the “America under Attack” and “America’s New War” banners and the live images from Baghdad, and contend that repetitive scenes of aircraft, missiles, and wreckage displace the human dimension. Drawing on Freud’s death instinct, they argue for an ethics of law and reciprocity, note the human capacity to dehumanize others, and compare televised violence to the return of the primal horde. They conclude that religious fanaticism dehumanizes attackers and victims alike, and that war as spectacle does the same to soldiers and civilians. In their view, reporting facts is the press’s ethical duty, but making human suffering an object of display makes death banal.

empathy, group identity, Gulf War, Iraqi invasion, Middle East, psychohistory, terrorism, war casualties, warfare, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged

In this article, the author argues that individual empathy is a casualty of war between groups. The author holds that empathy is a capacity present from early childhood and that its absence in a social situation usually reflects suppression rather than deficiency. Working from the definitions of war and empathy in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, the author contends that a soldier’s obligation to kill and to be a target is tolerable only through suppressed empathy. The author describes milder suppression in competition, especially team sports, and among people with fragile self-esteem. Invoking Freud’s description of repressed feeling, the author proposes that suppressed empathy is expressed in distorted ways, including exaggerated attachment to one’s own group or nation and exaggerated hatred of the enemy. The author objects to the wartime euphemism for the killing of non-combatants and applies the word damage to war’s effect on empathy. The author states a belief that the 1991 Gulf War lessened empathy in all participating nations and that its prolonged suppression contributed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and its coalition. The author suggests that later effects may include American aggression against other countries, heightened Muslim antagonism toward the United States, and more frequent attacks on Israel and the United States by individual attackers.

Basic Neurosis and Divorce Won’t Help, Civilization and Its Discontents, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach, Edmund Bergler, “The Evolution of Childhood,” Hitler Among the Germans, Lloyd deMause, Peter Loewenberg, psychohistory, Rudolph Binion, Sigmund Freud

In this article, the author, the journal’s editor, names works he regards as classics of psychohistory and recounts how he came to the field. He discusses Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, Peter Loewenberg’s Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach, Lloyd deMause’s “The Evolution of Childhood,” and Rudolph Binion’s Hitler Among the Germans. He judges each useful for scholarship or teaching, notes that deMause’s six modes of childrearing can be misused if applied rigidly, and reports that most of his students struggle with psychogenic theory. He also credits the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler’s popular books, which he calls simplistic, with opening him to the unconscious in the 1960s. He describes his own entry into the field as arising from unanswered questions about himself and others and from a university colleague’s conversation. He concludes that people reach an understanding of the unconscious by many routes.

cannibalism, Civilization and Its Discontents, Dan Dervin, Eli Sagan, Enactments, Hitler’s Ideology, psychoanalysis, The Psychoanalysis of Racism, psychohistory, Richard Koenigsberg, Revolution & Nationalism, Sigmund Freud

In this article, part of the Classics and Psychohistorians special feature, the author recounts how he came to psychohistory and sets out what he takes the field to include. Born in 1946, he describes a turn during his undergraduate years at Brandeis University from physics toward the question of why people act as they do. He reports the influence of Freud’s writings on history and civilization, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, set against the anti-war movement and the New Left of the mid-1960s. He mentions later graduate study in clinical psychology at the University of Chicago and York University, Toronto, where he studied with David Bakan. He states that his interest was in understanding rather than therapeutic change, especially in what leads people to drop atomic bombs on cities and to commit the Holocaust. He proposes that psychohistory covers any use of psychoanalytic or psychological concepts to understand historical or contemporary realities, from biography and literary, film, and art criticism to the history of ideas and political analysis. He places within it the applied psychoanalysis of Freud, Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, Roheim, Reich, Erikson, and Fromm. He observes that newer perspectives, including object relations, self psychology, attachment theory, Lacan, relational psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and developmental research, have widened the field. He closes by naming three favorite, lesser-known authors and expressing admiration for their work: Richard Koenigsberg, Eli Sagan, and Dan Dervin, whose Enactments he describes as a systematic analysis of psychohistory.

