Psychohistory

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 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 lens of his experiences since the late 1960's. He stated that "Thoughtful people do psychohistory whether or not they realize it. Psychological assumptions underlie 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

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. 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

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.