1980
                               SHRINKING HISTORY,

                   On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory


                              by DAVID E. STANNARD




                (C) Copyright 1980 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, INC.
             Used with permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
şiElectronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
DAK Upgraded Edition, Copyright 2000, DAK Industries 2000, Inc(R)şI

{SHRINKING_HISTORY
            SHRINKING HISTORY,
-
     Am I obliged to believe every absurdity?
     And if not, why this one in particular?
     There is no appeal to a court above that of reason.
-
                         -Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

{PREFACE
                             Preface
-
  IN 1958 the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed
that the principal difference between history and anthropology can
be seen "in their choice of complementary perspectives: History
organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social
life, while anthropology proceeds by examining its unconscious
foundations." *(1)
  In that same year, halfway around the world, there appeared in
print the first clear sign that established academic historians would
soon begin to reject this apparent truism. In what he called "the
next assignment," the president of the American Historical
Association exhorted the membership of that organization to get on
with the task of examining and analyzing the unconscious foundations
of the social life of the past. *(2) Such an effort, William L. Langer
thought, was long overdue. Magnanimously (though only tentatively)
ruling out "constitutional obscurantism" as the source of previous
historians' reticence in adopting psychoanalysis, the tool that could
unlock the door to the unconscious world of the past, Langer
preferred to think that such caution derived merely from a fear of
the effects the "coldly penetrating calculus" of psychoanalysis might
have on the humanistic tradition of historical explanation. Some
unconvinced historians (those, Langer would have said, who remained
"buried in their own conservatism") may have preferred to blame their
alleged timidity on the constitutional and semantic obscurantism- to
use the second meaning of that word- of psychoanalysis.
  But no matter. History, at least in the United States, has not been
the same since then. A few years after Langer's ringing declaration
that the practice of history writing was "on the threshold of a new
era," another distinguished member of the profession, in a flush of
enthusiasm, went so far as to advocate individual psychoanalysis as
part of the professional training of the budding academic historian.
While recognizing that "a full psychoanalysis" might not always be
necessary or even possible, H. Stuart Hughes wrote that in many
cases "it might be precisely what was called for, and I trust that
foundation funds would be forthcoming to finance such a venture." He
went on:
-
  I hope that in the coming years a significant minority of young
historians, particularly those most concerned with the psychological
aspects of historical interpretation, will be going through personal
analysis under the guidance of experienced clinicians. For the
others,  it may be possible to work out a shorter program in
consultation with the Psychoanalytic Institutes established near some
of our major universities. *(3)
                                                      {PREFACE ^paragraph 5}
-
  As of yet Hughes's hope has not been realized. At least analysis
has not commonly become a formal part of graduate school curricula in
history. Nevertheless, there remain rather few historical figures of
consequence who have not, during the past two decades, been the
subject of what self-professed psychohistorian Fawn M. Brodie has
referred to as the "surgical operation" of psychohistory. *(4) Hardly
a professional association meeting passes without a minimum of a
session or two on the latest developments in psychohistorical
procedure. And there are now at least two scholarly journals extant
whose sole purpose is the propagation and examination of
psychohistorical analyses. *(5)
  The quality of this work ranges from the elegant and sensitive
writings of Erik H. Erikson, to the tawdry and crackpot
disquisitions of too many to name without fear of overlooking others
equally deserving of mention. But one example can give at least the
flavor of the approach of this latter group.
  Writing of the sources behind a "moment of discovery" in his
thinking on the psychoanalytic meaning of war, Lloyd de Mause, the
founder and editor of The Journal of Psychohistory, admits that
"technical training" in history and psychoanalysis were of some
value to him (although he has no "technical training" in history)
because he "had to know how to get around in the literature of both
fields." However, he continues:
-
                                                     {PREFACE ^paragraph 10}
  Far more crucial were . . . the long hours somewhere around the
seventh or eighth year of my personal psychoanalysis when I
struggled to re-experience and find meaning in dreams of drowning
and sinking in a Whirl Pool of quicksand, or, when my son was two
years old, those hundreds of hours I spent with him pretending we
were babies in mommy's belly, crawling around in the dark under the
bedclothes and pretending to fall off the bed crying "Help Save me,"
because that was the endless game that seemed to give him a strong
sense of the pleasure of mastery. *(6)
-
It was thanks to this sort of thing that de Mause made the inspired
discovery that war is nothing less than a reenactment of the
experience of birth. The real breakthrough, however, came when he
found that military bands beat at the same rate as does "the
elevated heart-beat of a woman during a contraction in labor." Thus,
de Mause came to understand why he, "a radical and anti-nationalist,
was nevertheless moved almost to tears when I stood with my son
watching a parade with marching bands.... I obviously was a baby
being born while watching the parade, being picked up and carried
along by my mother's heart-beat whether I felt like it or not, and
the tears in my eyes were for the impending separation from my
mother!" *(7)
  If this were representative of the bulk of work being done by
psychohistorians it would hardly be necessary to write a book on the
subject. Clearly, Mr. de Mause works well beyond the fringe of even
the most generous definition of the world of scholarship as do
others of his colleagues, such as one Henry Ebel, who "surrounds
himself with his historical materials and 'Primals' for hours while
free-associating to the material in front of him, in a concentrated
effort to reach deeper levels of motivation than the usual reading
reveals." *(8) (The published results of such "concentrated efforts"
can, as one might expect, be rather mind-boggling- e.g., "Bosch, of
course, is just a more finicky da Vinci. And da Vinci is just Luther
with a talent for sketching.") It is not surprising that de Mause's
recent declaration of independence from the discipline of history
was greeted with quiet sighs of relief by other, less eccentric,
practitioners of the psychohistorical craft- those who do not spend
"hundreds of hours" crawling under the bedclothes with a two-year
old searching for answers to the riddles of history. *(9)
  Yet, we must be careful here. For, as often happens when fanatics
enter an already questionable field of endeavor, by the very
ludicrousness of their positions they may make the work of other,
more moderate, participants appear to be models of responsibility.
This book argues that this should not be permitted to be the case with
with psychohistory. While certainly some works of psychohistory are
vastly superior to others, little, if any, psychohistory is good
history.