Civilization and Its Discontents, Friedrich Nietzsche, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud

In this article, the author, a historian, recounts how Freud became the major influence on his thinking as it moved into historiography. He describes reading Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis as a purely intellectual experience and says he has tried to write history in the same modest, comprehensible manner. He regards Civilization and Its Discontents as one of the supreme works of thought, valuing its bleakness and anti-utopian stance, and proposes a more accurate English translation of its German title. He maintains that its conclusions condense the substance of Greek drama and Shakespeare. Moving to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, he contends that both thinkers address irreducible contradictions in life, span the individual and civilization, and teach modesty in individual and collective ambitions. He suggests that efforts to soften Freud or dismiss Nietzsche as protofascist reflect how unbearable many find their truth. He lists subjects on which he says Freud helped him, including Walther Rathenau, Marx, Lenin, Wilson, Marxian and Keynesian economics, American pragmatism, and, with Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther, father-son dynamics in John Neville Keynes and John Maynard Keynes. He reports that critics found his readings of Rathenau unappreciative, of Keynes uncomprehending, and of Marx expressive of anger, and sharply dismissed his interpretations. He says he found this response exhilarating without regarding it as confirming or refuting his evaluations.

Adolf Hitler, Amerindian tribes, character structures, Childhood and Society, childrearing practices, ego development, Erik H. Erikson, moral values, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory

In this article, part of the journal’s special feature on classics and psychohistorians, the author surveys the work of Erik H. Erikson as a pioneer of psychohistory. The author recounts Erikson’s studies of childrearing among the Sioux and the Yurok in the late 1930s and early 1940s, reporting that Erikson tied certain behavioral configurations to childrearing practices without positing a causal link to tribal character or treating either group as pathological. The author also reports Erikson’s 1942 sketch of Hitler, “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,” later expanded in Childhood and Society, which related a leader’s identity needs to the needs of large groups. The article covers Erikson’s concepts of identity, adolescence, and the life cycle, and his view of the psychoanalyst as a participant historian working through disciplined subjectivity. It also covers his psychobiographies of Gorky, Luther, and Gandhi, and contrasts his life-affirming reading of Luther with those of Preserved Smith and Fromm. The author maintains that Erikson urged psychohistorians to recognize how their own unlived experience shapes their research. The author further describes a reformist strand in Erikson’s writing on childrearing and his opposition to child mistreatment. The author concludes that Erikson’s psychohistorical enterprise merits further study.

Erich Fromm, Erick H. Erikson, Frantz Fanon, gender identities, group psychology, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Herbert Marcuse, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud, U.S. politics

In this article, the author recounts the texts that most influenced his intellectual outlook, beginning with Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and its problem of collective emotional life, which he relates to present-day American political debate. He also names Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics and Erikson’s Young Man Luther, which helped move him away from political science. He further names writings by Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, and Frantz Fanon, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He gives most space to Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur, describing its nonlinear organization and its argument that gender identities form in early childcare, where men and women together assign women a monopoly of infant care. He reports her view that this arrangement enables destructiveness, including ecological damage, and her hope that shared parenting would foster responsibility and fuller erotic gratification. He presents her as both counterpart and critic of Brown and Marcuse.

emotional development, family life, political corruption, political reforms, psychobiography, psychohistory, Robert M. La Follette, Vietnam War, Watergate

In this article, the author recounts her experience of writing and publishing a psychobiography of the Wisconsin Progressive Robert M. La Follette (1855–1925), which she began as a doctoral dissertation in 1981. She reports that she took up the subject because earlier biographies left his uncompromising personality unexplored, and she describes what drew her to his early family life, including his stepfather’s harsh religious preaching and his supervision of the exhumation of his father’s grave at age 39. She recounts the manuscript’s rejection by Harvard University Press after divergent readers’ reports, and the further rejections that followed, which she attributes to strong disdain for openly psychoanalytic interpretation. She describes publishing two articles from the manuscript in The Psychohistory Review (1993, 1995). She also describes removing psychoanalytic language and references to theorists and giving greater weight to politics, so that the book appeared as Fighting Bob La Follette: Righteous Reformer from the University of North Carolina Press in 2000. She reports the wide range of responses in twenty-four reviews, from reviewers who ignored the psychology to those who read the book as a psychobiography. These included favorable notices, a sharply critical review in The Progressive, and the Wisconsin Historical Society’s 2001 Book of Merit Award. She concludes that praise outweighed hostility and states her belief that her approach brought new understanding of La Follette.

historical distortion, medical school, Monotheism, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud

In this article, the author, a physician, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and psychohistorian, recounts how he became a psychohistorian. He describes his family background, his father’s career as a linguist and interpreter and his anti-Nazi activity, his own service as a combat infantryman in France, Belgium, and Germany, and a postwar college course in Latin American history that led him to question the history he had been taught. He names Freud’s writings, notably Moses and Monotheism, as his first psychohistorical studies. He lists further influences, including works by Lloyd deMause and Philippe Ariès and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he calls the most insightful historical writing he has read. He concludes that personal psychoanalytic therapy and training, together with an inquiring mind that doubts non-psychological explanations of historical events, are the most important preparation for a psychohistorian.

