Literature and varieties of history

[Part 3]

In my last two columns I discussed the relationship between literature and history in relation to the writings of historians such as Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra and the Annales School. Today I wish to focus on a group of historians who are said to subscribe to the idea of psychohistory. Admittedly, this is not a large group, and many of them are found in the United States. However, it is an approach, with all its numerous defects, that has an important bearing on literary studies. There are, it seems to me, two categories of psychohistorians - the strong and the weak. The strong advocate a narrower approach to the roe of psychology in history while the weak is much broader in its approach in that it promotes a looser connection between psychology and history. I plan to discuss both categories.

Psychohistory is a relatively new field of study that has grown over the past six decades. It is more popular in the United States than in most other countries largely because psychoanalysis has penetrated deeply into the consciousness of the people in the United States than is the case in many other countries. Psychohistory is the attempt to apply psychology to the study of history. It has to be admitted however, that from the very earliest times historians have paid attention to psychological issue – seeking to understand the motivations that led to actions.

However, the difference now is that after the Freudian revolution new concepts of psychoanalysis have entered the academic discourse and they are beginning to influence the study of history as well.

Earlier historians relied on their intuitions, while the new psychohistorians draw on the scientific concepts ( they are of course matters of controversy) put into circulation by psychoanalysis.

Psychohistory, it need hardly be said, draws heavily on the pioneering work of Freud. He both developed the fields of psychoanalysis and was able to apply it to the study of society and culture with great insight. Psychoanalysis addresses issues of human behaviour and motivation from a psychological view point; it is interested in mental functioning both normal and pathological. Freud emphasized greatly the unconscious processes of human motivation and thereby opened a new investigative space. A work like Totem and Taboo exemplifies this bent of mind and exploratory agendas very clearly.

I stated earlier that psychohistory is more popular in the United States than in most other countries. This is borne out by the work of scholars ranging from Erik Erikson to Peter Gay. In 1958 Erik H Erikson published his book, Young Man Luther, which is a work of psychohistory and it generated widespread interest both in the United States and beyond. Similarly, the works of the historian Peter Gay such as Freud for Historians have been at the center of a wide-ranging discussion.

There has been, to be sure, an understandable backlash against psychohistory. Many accuse it of being reductionist and ignoring the more important social forces that shape society. One such critic titled his book Shrinking History – the pun on the word shrinking is indeed important.

One of the moves that psychohistorians promoted was the introduction of a new vocabulary of analysis and a new focus of interest into historical investigations and writings. For example, traditionally historians argued about the conscious intentions, wilful strategies of their protagonists. The two eminent British historians H.R. Trevor-Troper and A,J.P. Taylor, for example, disagreed about the aims and intentions of Hitler.

Both were regarded as experts on the topic of Hitler. However, their explorations were confined to conscious objectives. On the other hand, more recent historians such as Robert Waite, who is clearly partial towards psychohistory, places greater emphasis on unconscious intentions, childhood traumas and psychopathologies in examining the behavior of Adolf Hitler.

Peter Gay, who has written so perceptively on the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature says that ‘all history is in some measure is psychohistory.’ However, he immediately adds the disclaimer that ‘psychohistory cannot be all of history.’ Gay’s contention is that a reliance on psychoanalysis need not promote a superficial, reductionist, monocausal understanding of history. Commenting on his own theoretical books on psychohistory Peter Gay says that, ‘my intention…has not been to propose that historians substitute Freud for Marx in their monotheistic rites.’ He feels that the study of politics, religion, culture, technology, geography, and other great standbys of historical explanation are extremely valuable and they help to shape the minds of historians in interesting ways.

The application of psychoanalytic techniques to the study of history can have beneficial effects. Such topics as the influence of childhood experiences, the family, group psychologies, unconscious motivations can be examined more rigorously and with a better appreciation of what they entail.

It also promotes, according to him, more insightful readings of various texts including diaries, letters, memoirs, literary works and so on that historians ordinarily rely on. An area that psychoanalysis can productively illuminate is that of group behavior.

The way people interact within groups and the interplay between the mind and the world is an area that psychoanalysis can help to conceptualize better. In addition, the idea of complexity of human behavior is a topic that invites the closest attention of historians. How people cope with their inner tensions, manage conflicts, seek to resolve ambivalences, the kind of defensive mechanisms they adopt in encountering troublesome experiences are themes that psychoanalysts have explored well and insightfully.

