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What is Psycho-History?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Bruce Mazlish
Bruce Mazlish
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Extract

I HAVE entitled my paper ‘What is Psycho-History’, in obvious imitation of an illustrious predecessor in analysing Clio’s nature and character. For reasons that will be clear later, I have come to think that psycho-social history may well be a better title than psycho-history for the inquiry that seems to be emerging, but since ‘tradition’, that is about ten years of effort by historians and psycho- analysts, has gone on under the latter rubric, I shall retain it here.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 21 , December 1971 , pp. 79 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1971

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References

1 Jaspers, Karl, Psychopathologie générate, French translation by Kastler, and Mendousse, , quoted in Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Markmann, Charles Lam (New York, 1967), pp. 168–69Google Scholar. CfPolanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge (London, 1958).Google Scholar

2 For a further instance of Erikson’s efforts to establish the historian’s self-knowledge, see Erikson, Erik H., ‘On the Nature of Psycho-Historical Evidence: In Search of Gandhi’, Daedalus (Summer, 1968).Google Scholar

3 Erikson, Erik H., Gandhi’s Truth (New York, 1969), pp. 50–51. This particular instance should remind us that evidence and inference in psycho- history are, necessarily, defined by the needs and theoretical concepts of the discipline itself. A datum may be evidence for a psycho-historian that would quickly be passed over by the general historian as of no value. Similarly, inferences from a range of evidence may be sound or untenable in terms only of a given psycho-analytic theory; obviously, only a historian conversant with the latter is able properly to judge the particular inference. (Of course, j this still leaves entirely open the question as to whether the particular psycho- j analytic theory, or indeed any and all such theories, is itself acceptable and valid.)Google Scholar

4 For these matters, and–or a discussion of them, see Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Mazlish, Bruce (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1963). (A new version of this volume is being prepared.)Google Scholar

5 For a tentative effort in this direction, see, for example, Erikson, Erik H., ‘The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood’, in Childhood and Society (New York, 1963)Google Scholar. Some of the straightforward historical material that might be used in such a psycho-historical study can be found in Smith, Bradley F., Adolf Hitler: His Family, Childhood and Youth (Stanford University, 1967).Google Scholar

6 New York Review of Books (20 November 1969), p. 4.

7 Of course, other than ‘family’ arrangements can be made by a society to socialize and bring up its young. In some societies, kinship groupings or communal nurseries may hold the commanding role in these processes. How- ever, for most of Western, and certainly modern, history, the family may be generally assumed to be the key unit in establishing the nuclear social and psychological relations with which psycho-history is concerned.

8 For a splendid exemplification of this point, see Anne Parsons, ‘Is the Oedipus Complex Universal? The Jones-Malinowski Debate Revisited and a South Italian “Nuclear Complex”,’ The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, iii (1964).

9 Translated from the French by Baldick, Robert (New York, 1962).Google Scholar

10 New York, 1970.

11 Langer’s address is reprinted in Psychoanalysis and History, ed, Mazlish.

12 Parenthetically, one might note that Freud himself, and psycho-analytic theory after him, later began to underplay the entire notion of trauma as an explanatory device.

13 For one examination of ways of dealing with feelings about death and survival, see Lift, Robert Jay on, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

14 See Holland, Norman N., The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

15 See, for example, some of the essays in Children and the Death of a President, ed. Wolfenstein, Martha and Kliman, Gilbert (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, and The Threat of Impending Disaster, ed. Grosser, George H., Wechsler, Henry and Greenblatt, Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).Google Scholar

16 Keniston, Kenneth, Young Radicals (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

17 See Simmel, Ernst, ‘Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology’ in Anti- Semitism: a Social Disease, ed. Simmel, E. (New York, 1946)Google Scholar and the valuable discussion on this point in Norman Cohn’s chapter, ‘Case-Study in Collective Psychopathology’, in his excellent book, Warrant for Genocide (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

18 For an interesting study of the demographic and social situation of modern youth, see Herbert Moller, ‘Youth as a Force in the Modern World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History x. 3 (April 1968).

19 Pye, Lucian W., The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).Google Scholar