Cinema and Society, Gore Videl, group fantasies, History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, Holocaust, memoir, Paul Monaco, psychobiography, psychohistory, Rudolph Binion, Screening History, World War II (WWII)

In this article, the author recommends works in psychohistory that he considers neglected or unfairly criticized, drawing on books and papers from his own collection and on his teaching. He begins with film, which he says receives little attention in mainstream psychohistory. He points to Paul Monaco’s Cinema and Society (1976), for its comparison of dreaming and film viewing and for its account of filmmaking as a collective group fantasy. He also points to Henry Lawton’s review essay “Towards a Psychohistorical Theory of Film” (Journal of Psychohistory, 1992). He turns next to the Holocaust literature and to Tom Segev’s Soldiers of Evil, based on interviews with concentration camp commanders. He reports that Segev found no certifiable psychopathology among them, and he maintains that Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men supports the finding and that it is still resisted with regard to terrorists and suicide bombers. He also defends Rudolph Binion’s Hitler Among the Germans (1975) against its critics. He contends that later Hitler studies offer no evidence against Binion’s emphasis on Hitler’s mother, her Jewish physician, and his wartime gassing, or against Binion’s account of his charisma.

Civilization and Its Discontent, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach, Henrich Himmler, Journal of Psychohistory (JOP), Paul Elovitz, Peter Loewenberg, psychohistory, Sigmund Freud

In this article, part of the “Classics and Psychohistorians” special feature, the author offers a short personal list of works he regards as classics of psychohistory. He names Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents first, recommending it while remarking that its sweeping statement about civilization may reflect some arrogance. He also recommends Freud’s “Analysis Terminal and Interminable,” which he does not count as a psychohistorical classic, as an example of Freud’s intellectual honesty. He lists two Peter Loewenberg essays collected in Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach: “The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler” and “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort.” Maintaining that the psychohistorical approach is also of use to military historians, he adds the expanded version of Paul Elovitz’s “Perspectives on Teaching About War-Making in 2002 America,” the centerpiece of a Journal of Psychohistory symposium in Summer 2003.

child psychology, childhood dream, Fred Rogers, latency stage, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” oedipal conflict, psychohistory, TV analysis

In this article, the author recounts a childhood nightmare from around the age of seven, in which the author rides the trolley from the television program Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood through a dark tunnel to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, interacts with its characters, and on the return trip is run down by the trolley. The article reports that the author watched the program regularly in the early to mid-1970s, remembers it less well than other children’s programs of the period, and is unsure whether the dream occurred once or recurred. It offers two readings of the dream and presents them as possibly complementary. The first is Freudian: the dream is an Oedipal echo in which a fantasy of power over adults and royalty is ended by the greater power of the father, a triumph of the reality principle over the pleasure principle and a premonition of the difficult passage into adulthood. The second draws on Donald Winnicott’s concept of transitional space. It treats the Neighborhood of Make-Believe as a play space and the dream as the anxiety felt when external reality overwhelms fantasy. The author concludes that the dream cautions against giving up play and fantasy entirely, and suggests that Mr. Rogers would have approved of that message.

child development, child psychology, childhood influence, ethical model, Fred Rogers, moral philosophy, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” psychobiography, psychohistory, sibling relationships, TV analysis

In this article, the author, writing after the death of Fred Rogers, host of the public television program Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, recounts watching the show from its 1968 debut through his teens and reflects on what it meant to him. He characterizes Rogers as a man who spoke openly about feelings and attended to ethical and spiritual matters, notes that Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister with academic training in child development, and reports that many people found him the same in private as on screen. The author credits Rogers and the program with influencing his decision to become a clinical psychologist. He maintains that Rogers embodied the five values of the model of value ethics presented in his forthcoming book Do the Right Thing: Living Ethically in an Unethical World: respect, responsibility, integrity, competence, and concern. He judges that other television personalities fall short of Rogers as examples for children and families, and he contends that if more people were like Rogers, society would face fewer of its present national and international problems. The article closes with a personal farewell.

child psychology, family dynamics, mother-son relationship, Fred Rogers, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” nature of man, psychobiography, psychohistory, self-esteem, TV analysis

