The Disavowal of Psychohistory and the Teaching of History

by Brian Connolly

The relationship between history and psychoanalysis has always been a bit vexed. Joan W. Scott has written of the “incommensurability of history and psychoanalysis,” which “provides the ground for continued conversation and debate about the possibilities, and also the limits, of a collaboration between the different temporalities of psychoanalysis and history” (2012, 82). If there is a trajectory of possibilities and limits that might propel critical historical thinking, there are also dangers. Michel de Certeau, himself one of the great practitioners of a psychoanalytic history, put it this way:

Since these Freudian “concepts” are supposed to explain all human endeavor, we have little difficulty driving them into the most obscure regions of history. Unfortunately, they are nothing other than decorative tools if their only goal amounts to a designation or discreet obfuscation of what the historian does not understand (1988, 288-89).

Another advocate of a psychoanalytically inflected history was less circumspect. “My plea for history as an elegant, fairly rigorous aesthetic science,” Peter Gay wrote in Freud for Historians,

was powerfully assisted by my commitment to psychology, in particular to psychoanalysis. I saw it then, and see it even more now, as a rewarding auxiliary discipline that the historical profession has so far inadequately trusted, and certainly far from mastered. The much canvassed disasters of psychohistory, on which its detractors have fastened with a kind of unholy glee, are ground for caution rather than despair—or for disdain (1985, ix-x).

Taking these cautions seriously, we might still ask, what was/is psychohistory? What has the discipline of history lost by effectively disavowing it? And what might this mean today for the teaching of history in the United States (and elsewhere), as the university itself crumbles?

Historian Peter Loewenberg noted the virtues of psychohistory in relation to other methods:

I believe psychohistory to be the most powerful of interpretive approaches to history because (1) it is the only model of research that includes in its method the countertransference phenomenon—the emotional and subjective sensibility of the observer—and (2) it enriches the historical account of political, social, and cultural-intellectual events with a perception of latent or unconscious themes, of style, content, and conflict, that integrate apparently discordant data from a specific historical locus (2017, 3).

In other words, psychohistory attends to the conundrum of desire in history, and it does so in a way no other method can.

The origins of psychohistory are, like all origin stories, a bit contradictory. While Freud certainly pursued numerous historical and psycho-biographical forays—one thinks of anything from the book on Leonardo da Vinci, the mythic history of Totem and Taboo, the speculative history of Moses and Monotheism, and the strange, co-authored book on Woodrow Wilson—he never used the term. It was first used by American psychoanalyst L. Pierce Clark in the 1920s and then popularized by Erik Erikson’s 1958 book Young Man Luther. In between, Isaac Asimov, in a series of short stories published between 1942 and 1944, invented a different mode of psychohistory: a kind of algorithmic prediction of the future, based on aggregated data from large populations. It shared with the psychohistory of academic historians a penchant for the speculative, but it sought to tame the wildness of desire that animated the best psychoanalytic history.

Psychohistory consolidated in the mid-twentieth century—not surprisingly, since psychoanalysis had permeated much of American culture by that point. References to it could be found everywhere, from scholarly writing to comic books, advice columns, and television programs. Perhaps the best-known essay in American historiography, Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” was, if not explicitly psychohistorical, a nonetheless compelling and daring exploration of conspiracy through psychological and historical methods, conversant in psychoanalytic concepts like projection, sadomasochism, defense, phantasy, and so on. The final sentence is a beautiful evocation of the psychic life of history: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well” (2008, 40).

By the 1970s, psychohistory was in full bloom. In 1958, William L. Langer, historian of France, president of the American Historical Association, and sibling of the psychoanalyst Walter Langer, had still been calling for

the urgently needed deepening of our historical understanding through exploitation of the concepts and findings of modern psychology. And by this…I do not refer to classical or academic psychology…but rather to psychoanalysis and its later developments and variations as included in the terms “dynamic” or “depth psychology.” (1958, 284-285)

But by the 1970s there was a scholarly journal (The Journal of Psychohistory), a scholarly organization (The International Psychohistorical Association), and numerous monographs.

Yet this heyday was short-lived. In 2021, a dissertation on the history of psychohistory—the subtitle of which was “The Rise and Fall of Psychohistory”—captured the declensionist narrative of the field. One problem was that the psychohistory that coalesced around the journal and the organization, while taking its cues from early practitioners like Erikson, Bruce Mazlish, and Robert Jay Lifton, was often dogmatic and reductionist, tending toward psychobiography and concentrating its attention on either childhood or authoritarian leaders.

Yet the decline of psychohistory as a subdiscipline didn’t do away with all psychoanalytically informed history. There were, for instance, the idiosyncratic and brilliant psychobiographies by Fawn Brodie; the Marxist-Freudian work of Eli Zaretsky in Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life; and Michael Paul Rogin’s stirring, incisive exploration of the Oedipalized scene of settler colonialism in Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of American Indian (1975). There were also far-reaching reconstructions of the historical discipline itself, for example in Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, the oeuvre of de Certeau, the work of intellectual historian Dominic LaCapra, and in the socialist-feminist work of Juliet Mitchell and others.

