Psychohistory

For Isaac Asimov's use of the term in science fiction, see Psychohistory (fictional).

Psychohistory is a transdisciplinary field of knowledge that represents an amalgam of psychology, history, psychoanalysis, political psychology, anthropology, ethnology, and related social sciences, art, and humanities. Psychohistorians examine the "why's" of history, utilizing the bottom-up approach rather than starting with psychological theories. They combine the insights of psychodynamic psychology, especially psychoanalysis, with the research methodology of the social sciences and humanities, to understand the emotional origin of the behavior of individuals, groups and nations, past and present.

Psychohistorians are interested in examining one's childhood, personality, family dynamics, as well as dreams, overcoming adversity, creativity, group and political affiliations. No single consensus definition exists within the field. Jacques Szaluta describes it as "the application of psychology, in its broadest sense, or psychoanalysis in a specific sense, to the study of the past." Henry Lawton characterizes it as "the interdisciplinary study of why man has acted as he has in history, prominently utilizing psychoanalytic principles," and notes that the field "is essentially interpretive" rather than narrative. Peter Loewenberg describes it as combining "historical analysis with social science models, humanistic sensibility, and psychodynamic theory and clinical insights to create a fuller, more rounded view of life in the past." Bruce Mazlish defines it as "the application of psychoanalytic concepts and theories to historical data and the re-examination of the psychoanalytic concepts and data in the light of historical methods." Scholars differ on whether psychohistory constitutes a distinct academic discipline or an interpretive method within conventional historical research.

In his seminal book, "The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors," Paul Elovitz, a "big tent" psychohistorian and "an Eriksonian participant-observer and scholar of this valuable movement" provided his assessment of the field of psychohistory through the lense of his experiences since the late 1960's. He stated that "Thoughtful people do psychohistory whether or not they realize it. Psychological assumptions underly any assessment - or even comment about - history, human interaction, and society. We humans want to know why things happen. These psychological assumptions underlying these speculations are seldom well thought out or developed. Thus, all historians do a type of psychohistory without realizing it."

History of the Field of Psychohistory

Rembrandt's painting of the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen.22). Psychohistory holds that ritual child sacrifice once occurred in most cultures.

Precursors (1910s–1950s)

The application of psychoanalysis to historical figures began with Sigmund Freud and his circle. Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) was the first extended psychoanalytic study of a historical personality, and members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society produced dozens of short studies of figures such as Napoleon, Shakespeare, Wagner, and Dante during the 1910s, many published in the journal Imago. In 1913, the American Reformation historian Preserved Smith published "Luther's Early Development in the Light of Psycho-Analysis", an early example of a professional historian applying psychoanalytic concepts to a historical subject. The New York neurologist and psychoanalyst L. Pierce Clark, who wrote psychoanalytic studies of figures including Lincoln and Napoleon, was using the terms "psychohistory" and "psychobiography" by the 1920s.

During the Second World War, the Office of Strategic Services commissioned the psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer to prepare a psychological study of Adolf Hitler, which predicted Hitler's suicide; it was later published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler (1972). After the war, the Central Intelligence Agency employed analysts to assess the psychology of foreign leaders.

Emergence as a field (1957–1969)

In his 1957 presidential address to the American Historical Association, the Harvard diplomatic historian William L. Langer called the application of "dynamic psychology" to history the profession's "next assignment", arguing that the common-sense psychological interpretations of past historians were inadequate compared with psychodynamic knowledge. The following year, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson published Young Man Luther (1958), a study of Martin Luther that drew the attention of much of the academic community to the possibility of psychoanalytically informed history. Later, in 1969, Erik Erikson published Gandhi's Truth: On The Origins of Militant Nonviolence. This book includes a substantial section on Gandhi's childhood, up to the time when he went to London to study law, which helps to understand Gandhi's character and the roots of his life's philosophy.