Hence, historians can draw a great deal on the cumulative wisdom of psychoanalysis. It is important to bear in mind that human motivations and emotions are highly over-determined and grow out of different roots.

Human emotions

Another important facet of human emotions is that although they could be private, they could also be invested in public life. This is an area that is of particular interest to historians. At the same time, it is also an area in which Sigmund Freud and his followers have done important work.

The Annales historian Marc Bloch once asserted that, ‘in the last analysis, it is human consciousness which is the subject matter of history. The interrelations, confusions, and infections of human consciousness are, for history, reality itself.’ Psychoanalysts have made it their business to probe as deeply as they can into the nature and dynamics of human consciousness.

Peter Gay, commenting on the advantages of psychoanalysis for historians makes the following useful observation. ‘Psychoanalytic history, then, is at its most ambitious an orientation other than a specialty.

I cannot reiterate often enough that psychoanalysis offers the historians not a handbook of recipes but a style of seeing the past. That is why Freudian history is compatible with all its traditional genres – military, economic, intellectuals, as well as with most of their methods.

Conflict

It is bound to provoke conflicts only with historians openly distrustful of Freud’s insights or firmly committed to behaviorist psychologies; psychoanalysis should inform other auxiliary sciences, other techniques, it should enrich, without disturbing, paleography, diplomacy, statistics, family reconstruction. Nor need it be reductionist. To be steeped in Freud does not compel historians to see only the child in man; they can also observe the man developed out of the child.’

He went on to make the point that the historian who is keen to stress the causal impact of economic interests, technological transformations, or class struggle need not yield up these forces on human behaviours. He emphasises life whether in relation to the individual or group, unitary events or chains of events unfolding over long stretches of time, has to be understood as a series of choices and compromises in which the uncontrollable drives, alarm signals of anxiety, defense mechanisms, the demands of the super ego, all play a decisive role.

As he observes, ‘history is more than a monologue of the unconscious.’ At the same time, he draws attention to the similarities between history and psychoanalysis.’ Both history and psychoanalysis are sciences of memory, both are professionally committed to scepticism, both trace causes in the past, both seek to penetrate behind pious professions and subtle evasions. History and psychoanalysis thus seem destined to collaborate in fraternal search for the truth about the past.’ This fraternal search is what we need to focus on.

Criticism

Psychohistory, to be sure, has come in for a barrage of criticism from historians and cultural critics. That it is reductive in the sense that it tends to reduce vast social transformations, upheavals that are the stock in trade of historians into psychological factors of aggression, narcissism, repression etc. is one such charge. That it tends to focus on negative forces, evil and violence and pathologies, given the natural bent of psychoanalysis in that direction is another.

The fact that that one cannot psychoanalyze the dead is another limitation cited by the denigrators. Two of the most scathing attacks on psychohistory have been written by Jacques Barzun and David Stannard ( David Standard, incidentally, is a friend of mine who teachers at the University of Hawaii).In his book Clio and the Doctors; Psycho-history, Quanto-history and History; Barzun attacks the arcane specialized jargon deployed by thee historians and their pretensions to science. He concluded that psychohistory is neither history nor science.

Similarly Stannard in his book Shrinking History: on Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory, demolished both psychohistory and psychoanalysis which lends it its foundation. The burden of Stannard’s argument is that psychohistorians are in the habit of promoting interpretations and establishing generalizations without adequate evidence to support their claims, and in addition, drawing on a theory that is totally defective.

Pretention

He believes that psychoanalysis is pretentions, and the concept of the unconscious that is so central to psychoanalytic investigations untenable. Stannard dismisses crucial concepts such as Oedipus complex, pleasure principle, id, ego and superego, and many others on the grounds that they cannot be rigorously investigated.

And with that attack on psychoanalysis, he believes the whole case for psychohistory falls apart. However, even he agrees that Erik Erikson, who did so much to galvanize the study of psychoanalytic history, offers us useful insights.

In order to demonstrate the nature, significance and limitations of psychohistory, what I would like to do next is to focus on four of its distinguished practitioners. Admittedly, my choice of names is very arbitrary and some might accuse me of being somewhat idiosyncratic.

