Psychohistory at the Crossroads

Amidst a great deal of business-trying to get my latest manuscript ready for final submission to the editor, with now less than six weeks to go, illness and confusion at home--I was asked to replace a short essay for a professional newsletter.  I overlooked the deadline, and, worse, I over-ran the word-limit, as it is always more difficult to be terse than to be verbose.  Nevertheless, while I probably just squeezed in under the finish ine thans to the generosity of the editorial board, they have cut down the essay by more than two thirds to fit in their remaining space.  Now, sicne the essay is written, I have decided to place in in this Blog, with just some minor tweaking for this context.  And because it has been too long since my last posting.

Psychohistory : History, Science or Art?

Though I started to call myself a psychohistorians more than twenty-five years ago and was deeply influenced by Lloyd deMauss, Henry Lawton and Paul Elovitz, I could never bring myself to see it as the major influence in my life; and always tried to use it within the parameters of History of Mentalities, and because of that to understand the individual and group mind as including the development of art, rhetoric and other cultural studies. Thus the debates on whether or not psychohistory is a science or a humanistic guide seem fruitless and pointless: from my perspective, it is not a branch or method of psychoanalysis or psychiatry meant to treat and heal either individuals or society, just as it is not a predictive social science.  It uses those sciences, social sciences, and healing skills, just as it draws from cultural anthropology, cultural history and discourse analysis.  What sets psychohistory apart lies in its stress on the evolutionary growth of consciousness, language and creativity and therefore of the formative development of the brain as a container for the mind and the relationship between an emerging infant into the social world of its primary carers and the community that shapes those experiences within specific historical times and places.  I reject strict and rigid paradigms of Darwinian progress and the determinist concepts of genetic programming.  What may important for medical experts and academic practitioners does not fit with my career in more creative humanist activities.

Even more, when reading through the five essays on Psychohistory up for discussion, three of them by Paul Elovitz, several points stand out which bother me, and have always bothered me, At almost the same time, I have also thought of myself as an historian of Mentalities, a cultural historian and a Jewish exegete of the goyish world. These essays both make me see why I value psychohistory as a significant approach to human experience and why I have major drawbacks with it as an academic discipline.

The first thing that gets my hackles up is the writers’ assumption that America is the intellectual heart of the psychohistorical movement, and therefore the arguments about whether or not psychohistory should be considered an academic pursuit or a branch of psychoanalysis or a sub-section of historiography seemed utterly irrelevant to career in universities outside of North America and my contacts and colleagues in Europe (especially France and Romania), Israel and Australia in the production of the journal Mentalities/Mentalités.  Generalizations and paradigms created to make psychohistory into some kind of predictive social science or grid for understanding group phenomena, such as political movements, did not fit with experience and evidence from other parts of the world.  There are special considerations and circumstances about American civilization, both in its homogenized bourgeois and commercial aspects, as in its regional, ethnic and pluralistic distinctions.  But the USA is not the rest of the world and its history has a different trajectory than that of other nations and cultures. 

Yet I grew up in New York City, and my earliest readings as an adolescent were in history, books like H.G. Wells’ History of the World and Isabel Leighton’s The Asprin Age. For my high school graduation (Stuyvesant High School) a psychoanalyst friend of the family gave me the five volume box of Freud’s Standard Works.   Later, while doing graduate studies in Washington University (Saint Louis) in the courses I took—mainly with Richard Hazelton—I was introduced to the books of Emile Mâle, Giambatista Vico, Johann Huizinga, Robert Curtius, S.J. Seznek, Erwin Panofsky, Erich Auerbach and Walter J. Ong, s.j. among others.  These were wonderful big fat books to put into the hands of a still very naïve and provincial Jewish boy from Brooklyn.  As an outsider to such academic disciplines, it would have been difficult—and perhaps still is—for me to draw strict lines od demarcation between archaic, ancient, classical, medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment traditions in art and literature, or to know where moral philosophy (the old name for what is now psychology) and science, let alone the humanities started and ended. Like Gertrude Stein, I found myself interested less in the development of such cultural history, than in the formation and expansion of human consciousness, beginning at the beginning of one line of primates becoming homo sapiens—so that it is like one long awakening from a collective dream.  In other words, psychohistory is a way of interpreting that long and very complicated dream.

Meanwhile, at Washington University, I was right down the hall from Comparative Literature and Art History, but was still too intellectually niave to be tempted by them, and, instead, was drawn by certain very strong personalities to Middle English Literature; this was probably because to study those texts one needed to know everything else—iconography, architecture, philology, theology and on and on—in a way that seemed possible.  After receiving my doctoral degree and starting to teach at universities in Canada and the USA, everything I had prepared myself to undertake was stopped by the emergence of new kinds of epistemological theories: structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism and similar politically correct versions of what I can now see are anti-intellectual and anti-western trends in scholarship.  As they started blowing through the hallowed halls of academe, I fell back in horror.  It became painful to attend conferences of the Modern Language Association and similar literary meetings. Not just the jargon, the ready-make paradigms and the arrogance of the devotees, but the very texts to be studied and the themes considered appropriate—gay and queer studies, feminist and gender approaches, post-colonialism and Orientalist ideology, and theory for its own sake; and all this to the exclusion of solid philology, intensely sensitive close-reading, wide-ranging comparative literature, and historically-based cultural anthropology.  Thus, in self-defence—and the need to have someone to talk to sensibly—I   found myself going to psychohistory meetings in New York, psychiatric conferences in Canada, religious studies congresses in Sydney, and seminars in Jewish Studies in New Zealand (although I had to organize them myself).  And still, if asked to categorize myself, I would usually say some sort of psychohistorians.  No one was ever satisfied, certainly not me.