  This is the conclusion of many (probably most) professional
historians. Their reasons for rejecting psychohistory, however, have
often not been heard by the general public, nor found convincing by
other restless and methodologically inquisitive historians who have of
late been seeking out new ways of viewing and interpreting the raw
data of the past. It is insufficient, for example, simply to look with
disdain upon the poor taste of those who would besmirch the dignity of
traditional historical explanation; and to lump psychohistory, as some
have done, with the equally new efforts of historians to seek
clarification through quantification utterly distorts matters.
Moreover, it does not help much to argue, however correctly, that
psychohistory attenuates responsibility in history, "trivializes human
action.... exculpates the vicious and . . . debunks the virtuous"-
that is, that it reduces conscious ethical decision-making by such
diverse historical figures as Luther, Hitler, Jefferson, Stalin,
Gandhi, and others to a crudely mechanistic determinism rooted
in ideas concerning the psychopathology of everyday life. *(10)
                                                     {PREFACE ^paragraph 15}
  To begin with, history cannot any longer be viewed as Clio, fair
maiden among the muses, who must be maintained in the vale, as
Jacques Barzun has said, "virgo intacta." *(11) To adopt or maintain
this attitude in response to the challenge of psychohistory is merely
to repeat the simple-minded rejection of psychoanalysis itself, when
it emerged at the turn of the century, as only an exercise in bad
taste and a degradation of human nature. To reject quantitative
evaluations of historical data in the same sweeping motion is to court
genuine obtuseness: there has, of course, been bad work (as well as
very good work) done by quantitative historians, and some of them have
made embarrassingly grandiose claims for the limited insights and
discoveries resulting from their efforts; but there is no
methodological or thematic connection between psychohistory and
quantitative analysis that justifies treating them as two elements
of a single (and singularly troublesome) phenomenon. Nor, finally,
does the argument that psychohistory trivializes both thought and
action- that it is a dangerous exercise in the historical exculpation
of villains and the debunking of heroes- do little more than
underline psychohistorical pretentiousness: such, it is contended,
is the price that must always be paid for scientific advance.
  This book takes a somewhat different critical approach from those
noted above, and I should be candid about it. I was for some time
interested in the potential of psychoanalytic theory for opening new
ways of looking at historical data, and in other writings I have
both urged others and engaged myself in various interdisciplinary
borrowings in an effort to coax greater meaning from the fragmented
materials of history. I am not at all opposed to open (and admitted)
speculation in the writing of history. After all, some of the most
important historical advances in modern times have derived from the
examination and reexamination of what began as bold speculations.
  But mere common sense imposes a limit on this sort of thing. We
would not, for instance, see much explanatory value in an effort to
show that the cause of this or that historical event was traceable
to the fact that the main actor in the event was a Scorpio whose
governing planet was Mars; nor would the fact that this actor may
have had certain specified facial features be regarded as credible
evidence of a constitutional or genetic predisposition to act in a
particular fashion; nor would we likely concur with an explanation
asserting that such and such happened because God was pleased or
displeased with the actor in question. The point is obvious: there
is not sufficient believable evidence available to indicate with
reasonable assurance that any of these explanatory schemes works. It
is as simple as that. Divine intervention may or may not be a
reality in the everyday affairs of humankind, but modern historians
have generally agreed that analyses based on claims of divine
intervention do not deserve a place in historical explanations of
events. What is required of God must be required of all would-be
explanation systems, including psychoanalysis; that is, evidence.
  Historians have not, to date, seemed especially inclined to
investigate this matter at much length. They have other work to do
and thus generally treat psychohistorical work on an ad hoc basis
whenever a particular effort intrudes on their individual fields of
specialization. This book, however, is devoted to precisely that
question of theoretical efficacy, to the task of examining what
evidence exists to support various psychoanalytic hypotheses and their
applicability to history. It is not, apart from a look at a model of
sorts in the first chapter, a critical survey of works thus far
written in the field of psychohistory; for to do that would be to
avoid the central question: does psychoanalytic theory work- does it
even make sense?
  We will thus be taking up a challenge laid down by Freud more than
half a century ago. In his "Autobiographical Study" of 1925, Freud
claimed that many of his critics had unfairly rejected his work by
"the classical maneuver of not looking through the microscope so as
to avoid seeing what they had denied." *(12) Now, there are
microscopes and there are microscopes. The one Freud had in mind was
his own: a deep immersion in analysis. Whatever its benefits, such a
procedure hardly deserves to be called looking through a microscope.
A microscope is, after all, a scientific instrument, a piece of
equipment- not a conversion experience. To follow Freud's advice on
this matter (and the subsequent advice of legions of defensive
analysts) is much closer to following the suggestion that only those
who have spent an extended period of time as novices among the
Jesuits can properly understand, criticize, or recognize the truth
value of the teachings of Ignatius Loyola. Such an experience might
help in understanding the matters at issue. It might also (more
probably) so distort the individual's perspective that it would
hinder objective understanding. In any case, it is hardly
intellectually obligatory.
                                                     {PREFACE ^paragraph 20}
  There is a better microscope- the same one to which other systems
of explanation must submit. It is the process of simply putting such
systems through some elementary tests designed to determine if they
are logically sound, empirically confirmable, and capable of a
reasonable degree of generalization. By and large, psychoanalysts
have shunned this microscope. Their reasons have been various, but
one of the most common, ingenious (and fatuous) is to claim that
psychoanalytic theory is so subtle, so complex, and so sophisticated
that none of the tools of evaluation yet devised by the best of
human minds is capable of testing it. *(13) This, like the other
common ad hominem complaint that critics of psychoanalysis are only
displaying their neuroses, *(14) is a reply worthy of a mystic or an
intellectual charlatan but not someone who wishes to have his or her
ideas taken seriously. Because it is so common a claim, however, I
will discuss it later at somewhat greater length.