Academic historians and social scientists produced a wave of psychologically informed studies in the 1960s, most of them psychobiographies, including Bruce Mazlish's edited Psychoanalysis and History (1963), Rudolph Binion's Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple (1968), Frank Manuel's A Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton (1968), and Arthur Mitzman's The Iron Cage (1969), a study of Max Weber. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton published Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1968), which won the National Book Award; and in 1966, he and Erik H. Erikson founded the Group for the Study of Psychohistorical Process, an annual multi-day seminar held at his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. This group was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and met until 2015, becoming the longest-running psychohistorical group.

Institutionalization (1970s)

Psychohistory became an organized field in the United States during the 1970s. The Group for the Use of Psychology in History (GUPH), an affiliate of historians, was established in 1972 by historian Richard L. Schoenwald who pioneered the formal application of psychology, specifically psychoanalysis, to historical research and biography. The Group met at the annual American Historical Association conferences until 1999; its newsletter developed into The Psychohistory Review (1972–1999). In 1973, Lloyd deMause founded The History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, renamed The Journal of Psychohistory in 1978; he also edited the anthology The History of Childhood (1974), established the Institute for Psychohistory (1975), and operated the Psychohistory Press. The growth of the literature was rapid: one count found 12 psychohistorical dissertations, 65 books, and 150 articles produced in 1965–1969, rising to 65 dissertations, 122 books, and 428 articles in 1975–1979.

The International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA; founded in 1977 and formerly abbreviated IPA) held its first annual conference in 1978. The International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP), founded in the same period, launched the peer-reviewed journal Political Psychology in 1979 and became the largest and most international of the organizations applying psychology to public affairs.

The organized field divided early. Within the first years of The Journal of Psychohistory, academics including John Demos, Peter Loewenberg, Elizabeth Marvick, Bruce Mazlish, and Edward Shorter withdrew from its editorial board, and most academic historians committed to the field distanced themselves from deMause's theoretical claims, which they regarded as too radical. In 1982, Paul H. Elovitz and Henry Lawton founded the Psychohistory Forum, which began publishing the journal Clio's Psyche in 1994.

Academic resistance and later developments

Despite the expansion of the 1970s, psychohistory did not become established in university history departments. The field organized during the academic jobs crisis of the 1970s, when history departments were contracting rather than hiring; Charles Strozier has reported that he was the only person hired in the United States specifically as a psychohistorian. Erikson and Lifton, the two most prominent psychohistorians of the late 1960s, both opposed creating a separate academic discipline of psychohistory. The Psychohistory Review ceased publication in 1999, the same period in which GUPH stopped meeting. As academic history departments closed ranks against the field, its practitioners came increasingly from anthropology, literature, political science, social work, sociology, and especially clinical settings.

Organized psychohistorical activity has continued through the IPhA, which holds annual conferences; the Psychohistory Forum and Clio's Psyche; The Journal of Psychohistory; and groups outside the United States, including the German Gesellschaft für Psychohistorie und Politische Psychologie (founded 1993).

Areas of study

Psychohistorical research has concentrated in three related areas: psychobiography, the history of childhood, and the study of groups.

Psychobiography

Main article: Psychobiography

Psychobiography, the psychologically informed study of an individual life, has been the field's principal genre since Freud's study of Leonardo, and most of the works that drew academic attention to psychohistory in the 1950s and 1960s—including Erikson's studies of Luther and Gandhi—were psychobiographies. Since the early 2000s, psychobiography has undergone a revival within academic psychology, marked by the publication of the Handbook of Psychobiography (2005) and a growing methodological literature.

History of childhood

The history of childhood and child-rearing practices became a central psychohistorical concern in the 1970s, reflected in the original title of The Journal of Psychohistory and in deMause's anthology The History of Childhood (1974), which followed Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood (1962) in treating childhood as a subject of historical change. Researchers in this area study how family structure, parenting practices, and the treatment of children have varied across historical periods, and how childhood experience may shape adult behavior and social life.

Group psychohistory

A third line of research applies psychological concepts to groups, including the relationship between leaders and followers, the psychology of war and ethnic conflict, and the transmission of trauma across generations. Representative work includes Lifton's studies of Hiroshima survivors and war veterans and Vamık Volkan's research on large-group identity and international conflict, such as The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (1988). This area overlaps substantially with the academic field of political psychology.