Then, continuing an assessment of Paul Elovitz’s collection of essays on psychohistory as a science,  there is the problem of other models for research, such as Aby Warburg’s Kulturgeschichte (Cultural History) and its relation to other Germanic versions of Geistesgeschichte (History of the Mind), and how they square with various types of Romanian and French Histoire de Mentalités, Anthropologie culturale or Sciences de l’homme as approaches to the study of how human language, consciousness and perception develop in various cultural zones (historical as well as geographical).  In terms of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology, I found myself drawn towards the circle of Henri Ey (the psychiatrist who was pushed aside by Jacques Lacan for the chairmanship of the French and then the International Psychiatric Association) and the notion of “organo-dynamism”, the fusing of physiological and psychic processes and phenomena.  Sometimes, too, the insights of, if not the name of psychohistory, appear in varieties of religious study, art history and folklife-dialect research  (when I was in Bucharest the place I worked was called the Institute for Folklore, though my favourite version was when letters came to the University of Leeds addressed to “Forklift Studies”), where the research on pre-verbal memory and concept formation in mythology and deeply-embedded ritual performances and chants is seen to yield great insight into the way the mind is formed and personality expressed in specific individual and small group events.

My introduction to Histoire de Mentalités was in Romania, thanks to Alexandru Duţu who urged me to set up the journal that has its name in English and French.  Through his good offices I met, or at least corresponded with many scholars with international reputations in France, Belgium Germany, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere in Europe.  Whatever I edited or wrote myself always had the responsibility of their good names on my shoulders to ensure nothing silly or below standards was done.  There were also psychiatrists and psychoanalysts involved, again only a few of whom I actually met, but with whom there passed many letters working out the plans for the journal or discussing their work in relation  to my own minor efforts.  In Bucharest, I spent many hours with the leading folklorist, Romulus Vulcanescu, and now I am amazed at how much time he gave to me, as did Alexandru Duţu at the Institute for Southeast European Studies.  Vulcanescu’s encyclopaedic knowledge (literally, because  he edited many encyclopaedias) gave great insight into the workings of the pre-modern mind and traditional societies; and this was confirmed and expanded when I spent days and weeks with an American scholar of oral traditions, Robert P. Creed.  In Israel, to my surprise, Dov Noy, one of the leading experts on Yiddish folklore often invited me to his house and taught me much more than he probably he realized, not least on very long walks (runs?) as he went from one university to another where he lectured.  Similarly, in regard to Talmudic and rabbinic systems of knowledge, Chocham (Sephardic Rabbi) José Faur—still a world authority in Sephardic intellectual history—spent many hours with me in a small coffee house in Jerusalem.  Thanks to Jacob (Jack) Neusner I had several study leaves at Brown University and thus access to its wonderful Judaica holdings, and by reading my way through the Judaica shelves over many months I gained the background that until then I had missed out on.

The boundaries between History of Mentalities, Psychohistory, Cultural Anthropology and Folklore and Iconography faded away.    Started about twenty years ago, I  tried to define History of Mentalities as the inclusive study of the development and persistence of  tensions between the unspeakable and the speakable, the imaginable and the unimaginable, the conceivable and the inconceivable and, even, the memorable and the unmemorable, with an emphasis on the tensions as ever crisscrossing lines of anxiety, fear and  frustration.  What we see, experience and remember as history is a blurry field of nervous energy between those phenomena which are forever losing their continuity and contours appropriate to what we have grown up assuming to be words, images and actions that form our reality and at the same time already we are starting to see, feel and recollect things in life that are only coming into being—by fits and starts, often enough, with major shifts at points of traumatic interference and explosion—and these things do not have a vocabulary, iconography or repertoire of recognizable gestures which we can easily communicate to ourselves or ourselves.

While there is a truth out there, it is not easily accessible by the usual (and American) academic disciplines, and can be reached (if at all) through constant dialectic of analysis and interpretation, reading many signs, hints or metonymies—words, images, gestures in various texts, discourses, works of art, dreams and archaeological ruins—through the teasing apart, saturation in contextual events and documents, drawing on seemingly far flung/fetched analogies, complex metaphors and archaic songs, dances and festival masquerades,  and very close analysis of confessions and diaries from many different times and places. To an extent, that I recognize if no one else does, this seems to me to be what rabbinical exegesis and related Jewish creative interpretations in the arts, crafts, and practical give-and-take of ordinary life named midrash (more than explication through aggadah or narratives, allegories and emblematic events), a poetic enhancement through close-reading, analogizing, and recontextualization, a process I call midrashing