-
  This book, it should be said, is in design something of a primer-
a book of elementary principles. In the present case the principles
I am concerned with are, as I have said, those having to do with the
philosophic, scientific, and universalistic status and validity of
psychoanalytic theory. In approaching these matters, I have confined
myself largely to the examination of fairly orthodox Freudian
theory. In this regard I have allowed myself to be guided by the
working psychohistorian. For, despite occasional theoretical forays
into the hypothetical world of what psychohistory might be, in
practice the rule of virtually all writers has been to hew closely
to the Freudian line. And even the apparent exceptions- the works of
those who rely upon or imitate the ideas of Erik Erikson, for
example- remain sufficiently derivative of the Freudian model (in
Erikson's own words, "Freud's monumental work is the rock on which
such exploration and advancement must be based") *(15) that the shape
of the discussion that follows is as applicable to that work as it is
to Freud's. Moreover, despite all the imaginative so-called
alternatives to relatively mainline psychoanalytic theory, only
fairly orthodox approaches have thus far generated any empirical
support- and thus, at least insofar as such support is concerned,
Freudian theory provides the strongest case for the validity of
psychohistorical analysis. Other approaches, from the fairy tale
world of Lloyd de Mause to the more serious and responsible efforts
of such writers as Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt, suffer a
single common problem: empirically speaking, they are
pipedreams. *(16)
  Freudian theory (and that of at least the seminal work of the
so-called "post-Freudians"- from Jung, Adler, Rank and the other
"early schismatics," to Sullivan, Fromm, Horney, Erikson and others)
is, of course, generically a therapeutic technique- however much it
may subsequently have worked itself into a would-be holistic theory
of human behavior of interest to certain social scientists,
historians, and students of literature. As a therapeutic technique it
requires the existence of a living subject, one willing and able to
actively participate in tie effort to reach awareness of the
allegedly repressed impulses or forgotten traumatic events (and their
unique interpretations) that are said to underlie the symptoms in
question. This active participation- necessarily involving, it is
claimed, transference of intense feelings onto the person of the
analyst- is essential to the cooperative process of gaining insight,
overcoming resistances, "making the unconscious conscious," and
eventually effecting cure. *(17) The fact that this is patently and by
simple definition impossible when dealing with the scattered literary
remains of a long-dead (and therefore, needless to say, inactive and
non-participating) subject has led many- most notably a good many
psychoanalytically trained clinicians- to dismiss out of hand as what
Freud himself called "wild" psychoanalysis the retrospective
psychoanalyzing that is the heart of psychohistory. *(18) Despite the
apparently eminent reasonableness of this rejecting attitude, from
the psychoanalytic perspective itself, there remains in the minds of
many the belief that abstract psychoanalytic theory can be applied
to historical documents as a method of opening up for scrutiny and
intelligent analysis the unconscious mind of the past. Thus, this
book- an examination of that theory and its implications for
historical analysis.
  There is, finally, one more thing that should be said about the
presentation of this book as a primer. A primer, ideally, should be
written in such a way that it is accessible to the general reader
and presents in compact form the essential aspects of an otherwise
forbiddingly long, complex, and esoteric argument. My purpose in
writing this book in such a way is a simple one: it is merely to
help open a long overdue discussion among intelligent laypeople and
students of history that has for too long been rendered impossible
by the protective smokescreen of functionless private jargon and
cant and dogmatic Alice-in-Wonderland logic that has marked the
psychoanalytic and psychohistorical enterprises- a discussion, quite
simply, about one small but important aspect of the nature of
historical explanation.

{ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
                         Acknowledgments
-
  MOST of the work on this book was carried out in the libraries of
Yale and Stanford Universities and the University of California at
Santa Cruz. Special thanks are due the staff of the Medical School
Library at Yale.
  In their earliest stages some of the ideas contained in this book
evolved from conversations with Donald M. Lowe, Bruce Kuklick, and
David Brion Davis. Drafts of the entire manuscript benefitted from
the keen criticisms of William A. Clebsch, Elizabeth A. Davis, Edmund
S. Morgan, and two colleagues with serious professional interests in
psychohistory, Kai T. Erikson and Joel Bernard.
  Daphne Y. F. Chu contributed significantly in a number of ways to
the completion of the manuscript; and, although she has not seen the
completed work, Valerie M. Stannard endured and contributed much
when I was working up a first draft- and thus the book is dedicated
to her.
  A special note is due Susan Rabiner, the sort of editor every
author should have. Since I neglected to thank her in my last book,
I would like to do so doubly this time: in ways far beyond what any
writer normally expects she has vigorously supported and criticized
my work, and in the process has become a valued and trusted friend.
  I should also like to acknowledge the work of someone whose name I
do not know: the person who gave the title "Shrinking History" to an
essay by Robert Coles in The New York Review of Books- a title which
I have shamelessly stolen for this book.
                                             {ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ^paragraph 5}
  And finally, to Haunani-Kay Trask- Hawaiian nationalist, activist,
and intellectual- for her pride, her courage, and her righteous
anger:
-
                    E ku'u pua laha 'ole

                    Pa mai ka makani kuehu e
                    He ku mau e ka nani pa'a pono e!
                                            {ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ^paragraph 10}
-

INTRO_TO_CH_1
-
   Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
   Hotspur:   Why, so can I, or so can any man;
              But will they come when you do call for them?
-
                            -William Shakespeare,
                             The First Part King Henry the Fourth

{CH_1
                                1
                     The Lessons of Leonardo
-
  FREUD'S Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, published
in 1910, was the first true example of psychohistorical analysis. *(1)
A genuine tour de force, it remains, along with Erik H. Erikson's
work, among the finest indicators of the potentials- and the limits-
of psychohistory. Within its brief compass this work contains some of
the brightest examples of what makes the best psychohistory so
stimulating: insight, learning, sensitivity, and, most of all,
imagination. It also contains some of the clearest illustrations of
the pitfalls of works of this sort: it is dazzlingly dismissive of
the most elementary canons of evidence, logic, and, most of all,
imaginative restraint. As one enthusiast has recently written, it is
truly "a model for all later psychobiographies." *(2) There is much to
be learned from it.
  Freud begins his study with a brief apology for his intended
invasion of the privacy of such a great personage as Leonardo, then
launches immediately into a search for those most intriguing and
possibly revelatory attributes of the great man. Leonardo was known
to have possessed what Freud calls a "feminine delicacy of feeling"
(exhibited, for instance, in his vegetarianism and his habit of
buying caged birds in the market, only to set them free), but was
also capable of seemingly contradictory behavior such as studying and
sketching the faces of condemned and soon-to-be executed criminals
and designing "the cruellest offensive weapons" of war. Leonardo
often seemed inactive and indifferent to competition and controversy;
he had a habit of leaving work unfinished; he worked very slowly. The
list goes on, but initially what interests Freud most is the fact
that Leonardo seemed to combine in his adult life a "frigidity," a
"cool repudiation of sexuality," and a "stunted" sexual life (evident
not only in his behavior but also in his art) with an "insatiable and
indefatigable thirst for knowledge."