Status as a separate discipline

Practitioners have disagreed over whether psychohistory constitutes a separate discipline or a method available to existing ones. Erikson disliked the term "psychohistorian" and opposed creating a separate field; Lifton has described psychohistory as a method of inquiry rather than a discipline; and Peter Gay characterized his own work as history informed by psychoanalysis, rejecting what he called the historical reductionism of psychohistorians. By contrast, deMause devoted his career to building psychohistory as an independent discipline with its own organizations, journal, and theoretical framework, a position Binion also favored.

Reception among historians has ranged widely. Loewenberg called psychoanalysis the most powerful of interpretive approaches to history, while Jacques Barzun objected that in psychohistorical writing events and agents lose their individuality and become illustrations of psychological mechanisms. Critics have questioned whether psychoanalytic interpretation of deceased subjects, who cannot be examined or respond, can be verified, and whether such interpretations are unavoidably subjective; defenders such as Loewenberg respond that the researcher's emotional reaction to the subject (countertransference) is itself part of a disciplined psychohistorical method, and that no two historians of any school produce identical interpretations of the same evidence. Practitioners have also acknowledged weaknesses within the field: Elovitz writes that highly speculative and poorly researched psychobiographies have damaged its reputation, and that applying a psychiatric diagnosis to a historical figure is sometimes passed off as psychohistory rather than treated as a starting point for research.

Organizations

The Association for Psychohistory was founded by Lloyd deMause over 50 years ago. It had 19 branches around the globe and has published the Journal of Psychohistory since 1973.

The International Psychohistorical Association was also founded by Lloyd deMause, Paul Elovitz, and others in 1977 as a professional organization for the field of psychohistory. The association hosts an annual convention. It also offers theme-based conferences and publishes Psychohistory News.

The Psychohistory Forum, the interdisciplinary scholarly and professional non-profit organization, was founded in 1982 by historian and psychoanalyst Paul H. Elovitz, with Henry Lawton as a co-director. The Psychohistory Forum focuses on the application of psychoanalytic and psychological concepts to the study of historical events, cultural phenomena, and individual lives. It operates at the intersection of psychoanalysis, history, and related fields including psychobiography, sociology, political science, pedagogy and developmental neuroscience. This organization of academics, therapists, and laypeople holds regular scholarly meetings in New York City and at international conventions. It also sponsors Psychobiography Reading Groups and the online discussion group. The Psychohistory Forum publishes the peer-reviewed quarterly journal Clio's Psyche since 1994.

The Gesellschaft fur Psychohistorie und Politische Psychologie e.V. (GPPP), the German organization for psychohistory, was founded in 1992 by Dr. Ludwig Janus and others to explore the intersection of psychology, perinatal psychology and medicine, history, and political science. The GPPP holds yearly conferences (in German) and publishes the Jahrbuch für Psychohistorische Forschung.

Boston University offered the psychohistory courses at the undergraduate level from 2003 to 2006 by professor Anna Geifman, and has published course details. As per Anna Geifman, psychohistorians should not only look for political and economic factors that lead to historical events; they should examine the unconscious motivations of individuals and groups.

Notable Psychohistorians

• Lloyd deMause, founder of The Institute for Psychohistory.
• Peter Gay, Sterling Professor at Yale University, author.
• Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist specializing in psychological motivations for war and terrorism.
• Jerome Lee Shneidman, Editor of the Bulletin of the International Psychohistorical Association, established the Seminar in the History of Legal and Political Thought and Institutions at Columbia University.
• Vamik Volkan, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, University of Virginia professor emeritus, peacemaker, and Nobel Prize nominee.
• Fawn Brodie, Professor at UCLA, and historian and biographer of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Smith, and others.
• Joel Kovel, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; co-founder of eco-socialism.
• Alice Miller (psychologist), psychoanalyst and philosopher, noted for her books on parental child abuse.
• Paul H. Elovitz, Professor of History at Ramapo College, NJ; Editor-in-Chief of Clio's Psyche