Psychoanalysis has also informed such fruitful, surprising, speculative, and critical work as Lynn Hunt’s The Family Romance of the French Revolution, John Demos’s A Little Commonwealth,  Nell Irvin Painter’s “Soul Murder and Slavery,” and Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” While none of these works would be classified as psychohistory (indeed, some of it actively opposed psychohistory), they nevertheless took seriously the conjunction of history and psychoanalysis.

The field of psychoanalysis itself has always been at least minimally historically engaged, and this engagement has been documented in recent histories of psychoanalysis by Dagmar Herzog, Hannah Zeavin, Élisabeth Roudinesco, Omnia el Shakry, Camille Robcis, and many others. And journals like Psychoanalysis and History and Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society have attained prominence in the field.

And yet, for all of this intellectual excitement and for all of the forms of institutionalization that accompany field growth, psychohistory remains largely absent from undergraduate history curricula. There have been some important exceptions—at UCLA , for instance, where Peter Loewenberg long taught courses on psychohistory (and where Fawn Brodie was a professor of history until her death in 1981). And some of the dyed-in-the-wool psychohistorians—those associated with the Journal of Psychohistory, the International Psychohistorical Association, Clio’s Psyche, and the Psychohistory Forum—have taught courses here and there. For instance, David Beisel’s courses on psychohistory were among the most popular history courses at Rockland Community College (1998). In the mid-1960s, the university-adjacent Wellfleet Group formed by Lifton, Erikson, and Mazlish received funding from the American Academy for Arts and Sciences meant to support, among other things, the teaching of psychohistory. But that vision was never realized.

Consequently, our undergraduate history programs remain ill-equipped and unmotivated to teach psychoanalytic approaches to history. Indeed, most departments remain organized around geography and period rather than method and theory. The ongoing “crisis of the humanities” that has afflicted all humanities and many social science disciplines—a crisis of manufactured austerity, rabid vocational drive, and administrative short-sightedness—has made most history departments risk-averse and intellectually conservative. In over two decades of teaching, I’ve had only two opportunities to teach courses on psychoanalysis and history, and they were constrained to histories of psychoanalysis (once as a history of science course and once as a history of psychoanalysis in the U.S.). The impoverishment of undergraduate curricula dedicated to history and theory, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis, on the other, makes it close to impossible to address psychohistory and the many interpretive and analytic enrichments it has to offer our students. Indeed, in those courses psychoanalysis was an object to be studied, not an interpretive frame for thinking. Of course, students came with some preconceptions and the familiar pop-Freudian lexicon, and we spent a lot of time doing the work of contextualization so common in history. But we didn’t have time for the analytic and interpretive promise of psychoanalysis for history (and of history for psychoanalysis). The semester was too short, the aims of course didn’t include historiography, and, in any case, the rest of the history curriculum would have made such an approach a potentially bewildering anomaly.

Where it is taught at all, psychohistory has served as a convenient and easy synecdoche for the much more wide-ranging relation between psychoanalysis and history. Indeed, psychoanalysis, where it is taught at all, is taught as something belonging to the past-that is, as history. That such a complex and unruly way of thinking about history is largely excluded from the contemporary teaching and writing of history robs our students of the most generative way of thinking about the turbulence of desire in history, the wildness of historical narrative, the relevance of unconscious determinism, and, not least, the limits of empiricism. Indeed, in history curricula increasingly constrained and foreshortened by declining faculty positions, fewer and larger courses (more and more of them rote “general education” courses) taught by contingent instructors, and routinely subjected to right-wing attacks and censorship justified by “facts only” approaches, the very idea of history is under assault.

 

Works Cited

Beisel, David. 1998. “Teaching Psychohistory.” The Journal of Psychohistory 25.4. https://psychohistory.com/articles/teaching-psychohistory/

Brodie, Fawn. 1974. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: W. W. Norton.

Brown, Norman O. 1959. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. New York: Vintage.

de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. Tr. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press.

Demos, John. 1973. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eaton, Arthur. 2021. History Telling: The Rise and Fall of Psychohistory. Doctoral Thesis (PhD). London: University College London.

El Shakry, Omnia. 2020. The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Erikson, Eric. 1958. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: W. W. Norton.

Gay, Peter. 1985. Freud for Historians. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Herzog, Dagmar. 2018. Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hofstadter, Richard. 2008. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. New York: Vintage.

Hunt, Lynn. 1992. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. London: Routledge.

LaCapra, Dominic. 1989. Soundings in Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Langer, William L. 1958. “The Next Assignment.” American Historical Review 63.2: 283-304.

Loewenberg, Peter. 2017. Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach. London: Routledge.

Mitchell, Juliet. 1975. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women. New York: Vintage.

Painter, Nell Irvin. 1995. Soul Murder and Slavery. Waco: Baylor University Press.

Robcis, Camille. 2021. Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rogin, Michael Paul. 1991. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. New York: Routledge.

Roudinesco, Élisabeth. 2016. Freud: In His Time and Ours. Tr. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Scott, Joan W. 2012. “The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History.” History and Theory 51.1: 63-83.

Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2: 64-81.

Zaretsky, Eli. 1976. Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life. New York: Harper and Row.

Zeavin, Hannah. 2021. The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy. Cambridge: MIT Press.