  This last combination of traits is not surprising to Freud. It is,
he says, a result of sublimation. "When the period of infantile
sexual researches has been terminated by a wave of energetic sexual
repression, " he asserts, "the instinct for research has three
distinct possible vicissitudes open to it owing to its early
connection with sexual interests." These are: 1) an inhibition of
curiosity; 2) a return of the curiosity in the form of "compulsive
brooding," wherein "investigation becomes a sexual activity, often
the exclusive one . . . but the interminable character of the child's
researches is also repeated in the fact that this brooding never
ends and that the intellectual feeling, so much desired, of having
found a solution recedes more and more into the distance"; or 3) "in
virtue of a special disposition" in some people the investigative
impulse provides an outlet for repressed sexuality (the process of
sublimation) and "the instinct can operate freely in the service of
intellectual interest . . . [while] it avoids any concern with sexual
themes."
  Leonardo, Freud suggests, seems "a model instance of our third
type." But here we encounter difficulty. To substantiate this
hypothesis we would "need some picture of his mental development in
the first years of his childhood." And there is almost no such
information extant. Indeed, Freud admits, all we know of Leonardo's
childhood is that he was born in 1452, the illegitimate child of Ser
Piero da Vinci, a notary, and "a certain Caterina, probably a
peasant girl." Beyond this, the only record of his youth is a 1457
tax register in which the five year old Leonardo is mentioned as a
member of Ser Piero's household.
                                                         {CH_1 ^paragraph 5}
  At this point Freud turns to the life of Leonardo from another
direction. He quotes a curious passage that appears as an
interruption in one of his scientific notes on the flight of birds:
-
  It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with
vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories, that
while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my
mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against
my lips.
-
  So important does Freud find this sentence that he announces his
intent to use it, by means of "the techniques of psycho-analysis,"
to "fill the gap in Leonardo's life story by analyzing his childhood
fantasy." The analysis that follows is nothing short of imaginative
wizardry.
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 10}
  The tail of the vulture, beating against Leonardo's infant lips, is
translated into a "substitutive expression" for a penis. The scene
is thus illustrative of fellatio, of a "passive" homosexual
experience. But there is another side to the fantasy, Freud notes,
since the desire to suck on a penis "may be traced to an origin of
the most innocent kind": "merely a reminiscence of sucking- or being
suckled- at his mother's breast."
  But why is the bird a vulture? At this point Freud's great breadth
of learning takes over: in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics "the
mother is represented by a picture of a vulture." Further the name
of a vulture-like Egyptian female deity was pronounced mut- a sound
very similar to Mutter (mother). In addition, other classical
writings indicate that "the vulture was regarded as a symbol of
motherhood because only female vultures were believed to exist"-
females who conceive "in mid-flight" when they "open their vaginas
and are impregnated by the wind," a notion used by certain Fathers of
the Church "as a proof drawn from natural history" against those who
doubted the virgin birth and a notion with which, Freud writes, "it
can hardly be doubted" Leonardo was aware. The importance of the
vulture fantasy to Leonardo, then, can be seen in his recognition
"that he also had been such a vulture-child- he had had a mother, but
no father.... [and] in this way he was able to identify himself with
the child Christ, the comforter and savior not of this one woman
alone."
  Having so ingeniously solved the puzzle of Leonardo's vulture
fantasy, Freud returns to the problem of the lack of information
available on Leonardo's childhood beyond the date of his birth and
his parentage and the lonely fact that he appears as a member of his
father's household at age five. Freud writes that since "the
replacement of his mother by the vulture indicates that the child was
aware of his father's absence and found himself alone with his
mother," the vulture fantasy serves as a replacement for the missing
historical data as it "seems to tell us" that Leonardo spent "the
first critical years of his life not by the side of his father and
stepmother, but with his poor, forsaken, real mother, so that he had
time to feel the absence of his father."
  Freud thenceforth accepts this surmise as "this fact about his
childhood" and determines that Leonardo's having "spent the first
years of his life alone with his mother, will have been of decisive
influence in the formation of his inner life." How decisive? So
decisive that Leonardo, "more than other children," would have
encountered the problem of the missing father. The fact that he would
"brood on this riddle with special intensity," indeed that he was
"tormented as he was by the great question of where babies come
from and what the father has to do with their origin," thus explains
(it was "an inevitable effect of this state of affairs," Freud says)
why Leonardo "at a tender age became a researcher."
  Content now with his reconstruction of Leonardo's outer and inner
lives during his infancy and early childhood, Freud next turns to
the problem of connecting these analytically unearthed childhood
experiences with Leonardo's adult behavior and predispositions. He
begins again with the vulture: how is it possible, Freud asks, that
this maternal image is furnished with a symbol of maleness- a tail
which "cannot possibly signify anything other than a male genital, a
penis." For an answer Freud draws on his then-developing theory of
infantile sexuality.
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 15}
  The young male child, Freud believed, always assumes that everyone
(including his mother) has a penis. Even when confronted with evidence
to the contrary, the child assumes that the female once had a penis,
but that it was cut off. Since all this thinking derives initially
from the child's great interest in his own genitals he then becomes
threatened by the possibility "that the organ which is so dear to him
will be taken away from him if he shows his interest in it too
plainly.... [and] henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity, but
at the same time he will despise the unhappy creatures on whom the
cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already fallen." A further bit
of insight regarding the vulture fantasy now becomes clear to Freud:
at the time when Leonardo directed his "fond curiosity" to his mother
he still believed her to have a penis. This insight becomes "more
evidence of Leonardo's early sexual researches, which in our opinion
had a decisive effect on the whole of his later life."
  But decisive in what way? It is decisive, Freud observes, in that
it allows us to begin seeking "a causal connection between Leonardo's
relation with his mother in childhood and his later manifest, if
ideal [sublimated], homosexuality."