All I can say in this regard is that I acknowledge I am guilty as charged; my selection, based on texts dealing with ancient Greece to modern Britain, is based purely on my personal readings. The first scholar I wish to focus on is Erik Erikson (1903-1994). He is a psychoanalyst who carved out new pathways to the application of psychoanalysis to history. His books enjoyed wide popularity, and hence served to widen the discursive boundaries of psychohistory.

Here I wish to focus on two books – Young Man Luther published in 1957 and Gandhi’s Truth published in 1969.Drawing productively on Freudian concepts of psychoanalysis he sought to chart the growth of personality and identity with reference to social roles. The subtitle of Young Man Luther is A Study in Psychoanalysis and History.’ Indeed this book marks a watershed in the evolution of psychohistory.

Explication

Here the author seeks to offer an explication of the personality and modes of actions of Luther in relation to the idea of life-cycles. Erikson demonstrates the ways in which his favorite ideas of personal autonomy, identity crisis and conflicts between generations can be productively applied to the life of Luther.

What we see in Erikson’s Young Man Luther is an attempt by him to correlate the life history of Luther with the larger social and cultural movements of the time. Here we see him deftly intercutting between the personal and the social in interesting ways that would most certainly hold a fascination for psychohistorians.

The way Luther faced his identity crisis, his change from a docile son and a religious official to an innovative thinker and bold actor is reflective of larger social forces. Similarly, in his book Gandhi’s Truth he combines psychoanalysis, politics and religion in a productive way. In this book, he deploys Indian concepts such as dharma and satyagraha to great effect. Indeed the concept of satyagraha is central to Erikson’s project and he enforced parallelism between it and psychoanalysis.

He says that, in both encounters only the militant probing of a vital issue by a nonviolent confrontation can bring to light what insight is ready on both sides. The work of Erik Erikson, then, is important in understanding the nature and aims of psychohistory.

The second scholar I wish to focus on is E.R.Dodds (1893-1979). He was a professor of classics at Cambridge. Most readers of psychohistory would be surprised to see his name included among psychohistorians, and he certainly would have been startled to hear him being called a psychohistorian. However, it is my contention that he deserves to be lumped with the other historians who display an interest in psychoanalysis. Here I wish to call attention to his book The Greek and the Irrational (1951).

Overtly it is not a book dealing with psychoanalysis; it has very little of the technical vocabulary and frequent references to Freudian concepts. However, the thinking of Freud is clearly behind this work. He said that ,’the evolution of culture is too complex a thing to be explained without residue in terms of any simple formula, whether economic or psychological, begotten of Marx or begotten of Freud,’ however, it is evident that he drew – not heavy-handedly but unobtrusively – on the writings of Freud.

Psychology

Dodd’s interest in psychology and its value as an investigative tool is reflected in statements such as the following. ‘Aristotle’s approach to an empirical psychology, and in particular to a psychology of the irrational, was unhappily carried no further after the first generation of his pupils.

When the natural sciences detached themselves from the study of philosophy proper, as they began to do early in the third century, psychology was left in the hands of the philosophers where it remained – I think to its detriment – down to the very recent times.’ E.R. Dodds is, therefore, the second scholar that I wish to highlight as we probe into the achievements of psychohistory.

This book clearly shows how Freudian concepts can be productively pressed into service in studying cultures both modern and ancient. The fact that Dodds did nor t identify himself as a psychohistorian does not minimize the importance of his effort.

The third scholar that I wish to focus on is Robert Jay. Lifton (1926 -). He is the author of such widely read books as death in life; survivors of Hiroshima, revolutionary immortality ;Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese cultural revolution, the Nazi doctors; medical killing and the psychology of genocide.( I like Lifton because of his deep interest in Asian societies and cultures).

Despite the fact that he shows the influences of Freud and Erikson when it comes to writing on historical events, it is also apparent that he has moved away significantly from them. His firm investments in form, symbol and image gives his exegetical work its distinct flavor.

Freud sought to draw attention to the presence of the past in human actions and interactions. Erikson was interested in displaying the capability that cultures had in bringing together psychosocial modes of growth from scattered instincts. Lifton, for his part, was committed to demonstrating the way the imminence of death played a central role in giving shape and density to life.