In this article, the author, a clinical psychologist who teaches a course on early childhood, recounts personal and professional encounters with the television host Fred Rogers and his program Mr. Rogers and His Neighborhood. The author reports that her three-year-old son believed Rogers knew his name. A family member’s correspondence with Rogers then brought a reply, which the author relays, linking name and nature in Old Testament Hebrew and describing Rogers’s professional effort to know the nature of children. She also recounts a therapy client who said she felt special after watching the program with her toddler. She reports that students in her course, comparing it with Sesame Street and Blues Clues, recall its slower pace and personal attention fondly, even when they initially groan at the mention of it. The author is admiring of Rogers. She concludes that his appeal lay in personal connection and appreciation of each individual, and that viewers from age three to adulthood, herself included, felt he knew their name.

child psychology, Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, public television, psychobiography, psychohistory, race relations, religious training, secular humanism, socio-political influence, theology

In this article, the author recounts preaching a first sermon during a year of student ministry at Emory United Methodist Church near Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, after a church marquee bearing the name Mr. Rogers drew an unusually large congregation. From this anecdote the author turns to Fred Rogers, a seminary graduate and ordained Presbyterian minister, who is reported to have regarded Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as his ministry. The author proposes that the program’s format derived from the postwar Protestant children’s sermon. From the episodes he saw, he characterizes its message as the undogmatic theology of mainline Protestantism, Reform Judaism, and liberal Catholicism, reducible to an admonition to be kind. He reports studies indicating that since World War II mothers, rather than fathers, have most often influenced clergy vocations. He suggests that traditionally feminine values of harmony and soft voices suit such a theology, leaving open whether this is cause or effect. He also notes that women he asked described Rogers as non-threatening. He maintains that public television’s reliance on affluent donors, foundations, and corporations shapes its programming, and illustrates this with a 1970s WQED taping from which a physician’s remark about the Mellon family was cut. The author is critical of the program’s avoidance of questions of wealth and poverty, while acknowledging that he did not raise them in his own pulpit.

Aragonese-Catalan Empire, Columbia University, countertransference, Group for the Use of Psychology in History (GUPH), International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA), interview, Jerome Lee Shneidman, Jewish immigrants, psychiatry, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum, Spanish history

This interview, conducted by Paul H. Elovitz at the home of J. Lee Shneidman, emeritus professor of history at Adelphi University and a historian of medieval Aragon and modern Spain, covers his family background, training, and approach to psychohistory. Shneidman recounts that his turn to psychoanalytic study began with a puzzle in his research for The Rise of the Aragonese-Catalan Empire: 1200–1350, namely why James I of Aragon chose Jews as administrators. He says his wife, a psychoanalyst, helped him resolve it by asking about the king’s childhood. He describes coursework at Columbia’s psychoanalytic training program and at another institute. He maintains that he begins from documented facts and then selects among theorists such as Balint, Ferenczi, and Kernberg, rather than fitting facts to a framework. He defines psychohistory as one tool for explaining motivation and choice, and names Erik Erikson as its foremost contributor. He applies early parental loss to Aaron Burr and projective identification to Alexander Hamilton’s hostility toward Burr. He proposes that Thomas Jefferson’s divided childhood household fostered compartmentalization, a theme in his book on Jefferson’s covert dealings with Spain and the Barbary states. He argues that no history is impartial and links his own interests to childhood illness and hospitalization. He also gives views on fundamentalism and terrorism, on Francisco Franco and Hitler’s attitude toward him, and on John F. Kennedy, and he expresses personal dislike of Robert Kennedy.

childhood trauma, Erik H. Erikson, family dynamics, meeting report, narcissism, parent-child relationship, psychoanalytic theory, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum, public self, Sue Erikson Bloland

This meeting report describes the April 5, 2003, Work-in-Progress meeting of the Psychohistory Forum, where Sue Erikson Bloland, a psychotherapist and psychoanalytic teacher, spoke about growing up as the daughter of Erik H. Erikson and about her research on other famous people, including Laurence Olivier. The report presents Bloland’s account of the drive to be famous, which she is developing in her forthcoming book Fame: The Power and Cost of a Fantasy and outlined in a 1999 Atlantic Monthly article of the same title. Bloland maintains that a famous person’s public image is the opposite of the private self, an ideal self whose grandiosity defends against overwhelming early shame. She attributes this to parent-child relationships in which meeting parental expectations displaces the real self, and proposes that the public becomes a substitute connecting parent. She reports that she has not yet found a famous person without a history of trauma. The report also covers her recollections of her father’s fame after Childhood and Society, of the distance between his public standing as a theorist and his emotional connection with his children, and of the family’s need to protect his idealized image. It notes that the discussion was enthusiastic, that Bloland will return, and that Lawrence J. Friedman, author of Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson, will address the Forum on Erikson and Erich Fromm.