  The pursuit of this "causal connection" starts with Freud's
clinical observations that homosexuals have in early life "a very
intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their
mother." This attachment, though subsequently forgotten, is "evoked
or encouraged by too much tenderness on the part of the mother
herself, and further reinforced by the small part played by the
father during their childhood." (This situation, of course, precisely
describes Leonardo's childhood, at least as reconstructed in Freud's
analysis of the vulture fantasy.) The erotic attachment to the
mother, Freud notes, is eventually repressed by the young male, but
only because "he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with
her." Such attachments may be avoided by "the presence of a strong
father [which] would ensure that the son made the correct decision in
his choice of object, namely someone of the opposite sex." In some
lives, however, this is not to be the case- and instead the process
that leads to self-identification with the mother results in adult
homosexuality: "for the boys whom he now loves as he grows up are
after all only substitutive figures and revivals of himself in
childhood- boys whom he loves in the way in which his mother loved
him when he was a child."
  This analysis of infantile sexuality is critical to the unfolding
picture of Leonardo because it provides the theoretical link between
the nature of Leonardo's childhood experiences and the "historical
probability" that beneath the "cool sexual rejection" that seemed to
characterize much of his adult life, there lay the fact that
Leonardo was "one who was emotionally homosexual." True, evidence to
support this contention is rather thin. Indeed, it is singular and
questionable: at age twenty-four Leonardo was anonymously accused,
with three others, of homosexuality; the accusation was investigated
and the charges were dismissed. That is all. But for Freud it is
just the beginning. He then couples with this historical datum the
additional information that Leonardo often took as pupils handsome
young men toward whom he showed kindness and consideration. (Lest
one miss the implications of this fact, Freud goes out of his way to
note that in so showing kindness and consideration to his pupils
Leonardo was caring for them "just as his own mother might have
tended him.") Further, Leonardo's diary contains, among its many
entries, notes of small financial expenditures on his pupils. This
appears to be innocent enough, but not for the psychoanalyst: "the
fact that he left these pieces of evidence" of kindness "calls for
explanation."
  Freud points out that among Leonardo's papers is also a different
note of financial expenditure- one for the funeral of a woman
identified only as Caterina, the same name, it must be remembered,
as his mother's. Indeed, Freud says (although there is no evidence to
substantiate the assertion) that this Caterina was Leonardo's
mother. When set side by side with the entries regarding
expenditures on his pupils, this note for funeral expenditures tells
a dramatic and hitherto unknown story: although constrained and
inhibited from conscious expression, Leonardo's repressed feelings
of erotic attraction for his mother and his pupils take on the
character of an "obsessional neurosis" made evident by his
"compulsion to note in laborious detail the sums he spent on them."
The artist's hidden life now becomes apparent as this wealth of
accumulated evidence allows us to see Leonardo's unconscious mind
betraying what his conscious mind never could: "It was through this
erotic relation with my mother that I became a homosexual."
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 20}
  Finally Freud comes to the relevancy of his analysis for
understanding Leonardo's powers of artistic expression. We soon find
that this reconstructed sexual biography is responsible for the
greatness of Leonardo's Mona Lisa and other paintings and that "the
key to all his achievements and misfortunes lay hidden in the
childhood phantasy of the vulture."
  Returning once again to the vulture/mother fantasy, Freud notes
that it "is compounded from the memory of being suckled and being
kissed by his mother." In fact, "this may be translated," Freud
writes, thusly: "My mother pressed innumerable passionate kisses on
my mouth."
  With that translation in mind, Freud turns to one of the
outstanding characteristics of Leonardo's later paintings: "the
remarkable smile, at once fascinating and puzzling, which he conjured
up on the lips of his female subjects." It seems that, in
encountering on the face of his model for the Mona Lisa this "smile
of bliss and rapture" something was awakened in Leonardo "which had
for long lain dormant in his mind- probably an old memory." It was,
of course, the memory of his mother and the smile that had once
encircled her mouth. Although by this time "he had long been under
the dominance of an inhibition which forbade him ever again to desire
such caresses from the lips of women," he could and did thenceforth
endeavor "to reproduce the smile with his brush, giving it to all
his pictures."
  Such subsequent pictures include, most notably for Freud, the
famous Anna Metterza which depicts the child Jesus, his mother Mary,
and her mother Saint Anne. The faces of both women, Freud notes,
contain smiles similar to that on the Mona Lisa, though the "uncanny
and mysterious character" of the original is now replaced by "inward
feeling and quiet blissfulness." In addition, there is something at
least equally striking: Saint Anne is depicted as possessed of an
unfaded beauty making her appear generationally coterminous with her
daughter Mary. The conclusion is inescapable. This painting, says
Freud, contains nothing less than "the synthesis of the history of
his [Leonardo's] childhood." Freud had shown, earlier, through his
analysis of the vulture fantasy, how Leonardo identified himself
with the Christ child. Now he shows how this identification is
represented in Leonardo's art which gives the Christ child two
mothers, just as Leonardo himself had two mothers- Caterina and his
"kind stepmother, Donna Albiera." Leonardo endows each of the
mothers with the maternal smile of his own childhood memory, the
memory that had returned to him when he had reencountered the smile
on the model for his Mona Lisa. * From this point on the paintings of
Leonardo often seem marked by this enigmatic smile, and thus "with
the help of the oldest of all his erotic impulses he enjoyed the
triumph of once more conquering the inhibition in his art."
-
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 25}
  * In a later edition of this work Freud added at this point his
tentative approval (complete with illustration) of a "remarkable
discovery" by his disciple Oskar Pfister that the Anna Metterza
contains- cleverly concealed in "the curiously arranged and rather
confusing drapery" of Mary's robe- "the outline of a vulture" with
its tail leading directly to the Christ child's lips. Pfister was
not alone in conducting this sort of detective work. There have been
others, from C. G. Jung who, prior to Pfister, found a vulture
lurking somewhere else in the painting, to Raymond Stites who claims
to have found several fetuses, in varying stages of development,
beneath St. Anne's right foot. *(3)
-
  There is much more in Freud's biography that might be treated here,
including the analysis of a slight error (for some reason only one
of several is singled out) in Leonardo's recording of the death of
his father. Freud uses this analysis to explain the artist's failure
to finish paintings as well as his independence of mind. But enough
has already been seen to understand the general shape and method of
the argument.
