The World on a Couch

September 8, 1985
The World on a Couch
By ARNOLD A. ROGOW

FREUD FOR HISTORIANS
By Peter Gay.

n "The Next Assignment," his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1957, William L. Langer urged his fellow historians to deepen their understanding of history through the "exploitation of the concepts and findings of modern psychology." By "modern psychology" he did not mean, as he made clear, "classical or academic psychology" but psycho-analysis "and its later developments and variations as included in the terms 'dynamic' or 'depth psychology.' " He added that despite the "prodigious impact" of psychoanalysis on many, perhaps even most, fields of knowledge, historians had "maintained an almost completely negative attitude" toward Freud and the teachings of psychoanalysis.

While there is no record of whether that address was followed by polite or enthusiastic applause, psychoanalytic training institutes have not been overwhelmed - either then or in the decades since - by a flood of applications from historians. Although a small number of young historians, usually referred to now as psychohistorians, have accepted Langer's assertion that the "newest history" should be based on "penetration in depth," the negativism of historians and social scientists in general toward psychoanalysis has changed relatively little during the past three decades. One does not exaggerate much in observing that in the academic world, psychoanalysis, far from being an idea whose time has passed, is an idea whose time has not yet come.

In "Freud for Historians," Peter Gay, perhaps the most eminent of the psychohistorians, takes sharp and informed issue with his naysaying colleagues and broadens and deepens our understanding of the contributions psychoanalysis and history can make to each other. A professor of history at Yale and since 1976 a research (nonmedical) candidate in psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, Gay is one of those rare academics whose competence in psychoanalysis is hardly less than his expertise in historical research.

His argument is that the relationship between historians and psychoanalysts has been bedeviled by misunderstandings, prejudices and failures on both sides. On the one hand, most historians wrongly imagine the main thrust of psychoanalysis is to reduce everything to a psychiatric cause springing from a single trauma, and they believe that psychoanalysts are wholly uninterested in objective reality and the varieties of human experience. On the other hand, most psychoanalysts do not care much whether their theories and concepts are relevant to historians, and many are indifferent to questions of scientific or historical fact. The result, as Gay says, is not only mutual suspicion and distrust but research findings that, because they are poorly grounded in history or psychodynamics, are woefully incomplete or, even worse, wholly wrong.

Gay does not spare psychoanalysts. He notes their tendency to rely on Freud's assertions as adequate proof of psychoanalytic propositions and their "almost unrelieved clinical preoccupation [and] passionate inwardness." Nor is he unaware that the psychohistorian (and any nonanalyst who makes use of psychoanalytic concepts) "must be prepared to face skepticism from Freud's followers almost as much as from his denigrators." But he is far more critical of historians who denigrate psychoanalysis than he is of the ultra-orthodox Freudians whose scientific world is the couch, and only the couch.

Thus historians as distinguished as Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Lawrence Stone, Arthur Link, Kenneth S. Lynn, David E. Stannard, G. R. Elton and G. Kitson Clark, among others, are treated as uninformed and unfair critics of psychoanalysis, and not without cause. The most doctrinaire of Freud's disciples could not be more closed-minded than Schlesinger in declaring, according to Lynn, "that he had never read Freud and did not intend to." Also difficult to credit, much less accept, is Lawrence Stone's presumed belief that Freud held the sexual drive to be uniform from individual to individual, whereas, as Gay correctly notes, Freud knew only too well that the sexual drive varies enormously. On the whole, after reading "Freud for Historians," one has difficulty believing that psychoanalysts are as ignorant of history as historians are of psychoanalysis.

If that ignorance were overcome, historians and psychoanalysts might discover they have much to contribute to, and learn from, each other. Without some collaboration between them, there is little likelihood anyone will undertake what Gay sees as this generation's next assignment - a comprehensive history of the defenses against anxiety and how they vary by origins, epoch and social postion. Nor are we likely to know more about the psychodynamics of self-interest, which historians assume to be a powerful motivating factor in the behavior of nations, classes, groups and individuals, if the subject continues to be of little interest to either historians or psychoanalysts. F REUD suggested that we are never entirely free of our childhood wishes, fantasies and fears. In Gay's words, "the great lover is merely seducing his mother over and over again . . . the muscular bully is forever testing his little prepubertal manhood . . . the rational scientist finds himself bedeviled by superstitions he has preserved intact from primitive stages of his mental organization [and] politicians are only gratifying their own boyhood fantasies while they arouse those of others." If that is true, historians and psychoanalysts must consider the dismal possibility that "history is nothing more than an infinite regress, cruelly and interminably extended, in which superannuated little boys and girls solemnly replay the games of their tender years." Gay is careful to qualify such an assertion, but the fact remains -historians and psychoanalysts have been exasperatingly slow in attempting to make connections between regressive tendencies in the human psyche and the horrors of the century in which they have lived.

But "Freud for Historians" is unlikely to convince Gay's colleagues that "all history is in some measure psychohistory." And probably many psychoanalysts who read the book will not agree that "psychohistory cannot be all of history." Before rejecting Gay's argument, however, historians would do well to remind themselves that historians since Thucydides have not hesitated to speculate about psychological influences in human behavior, although they have done so with far less knowledge of such behavior than Freud and his followers possess. After all, it was not a psychohistorian or a psychoanalyst but Thomas Hobbes who in 1629 commented approvingly that in the writings of some historians, "there be subtle conjectures at the secret aims and inward cogitations of such as fall under their pen; which is also none of the least virtues in a history, where conjecture is thoroughly grounded, not forced to serve the purpose of the writer in adorning his style, or manifesting his subtlety in conjecturing."

Arnold A. Rogow is the author of "James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics and Policy." His "Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction" will be published next year.