Lloyd deMause's Contributions to Psychohistory

Further information: Lloyd deMause

Lloyd deMause, the field's most prominent organizer and the founder of the Institute for Psychohistory, developed a theory of "psychogenic modes" that is the framework most closely associated with psychohistory, although academic practitioners have regarded it as unrepresentative of the field as a whole. deMause held that child-rearing has evolved through a succession of modes—which he termed infanticidal, abandoning, ambivalent, intrusive, socializing, and helping—each producing a distinct "psychoclass", or shared adult mentality that in turn shapes the child-rearing of the next generation. On this account, historical change is driven chiefly by improvement in the treatment of children, so that societies advance only as new psychoclasses emerge from less abusive child-rearing. He set out the scheme most fully in Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), and in The Emotional Life of Nations (2002) introduced the related concept of "group fantasy" as a mediating link between a psychoclass's collective childhood experience and its behaviour in politics, religion, and other areas of social life.

deMause's psychogenic theory has been contested within psychohistory and among historians outside it. Academic historians associated with the field withdrew from the editorial board of The Journal of Psychohistory in its early years and distanced themselves from his theoretical claims, which they regarded as too radical. Fellow psychohistorians have described his broader theories as too speculative and reductionist to gain acceptance among most academics and clinicians, and his "helping mode" as a utopian ideal rather than a practical model of parenting. The six psychogenic modes, the childrearing timeline deMause associated with them, and the group-fantasy concept are described in detail in the article on Lloyd deMause.

Criticisms

Criticisms of Lloyd DeMause's childhood determinism thesis

The criticisms directed specifically at deMause's theoretical framework reflect a broader disciplinary orientation. Most academic historians are trained to treat the documentary record as the primary unit of analysis, approaching historical explanation through rational-empirical rather than psychological interpretation; resistance to deMause's childhood determinism arose substantially from this disciplinary formation rather than from simple closed-mindedness toward psychological approaches to history.

The content of the central objection was not that early childhood experience mattered to adult personality, a claim shared by Eriksonian psychohistory and by psychoanalytically informed history more broadly, but that deMause's version of this premise was deterministic in ways critics found overreaching. Specifically, deMause argued that particular infant care practices, such as swaddling and other methods of physical restraint, produced predictable adult personality types and that, cumulatively, the character of child-rearing in a given historical period determined the psychological character of the adult population and thereby shaped historical events. Critics, including colleagues who supported psychohistory in other respects, rejected this blanket causal claim as insufficiently attentive to the range of factors, cultural, economic, biological, and institutional, that shape personality and collective behavior; their objection was to the deterministic and overreaching character of the thesis, not to the underlying premise that childhood experience matters.

A related critique concerns deMause's characterization of the history of childhood as primarily a narrative of abuse, exploitation, and cumulative improvement. Colin Heywood, in A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Polity Press, 2001), challenged this progressivist framework as reductive, arguing that it subordinated the diversity of historical child-rearing practices to a single teleological arc of suffering followed by enlightenment. John Demos similarly questioned the categorical nature of deMause's claims about childhood history in Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (Oxford University Press, 1986).

Thomas Kohut, a historian at Williams College who trained as a psychoanalyst, published a detailed assessment of the field in the American Historical Review in 1986, drawing a sharp distinction between serious psychohistorical scholarship and what he termed "historical pornography." Kohut wrote that The Journal of Psychohistory exemplified the latter category, work that, in his view, privileged pathological and lurid content over scholarly rigor, and called on the field to hold itself to the evidentiary and interpretive standards of academic history. The identification of psychohistory as a whole with deMause's theoretical framework in the perceptions of outside scholars has itself been a source of concern among practitioners. Elovitz writes that deMause's ideas about fantasy analysis, the fetal origins of history, and "social alters" were regarded by most academics and clinicians as "simply too extreme," and that the reactions these ideas provoked prevented his broader theories from gaining acceptance, with the consequence that psychohistory became disproportionately associated in the eyes of outsiders with its most controversial practitioner. Elovitz notes that "the extremity of his views on fantasy analysis, the fetal origins of history, and social alters led to many colleagues shunning him and refusing to have anything to do with him or those who were perceived as close to him."