-
  It is difficult to know exactly where to begin in evaluating this
work. Even a historically untrained person with little knowledge of
Leonardo's life, unless extraordinarily gullible and naively
convinced of the magical powers of psychoanalysis, would have some
questions to ask concerning the logical and evidentiary leaps and
bounds Freud makes.
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 30}
  But let us begin with what Freud considered the pivotal event in
his analysis- the vulture fantasy. There was no vulture fantasy. The
only time in his extant writings that Leonardo even mentions a
vulture is under the heading "Gluttony" in that section of The
Notebooks that is entitled "A Bestiary." The reference reads, in its
entirety: "The vulture is so given up to gluttony that it would go a
thousand miles in order to feed on carrion, and this is why it
follows armies." Now this statement, I think it fair to say, does not
lend much support to Freud's thesis that Leonardo unconsciously
associated the image of the vulture with his beloved mother, thus
recognized "that he also had been such a vulture-child," and by
extension was led "to identify himself with the child Christ." On the
contrary, the entry suggests that Leonardo had a rather different
image of the vulture than the virgin-mother of the Church Fathers-
the image of which Freud had asserted, "it can hardly be doubted"
Leonardo was aware.
  But what about that recollection of an early memory? It does exist,
written on the back of a page that contains various notations on the
flight of birds (a subject which, along with anatomy, weight, and
the nature of water, he seems to have found particularly
interesting); but the creature in question is a kite, a small
hawk-like bird. It was a kite, not a vulture, that Leonardo recalled
opening his mouth and striking his lips with its tail. The kite, of
all the birds he wrote about, seems to have been of most interest to
Leonardo, but the only time he imbues it with qualities that might be
of interest to the psychobiographer is in the same "bestiary" section
of The Notebooks in which he also mentions the vulture. The reference
is under the heading "Envy" and is cold comfort to would-be
supporters of Freud's thesis. "Of the kite," it says, "one reads that
when it sees that its children in the nest are too fat it pecks their
sides out of envy and keeps them without food."
  It must be said, in Freud's defense, that this crucial error was
really not his fault. For his information on Leonardo Freud seems to
have relied heavily on D. S. Merezhkovsky's 1895 biography which
contains, in its German translation, a mistranslation that
substitutes "vulture" for "kite." The error was pointed out as early
as 1923, but does not seem to have much troubled subsequent
psychoanalytic evaluators of the work, despite Freud's own assertion
that the vulture fantasy was "the key" to all Leonardo's
"achievements and misfortunes." *(4) James Strachey, general editor of
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, did refer to the error once, in a personal communication with
Ernest Jones, as "an awkward fact." In his "Editor's Note" to The
Standard Edition's version of the Leonardo book, however, Strachey
dismisses the effort as but "one piece of corroborative support" for
the "psychological analysis of the phantasy" and claims that "the
main body of Freud's study is unaffected by his mistake." Jones also
considers the error to be "this unessential part of Freud's
argument," as does Kurt R. Eissler who writes that the resulting
problem affects not "the kind of conclusion that Freud drew but only
. . . the particular premise on which the conclusion rested" and
thus, he goes on to say, "in so far as Freud's interpretation does
not refer specifically to the kind of bird, it may be expected to be
correct. " (These are words that deserve careful re-reading.)
Similarly, and perhaps most recently, Joseph D. Lichtenberg insists
that, while admittedly "unfortunate," the mistake "affects only the
weight of confirmatory evidence for Freud's interpretation of the
meaning of the childhood memory- not the hypothesis itself." *(5)
  These are brave, but misguided, rescue efforts. To put it simply:
Freud built most of his analysis in the manner of an inverted
pyramid, the whole structure balancing on the keystone of a single
questionable fact and its interpretation; once that fact is shown to
be wrong, and removed as support, the entire edifice begins to
crumble. And no amount of rhetorical waffling or smoke screening can
conceal that process of natural disintegration.
  To begin with, the entire body of contingent hypotheses that Freud
joined to the vulture fantasy (hypotheses that themselves, in his
hands, soon became "facts") now lose relevance. Since there was no
vulture in the avian fantasy (and since the only evidence we have of
Leonardo's attitude toward the kite suggests a very different range
of symbolic meanings- if any- for that imagined experience) we no
longer have any reason to believe that Leonardo was aware of or
concerned (consciously or unconsciously) by his father's alleged
absence during his childhood- the analysis of the specific vulture
symbolism having been the sole initiating source of this idea.
Further, since Freud relied entirely on his analysis of the vulture
fantasy to "fill the gap" in Leonardo's childhood history, we now no
longer have any reason to believe that Leonardo in fact did spend
those years alone with his mother. Indeed, evidence unearthed
subsequent to Freud's work now indicates quite strongly that the
contrary was the case, that Leonardo was a welcomed member of his
father's household from the time of his birth. *(6)
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 35}
  The contrived facts of Leonardo's childhood, now suddenly gone from
the story, are, however crucial, just the first part of the problem.
They are important to Freud only insofar as he can link them with
other matters- this time, certain facts of Leonardo's adult life. As
with his childhood, these facts (at least those of interest to
Freud, that is, those suggestive of homosexuality) are precious few
and very chancy. First, there is the anonymous accusation leveled at
four young men in 1476, one of whom happened to be Leonardo, that
was officially examined at the time and dismissed. Freud himself
admits this accusation probably occurred in the first place only
"because he [Leonardo] had employed a boy of bad reputation as a
model." One may wonder why Freud is so ready to discount evidence he
himself has just introduced. It may be (one can only conjecture
here) because the accusation of active homosexuality is not really
necessary to his argument. (Indeed, it is actually detrimental to
it, since that argument depends on the conviction that Leonardo's
alleged homosexuality was not active but was sublimated.) Why then
introduce the matter at all? Perhaps for tactical reasons- few other
explanations make sense. For by bringing the accusation to the
reader's attention, but then leaving it in a questionable and
unresolved state, Freud creates enough doubt to at least lend
credibility to an otherwise wholly imaginary assertion: that
Leonardo's sexual interests, sublimated or not, were in fact
homosexual. From that point on, this one specious conjecture serves
to focus all the discrete fragments of evidence Freud has unearthed:
1) the childhood history that has been constructed for Leonardo (one
that Freud's clinical experience- though involving, he admits, only
"a small number of persons"- finds as common among adult
homosexuals); 2) the accusation of homosexuality as a young man; 3)
the many small kindnesses Leonardo showed to his pupils (most of whom
were- as of course all artists, craftsmen, or teachers of any sort
were at that time- young males) and recorded in his diary; 4) the
recorded note of expenditures for the funeral of one "Caterina," whom
Freud takes to be Leonardo's mother; 5) the lack of evidence that
Leonardo had an adult sex life of any kind; and 6) Leonardo's
insatiable desire to investigate the world about him.