Lifton was convinced of the fact that the ability of human beings to imagine various symbolic forms that invest life and death with meaning was an area that deserved careful scrutiny.

A perceptive commentator on Robert Lifton, Philip Pomper, makes the following observation. ‘The cogency of Lifton’s approach depends upon his ability to deal with the richness of human psychological and psychohistorical phenomena more adequately within the terms of his theory than either orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis or its many revisions can within theirs.

Lifton consciously shifts the centre of attention away from sexuality as well as from instinct, so that traumas, anxiety, and guilt issue from conflicts around the polarities of life and death imagery.’ When Lifton explores the psychoanalytical implications of Hiroshima or the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Holocaust he brings these interests to bear on his investigations with great skill and perspicacity.

The fourth author that I wish to cite is Leo Abse (1917-2008). His book Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice invites close scrutiny. His study of Margaret Thatcher combines political analysis and psychological analysis in intriguing ways. He points out how her hard-line social policies could be explained in terms her fraught relation to her mother as well as some of her childhood experiences.

The author argues that the complexities of Margaret Thatcher’s life and actions can be purposefully understood in terms of that relationship; hence the title of the book, Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice. Abse frequently in his analysis invokes Freudian concepts and approaches. At times, one is left with the somewhat uneasy feelings that the way he deploys these concepts might be too much of a stretch as in the following description.

‘Few of us could claim that we can totally regulate our relationship to money according to the demands of reality. In all of us an interest in money can in part be traced to the early excretory practices of defecation, but those early libidinal influences can be so overwhelming for some that their relationship to money is leeched away from rationalism. Thatcher’s deprivation of her defecatory pleasures made her an easy lay for Milton Friedman – her overvaluation of money led her to be an enthusiastic disciple of that monetary guru…..’

Distinction

At the beginning of this column I said that we need to make a distinction between the stronger and weaker versions of psychohistory. Let me expand on this idea. There are some scholars who would like to make psychohistory into a specifically focused and narrow field of operation.

The work of Lloyd DeMause represents this trend of thinking. For example in his book, Foundations of Psychohistory he lays out this vision. He opens his book with the statement, ‘Psychohistory is the science of historical motivation – no more, no less.’ He sees it as a science. He remarks that, ‘In beginning any new science, the first task is to formulate bold, clear, testable theories.’ His primary focus of interest is childhood conditioning. He believes that the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. He calls his theory a psychogenic theory of history. He is of the view that, ‘;the central force for change in history is neither technology nor economics, but the psychogenic changes in personality occurring because of successive generations of parent-child interactions.’

Many psychohistorians disapprove of DeMause approach calling it unnecessarily narrow. They would like to broaden it and adopt a more flexible approach. It is this latter group that I wish to characterize as representing the weaker version of psychohistory. It is my conviction that this second group has much to offer to historians as well as non-historians by way of illumination complex entanglements of personality, social formations and culture.

Common territory

Therefore, understandably, there are different psychohistorians representing diverse preferences and viewpoints in this group. All of them however, are united by the vision that psychoanalysis can shed valuable light on history-making. That history and psychoanalysis share mach common territory is an assertion beyond dispute.

The important issue is how historians make use of psychoanalysis without turning it into a monocausal form of interpretation or reducing the complexities of historical transformations to unitary psychological concepts. As one commentator remarked,’ the past is inseparable from recapturing the past, psyche is inseparable from history.’

Stephen Greenblatt, the scholar whose name is most closely associated with the form of literary analysis referred to as New Historicism, once stated that, ‘psychoanalysis can redeem its belatedness only when it historicizes its own procedures.’ Interestingly, he himself has drawn, in his later work, on the writings of Lacan and Lacanians such as Slavoj Zizek. In recent psychoanalytical studies of history, scholars have shown a disposition to turn away from Freud and embrace readily the innovative work of Lacan. For example, some historians of the holocaust are quick to interpret it in terms of the famous tripartite distinction of Lacan, the imaginary – symbolic and real, the emphasis decidedly falling on his understanding of the real. In addition, certain other critics see the value of a more open-ended psychohistory as promoting critical interrogations into the practice of historians.