Practitioners have responded that the International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA), which has held annual conferences since 1978, encompasses a range of theoretical orientations that extends well beyond deMause's framework, including psychobiography grounded in Eriksonian ego psychology, object-relations approaches to group history, and political psychology drawing on the work of scholars such as Vamık Volkan. The field as practiced in the early twenty-first century is not coextensive with any single theorist's system, and the IPhA's nearly five decades of annual conferences reflect a breadth of inquiry that the overentanglement critique, however warranted in specific cases, does not adequately capture.

Methodological criticism

The most persistent methodological objection to psychohistory concerns the relationship between theory and evidence. Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing in 1973 in response to the posthumous publication of Walter C. Langer's The Mind of Adolf Hitler, contended that psychohistorians typically deduced their facts from their theories, selecting historical material to confirm pre-existing psychological hypotheses rather than allowing interpretations to emerge from the evidence. Because psychohistorical interpretation rests on psychoanalytic assumptions about unconscious motivation, critics argued that the analytical framework was difficult to falsify: historical evidence could typically be assimilated into the interpretive scheme, and gaps in the record could be reinterpreted as repression or suppression rather than as disconfirming evidence.

Lynn Hunt, in an essay titled "The Misfortunes of Psychohistory" published in A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Blackwell, 2002), described the field in terms consistent with a pseudoscientific enterprise, arguing that psychoanalytic interpretation applied retrospectively to deceased subjects, who cannot be examined or asked to verify the interpretation — produces claims that cannot be assessed by the evidentiary methods available to historical scholarship. David Stannard's Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (Oxford University Press, 1980), one of the most sustained published critiques of the field, extended this argument, contending that the Freudian theoretical apparatus psychohistory depended upon could not be tested against historical evidence and therefore failed the basic evidentiary standard of historical scholarship.

See also

• Bicameral mentality – Hypothesis in psychology
• Child murder – Homicide of a minor
• Helicopter parent – Parent who closely manages their child's life
• Historicism – Approach to explaining social and cultural phenomena by studying their history
• Non-aggression principle – Core concept in libertarianism
• Poisonous pedagogy – Human Behavior
• Psychohistorical views on infanticide – Term used in the study of psychohistoryPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Religious abuse – Abuse administered through religion
• Trauma model of mental disorders – Theory in psychopathology

References

Sources

• deMause, Lloyd (1975). A bibliography of psychohistory. Vol. 2. New York: Garland Pub. pp. 517–62. ISBN 0-8240-9999-0. PMID 11614558. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
• deMause, Lloyd (1975). The New Psychohistory. New York: Psychohistory Press. ISBN 0-914434-01-2.
• deMause, Lloyd (1982). Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots. ISBN 0-940508-01-X. Archived from the original on 2002-10-20.
• deMause, Lloyd (1984). Reagan's America. New York: Creative Roots. ISBN 0-940508-02-8.
• deMause, Lloyd (2002). The Emotional Life of Nations, Publisher: Other Press; ISBN 1-892746-98-0 (available online at no cost)
• Ebel, Henry; deMause, Lloyd (1977). Jimmy Carter and American fantasy: psychohistorical explorations. New York: Two Continents. ISBN 0-8467-0363-7.
• Lawton, Henry W., The Psychohistorian's Handbook, New York: Psychohistory Press, ISBN 0-914434-27-6 (1989)
• Loewenberg, Peter, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach, Transaction Pub, ISBN 1-56000-846-6 (2002)
• Stannard, David E., Shrinking History, On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-503044-3 (1980). A critique of the Freudian approach to psychohistory.
• Szaluta, Jacques, Psychohistory: Theory and Practice, Publisher Peter Lang, ISBN 0-8204-1741-6 (1999)

External links

• The Institute for Psychohistory. This website contains over 1,500 pages of psychohistorical articles and books.
• International Psychohistorical Association. The professional organization for the field of psychohistory.
• Blind Trust: Leaders & followers in times of crisis: An acclaimed documentary film about the life and work of Vamik Volkan.
• Clio's Psyche and The Psychohistory Forum: Psychological and Historical Insight without jargon.
• German Society for Psychohistorical Research (in German).
• The Institute for Social Psychohistory. Promotes research into and advocates for the field of social psychohistory.