  For Freud, the conclusion seems inescapable: Leonardo became
homosexual as a result of his early childhood experience, but by the
process of sublimation his sexuality found expression in a
relentless quest for knowledge; only in his unconsciously motivated
"compulsion to note in laborious detail the sums he spent on them"
did he betray the fact that his mother and his pupils "had been his
sexual objects." We must examine this argument in steps.
  1) We now know that there is no evidence to support the idea that
Leonardo's early childhood was as Freud surmised-that is, that it
paralleled that of the unspecified "small number" of homosexuals of
Freud's clinical experience. In fact, the evidence we do have
supports the very opposite conclusion. But even if Freud had been
correct in his historical reconstruction, the most large-scale and
sophisticated modern studies of the genesis of homosexuality provide
no support for either the alleged importance of castration anxiety
or for the importance of the Freudian warm mother/distant father
hypothesis. *(7) In sum: Freud's reconstruction of Leonardo's early
childhood must be discarded as historically worthless and clinically
not much better.
  2) Leonardo was acquitted of the allegation of homosexuality and
there is no other historically acceptable evidence of homosexuality.
Even if there were support for this contention it would not help
Freud's case, which is based on Leonardo's presumed sublimation of
his sexual impulses. In sum: the question of Leonardo's active
homosexuality must be discarded as historically worthless, and in any
case irrelevant to Freud's own argument.
  3) This bit of evidence seems correct, though by itself utterly
trivial: Leonardo did keep a record of money spent on his pupils.
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 40}
  4) Leonardo did record an expenditure for the funeral of a woman
named Caterina. There is no reason, however, to believe that this
Caterina was his mother, while there is reason to believe she was his
house servant of the same name, the same apparent house servant named
Caterina who appears in Leonardo's financial accounts twice earlier
as the recipient of "ten soldi" payments. *(8) (It is also worthy of
at least passing note that, while Leonardo does not further identify
Caterina, when he records the death of his father Leonardo
explicitly identifies him as "Ser Piero da Vinci, my poor father!")
In sum: Freud's assumption that this Caterina was Leonardo's mother
must be discarded as historically unestablished and most probably
quite wrong. Further, if, as seems probable, this Caterina was not
Leonardo's mother, then the expenditures on her funeral become
irrelevant to Freud's argument. *(9)
  5) It is true that there is no evidence that suggests an active
adult sex life for Leonardo, though negative evidence of this sort
must be treated with a good deal of caution. There is also no
evidence to indicate that Leonardo washed behind his ears,
masturbated, or came in out of the rain, but lack of evidence cannot
be taken as proof that he did not do these things. That the problem
here is a common one among historians does not make it less
serious. *(10) In sum: the possibility that Leonardo may have been
sexually inactive may be taken as of some very low level biographical
interest if a significant number of historically credible and related
facts make such a conjecture relevant. In Freud's work, at least,
such facts do not exist. Thus, this matter too must be discarded.
  6) This assertion is indeed correct: like most, probably all, great
scientists and artists Leonardo did have a deep interest in
investigation.
  Thus far, then, after discarding those of Freud's notions that are
flatly incorrect, unsupportable, and/or irrelevant, we are left with
the following: Leonardo left no record of sexual activity of any
sort; he kept a record of small expenditures, some of which concerned
his pupils; he was also very curious about things. That is all.
  We turn now to the truly exciting part of Freud's biography, in
which he links his analysis of Leonardo's life with the character of
his art. The main foci here are two: 1) the "smile of bliss and
rapture" on the face of the Mona Lisa (believed by many to have been
the wife of the Florentine, Francesco del Giocondo) and subsequently
a similar smile on the faces of Saint Anne and Mary in the Anna
Metterza, as well as on such later figures as John the Baptist and
Leda; and 2) the generationally coterminous appearance, in the Anna
Metterza, of Anne and Mary, despite the fact that they were mother
and daughter. * (Of course, by this time Freud's thesis, based on the
assumption that Leonardo was unconsciously motivated by specific
early childhood experiences, makes no sense at all. Still, it is
instructive to look independently at this concluding section of the
argument.)
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 45}
-
  * For obvious reasons I will not here belabor the embarrassing
matter of the "hidden vulture" in the folds of Mary's robe.
-
It is crucial to Freud that the famed "Leonardesque" smile first
appears on the Mona Lisa and only later in other of his works. For
it was the woman depicted in that painting, he says, who reawakened
in Leonardo the "old memory" of his mother's smile which had "long
lain dormant in his mind." The problem now, then, is an art
historical one. Freud is dealing with extremely subtle and subjective
nuance here, not only in his characterization of the Mona Lisa smile
and in his attribution of similarity between it and the female smiles
on the Anna Metterza, but also in his necessary claim that nothing
quite like it precedes the Mona Lisa. But since it is well known, as
Edward MacCurdy has put it, that no more than about "a dozen pictures
are all that can be attributed to Leonardo with any degree of
certitude or even probability," and since not all of these portray
smiling women, it would seem that Freud has made for himself a
virtually irrefutable case. *(11) Certainly, at the very least it will
be very difficult to find contradictory evidence that is factual
rather than subjective and intuitive.
