Some Thoughts on Psychohistory

Some Thoughts on PsychohistoryAuthor(s): Joseph E. IllickSource: Political Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 759-762Published by: International Society of Political PsychologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791067 .

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Political Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1983

The Forum

Some Thoughts on Psychohistory Joseph E. Illick'

Most historians have been indifferent to or mildly unfriendly toward psychohistory. But, then, historians have never been very enthusiastic about innovations in their field of endeavor; persons who choose to deal with the past are by nature conservative. That such courses as the history of childhood or other offerings that attempt to use psychoanalysis as an interpreta- tive tool are now appearing in college and university bulletins can best be explained by their appeal to students, not teachers. At a time when en- rollments are decreasing, almost any attractive course can pass the curriculum committee.

I now offer Childhood, Past and Present to 20 or 30 students (usually women) a semester, lecturing on Freud and the development of psychoanalysis. They read and we discuss Selma Fraiberg, Erik Erikson, and Bruno Bettelheim before venturing into the historical material (Lloyd deMause, The History of Childhood; David Hunt, Parents and Children in History; Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament; as well as portions of Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood; Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family; Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman, The People of Great Russia; and various journal articles and primary sources) and then returning to present-day issues (David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd; Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, Childhood in Contemporary Cultures).

'San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, 94132.

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I continue to teach, along with most of my colleagues, one or two sections of the American history survey where, aside from my pronounced emphasis on family history (I lean heavily on John G. Clark et al. Three Generations in Twentieth Century America), I do not use a psychological approach, save for occasional short readings such as Brian Bird's brilliant The Etiology of Prejudice, which might accompany the screening of The Birth of a Nation. In my courses on colonial America and even American biography, I also limit my use of a psychoanalytic perspective. I felt most comfortable with psychohistory when teaching alongside a psychoanalyst in a seminar on social issues at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. I supplied historical contexts, while he rendered clinical material and theo- retical formulations to sympathetic and sophisticated participants. But one can hardly hope for such a setting in a college or university.

Like me, almost all psychohistorians teach the time-tested conventional courses as well as their new specialty. We coexist peacefully with our more orthodox colleagues - though they, if asked, would probably give it as their opinion that the dead cannot be psychoanalyzed. However, on either side of this large moderate group are radicals who claim either that psychohistory is substantially different from what has heretofore been called "history" and should, therefore, form its own discipline (see Lloyd deMause, "The Independence of Psychohistory," The History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, Fall, 1975) or that psychohistory is fraudulent and should, therefore, be excised from the curriculum (see David Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psycho- history, 1980).

Those who would abandon psychohistory usually maintain that the living benefit no more from psychoanalysis than the dead. And, indeed, the most striking difference between believers in and skeptics of psychohistory is that the believers have themselves been analyzed or undergone psycho- therapy, while the skeptics have not. One of the axioms of historiography, accepted even by the orthodox, is that personal experience underlies public utterance.

In other words, one becomes a psychohistorian as a consequence of seeing human motivation in a new light (I say this at the risk of being labeled a "born-again" historian) and of believing that thought and behavior in the past must be subject to the same or similar principles. The orthodox historian has a different yardstick for measuring the wellsprings of human activity, which grants more to the rational process and the independent existence of ideas and action, less to the power of the unconscious.

Being a psychohistorian myself, and believing as well in the process of psychological evolution, I think the unconscious was an even more im-



Some Thoughts on Psychohistory 761

portant determinant of human behavior in the past than the present. The process of evolution has brought us into a world of greater consciousness or, if you will, greater rationality. But if we are closer to the cosmos of the orthodox historian, we are far from being there, however much we may wish for total order and perfect reason, i.e., the academic world. And we surely cannot ignore the irrational in the past. Some psychohistorians may speak with more certainty than their arguments warrant, but they are not nearly so demented as their critics would have us believe.

I have in mind here, specifically, the example of radical psychohistorian Lloyd deMause, who announced his position in the opening essay of The History of Childhood and has continued to be heard in his Journal of Psychohistory (formerly History of Childhood Quarterly). Anyone at all unfriendly to psychohistory has found an easy target in deMause who, in turn, has seemed more than willing to make himself vulnerable. deMause initially earned the ridicule of historians by periodizing the modes of parent-child relations from antiquity to the present (infanticidal, aban- donment, ambivalent, intrusive, socialization, helping) and then speculating about the cause of change through his "psychogenic theory of history." Citing the evolution of parent-child relations as an independent but not the sole source of change (and not even independent, according to a footnote), he argued that such evolution is based on the adult's "need" or "ability" (it is not clear which) to regress to the psychic age of the child and "work through the anxieties of that age in a better manner the second time they encounter them than they did in their own childhood," while simul- taneously the child is striving for relationship.

Now, what is so ridiculous about deMause's position? The modes of childhood he outlined do correspond to our knowledge of past childhood in western cultures, though it may be argued that there are exceptions in nonwestern cultures (as historian John Benton argues in a commentary generally sympathetic to deMause in History of Childhood Quarterly, Spring 1974). Children do strive for relationships with adults, although deMause has been far more interested in the other side of the relationship: adult regression and reduction of anxiety through insight about childhood. This is surely the shakiest part of his theory, since clinical evidence shows that disturbed adults (the worst parents) are unable to regress to the psychic age of the children they face and, further, it is by no means established that those parents able to regress would gain insight from the experience. Con- sequently, the psychogenic theory of history has limited, or selective, application. Perhaps this accounts for deMause's use of both terms, "need" and "ability," to regress. But nowhere does he argue that the best parents raise children better equipped to survive. Through "Psychospecia- tion," The Journal of Psychohistory (Summer 1976), he has not con-



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fronted this point. Still, we might speculate that such a process of selec- tion exists.

Needless to say, progress in parenting must be dependent also on other (probably related) changes, such as improvements in medicine, which reduced child mortality, a point that deMause concedes only grudgingly (by hiding it in his footnotes). Nevertheless, the amount of scorn and derision directed at deMause for speculating on such matters seems motivated less by his theorizing than by a massive defensive reaction arising out of the col- lective unconscious of orthodox historians. I cannot pretend to know why this happens.

I have restricted my remarks to the situation in the United States. Two years ago I was a Fulbright lecturer in England. There I heard no angry denunciations of psychohistory. Rather, I had a fellow historian ask me with a smile whether I really believed Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declara- tion of Independence because he "fancied his mum." More often, however, the reaction to the subject of psychohistory was ever-so-polite tolerance. The only person who reacted at all strongly when I put forward my view- point to a gathering from several universities was a man who, I later learned, had had an unhappy first marriage to a psychotherapist.

English students may be more open than their professors, as here; it was hard to tell. Their final exams, written at the end of 3 years' study, covered only political and constitutional history, with a small admixture of social and economic matters. My proposed seminar on the history of the American family failed to recruit students, who saw it would not con- tribute to their finals. An undergraduate told me that all she knew of psychoanalysis was gleaned from Woody Allen films. (Of course, one of her contemporaries in an American academic psychology department might make the same claim.) Allen, whose profound grasp of the past was revealed in his definition of modern man as anyone born between Nietzsche and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," may be doing more for psychohistory than all us sober professionals.



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Some Thoughts on Psychohistory