We very often tend to ignore the fact that socially oriented historians and psychoanalysts deploy the same set of terms, although with slightly different connotations, in their investigative work. Terms such disavowal, ambivalence, alienation, anxiety, fetish, symptom, transference and so on are commonly used by socially driven historians and students of psychoanalysis.

Innovative

These commonly shared words and concepts can be the staging ground for innovative work in psychoanalytic history. Here, then, is another area in which psychoanalysis and history come together in a productive conjunction.

Leah Marcus, for example, has asserted that, ‘recent psychoanalytic theory and psychohistory can be placed in the service of postmodernist self-reflection and speculation about the hidden agendas behind our interpretive practices.’ This is indeed a theme that was untouched by early psychohistorians, and for that matter, by early literary critics.

If psychoanalysis is to prove itself to be a usefully ally, it must lend itself to social, economic, cultural and political re-contextualizatuon. What I mean by this is that if we take a book like Robert Jay Lifton’s Revolutionary Immortality with all its defects and drawbacks, we can perceive how he understood the importance of this move. What modern psychohistorians need to do is to travel down this path taking into full consideration the newer approaches to psychoanalysis and textual criticism that has emerged in recent times.

What I have sought to do so far in this column is call attention to the nature, strengths, limitations and future possibilities of psychohistory as a field of inquiry. Admittedly, it is not as popular as some other varieties of history are, and in recent years, it seems to have lost some of its luster. However, we can only gain by examining it carefully and seeking to identify potential spaces of nurturance.

Psychohistory

The point of this exercise, of course, is to inquire into the possibilities of literary analysis drawing on the trajectories of psychohistory. Here, there are some areas that deserve our attention. First, some Sinhala writers have shown a predilection for writing historical novels Their works can be better comprehended in the light of some of the privileged concepts of psychohistory.

Let us take a novelist like Arawwala Nandimithra or Jayantha Chandrasiri; both of then have written historical novels, one situating the experience in the distant past and the other in more recent times. The way their respective protagonists behave can be profitably understood in relation to some of the ideas put into circulation by psychohistorians.

Second, the intersections that psychoanalytically oriented cultural historians such as Lifton have highlighted in their writings can be utilized to illuminate the meaning of important Sinhala novels. For example, one useful way of approaching the chain of eight novels, beginning with Gamanka Mula, that Gunadasa Amarasekera has composed can be understood in terms of these intersections – psychological, social, political, economic and cultural.

Analysis

That important social transformations cannot be attributed to single causes or comprehended through unitary explanations is a fact that the better psychohistorians have demonstrated in their writing.

This is indeed a facet of analysis that can be productively applied to the novels of Amarasekera. Moreover the vicissitudes of human continuity that certain pshychohistorains reference is central to understanding Amarasekera’s novels.

Thirdly, we can apply some of the analytical approaches disseminated by modern psychoanalytically inspired historians in the elucidation of literary works both modern and classical. Let us, for example, consider the Kavsilumina, which in many ways is the greatest Sinhala classical poem.

It represents the creative blending of Buddhist thematics and Sanskrit poetry. What this poem focuses on is the theme of loss and desire - a theme that psychoanalysis such as Freud and Lacan have found inordinately fascinating. The basic narrative discourse of the poem is one that is found in many cultures – the best and the beauty. However, the author of the Sinhala poem develops it along his chosen cultural pathways.

The theme of loss and desire is expanded using culturally grounded and traditionally inflected tropes. This is clearly in evidence in, say, the lament of Kusa. Here the absence of the love object, and the memory of her and the desire for her lead to death anxieties and dark imagery.

Death

Here what we observe in an interesting way is how impending death makes life possible because the production of meaning and the rage for representation are made possible by it. It also has to be kept in mind that as the lament of Kusa demonstrates, what motivates desire is lack, and it is the price that human subjects are obliged to pay for their entry into the domains of language and culture.

In other words, the whole being of the poem Kavsilumina can be unriddled through the concepts of desire and loss - two concepts central to the analytical work of psychohistory. Lacan once claimed that he had underscored ‘the profound relationship uniting the notion of death instinct to the problem of speech.’ This line of thinking opens a whole new space of inquiry into Kavsilumina.

(To be continued)