  It can be argued, for instance, that those very few works that are
attributable to Leonardo include at least one, the Virgin of the
Rocks (1483), that predates by almost two decades his work on the
Mona Lisa and that contains female mouths that, if not clear
precedents of hers are at least remarkably similar. Perhaps even most
of his work can be shown to possess this characteristic, beginning
with the mouth on Leonardo's youthful head of an angel in his teacher
Verrochio's Baptism of Christ and including that of Mary in Leonardo's
own first major independent work, the Adoration of the Kings. The
eminent art historian Meyer Schapiro has also pointed out that
Verrochio himself painted "several smiling faces of a subtlety of
expression approaching the later pictures of Leonardo," thus
suggesting the possibility that, as with other of Leonardo's themes,
there was in the smile a derivative element traceable to his
teacher's work. *(12) In addition, there are other works, of other
artists, produced in the same general era that share- at least from a
figurative perspective- this characteristic: in sculpture, for
example, Rosselino's Virgin is so adorned. Beyond this, however, it
could be contended that even if the so-called "Leonardesque" smile
did appear suddenly, and without a hint of precedent, on the face of
the Mona Lisa, there is not a shred of evidence to support Freud's
conjecture that the encounter with his model stirred in Leonardo a
childhood memory; there are countless other possible reasons, each
with as much evidentiary support as Freud supplies for his own
conjecture (that is to say none), that might be suggested as
motivation for Leonardo's subsequent use of that expression.
  But finally, there is one bit of factual evidence that,
particularly when added to the above objections, makes Freud's case
simply wrong. It is the fact that there exists a preliminary cartoon
of the Anna Metterza that predates by several years the Mona Lisa.
And in that cartoon the faces of Saint Anne and Mary possess the very
same smiles as in the later full painting, the same painting that
Freud incorrectly assumed followed the inspiration induced by Mona
Lisa. *(13) In short, mere chronology is sufficient to show Freud's
thesis to be incorrect.
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 50}
  The other major consideration concerning Leonardo's later painting
involves the apparent similarity of age on the faces of Saint Anne
and Mary in the Anna Metterza. This suggested to Freud that Leonardo,
who supposedly identified himself with the Christ child, was
unconsciously painting, "the synthesis of the history of his
childhood" in which he had, Freud thought, two mothers. Although in
his analysis of the avian fantasy Freud had keyed Leonardo's Christ
child identification to the fact that, like the mythological
vulture, his actual mother (like Mary) had no male partner, for some
unexplained reason, in his analysis of the Anna Metterza Freud
argues that Mary is the representation of Leonardo's stepmother and
Saint Anne is his actual mother. Leonardo, Freud writes, "seems to
have used the blissful smile of Saint Anne to disavow and to cloak
the envy which the unfortunate woman felt when she was forced to give
up her son to her better-born rival, as she had once given up his
father as well." Now, apart from this characteristic bit of
confusion, this argument is premised on the assumption that by
portraying the two women as near-contemporaries Leonardo was making a
new and unusual artistic statement. In fact, he was not.
  As Meyer Schapiro has shown at some length, "contrary to Freud's
belief, Anne and Mary had been represented together as young saints
long before Leonardo." *(14) Age similarity was a quite common
characteristic of such Holy Family paintings, dating at least from a
1367 work by the Sienese Luca di Tome (in which Anne is simply a
replica of her daughter, or vice versa) and including the work of
such contemporaries of Leonardo as Durer and Cranach (an altarpiece
of the latter, in fact, portrays Anne as possibly even younger than
Mary). *(15) Freud's failing in this case was simply due to
unfamiliarity with the artistic and cultural context within which
his subject worked.
  And so, at each of the three essential steps in Freud's argument-
the early childhood history, the adult sexual life, and the later
painting characteristics- we find virtually no supporting evidence.
Each step independently fails to withstand scrutiny, even though,
because of the posited scheme of interlocking causality, all that
would really be necessary to undermine Freud's argument is the fatal
criticism of the very first step, the analysis of the unfortunate
vulture fantasy.
  Is there, then, nothing to be learned from Freud's study? Of course
there is. Simply by addressing his subject in the bold way that he
did, Freud broke through the crust of hagiography that had so often
characterized previous works on Leonardo and in so doing he raised a
variety of truly new and important questions that others might later
pursue in a somewhat more restrained and responsible fashion. Even
Meyer Schapiro, in some ways perhaps the sharpest critic of this work,
concedes that much.
  Perhaps, however, the most interesting insights to be gained from
Freud's Leonardo concern not Leonardo but Freud himself. For unlike
the story of Leonardo's life, about Freud we know quite a bit. And
much of what we know shows that a good deal of what Freud claimed to
find characteristic of Leonardo was characteristic of himself: an
insatiable curiosity; a great love for his mother; a strong desire
for privacy; extreme sexual repression; a very early withdrawal from
all sexual activity; an acknowledged "piece of unruly homosexual
feeling" and a "pronounced mental bi-sexuality"; a hesitancy about
publishing completed works and a habit of declaring that none of his
creations was complete; a rejection of "both dogmatic and personal
religion"; and finally a triumph of creativity "at the very summit
of his life," to use Freud's own words in describing Leonardo- Freud
was in his early fifties when he wrote the Leonardo study, almost
precisely the same age at which Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa. *(16)
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 55}
  This is just the sort of thing that makes for fine moments of
armchair musing and psychologizing- and at best perhaps the forming a
genuine hypothesis or two- but not much else. The same is true of
Freud's Leonardo.
-
  It is, I hope, now obvious that a book examining psychohistory as
an intellectual enterprise could not fruitfully be made up merely of
a series of critiques such as this. Not only would such an effort
never be sufficiently inclusive, but it would also be fruitlessly
repetitive and its argument eventually subject to a very simple and
correct criticism- that what was wrong with the works under review
could be remedied simply by doing better psychohistory. It is a
premise of this book that the best possible psychohistory would
still be bad history because of the limitations imposed by the
weaknesses of the underlying theoretical structure. This premise,
then, is the subject of the rest of this book.
  Nevertheless, there were good reasons for beginning with an example
such as Freud's. First, since this is something of a primer, Freud's
example provides the uninitiated reader with a sample of the type of
work done by the psychohistorian. Second, by beginning with Freud's
Leonardo, this reader is exposed to a sample from the pen of the
father of all psychohistorians, and a sample that remains, despite
its myriad problems, one of the finest and most restrained such works
available. (Subsequent psychoanalyses of Leonardo, for example- from
Marie Bonaparte's in 1927 to Kurt Eissler's in 1961- make Freud's
work appear positively prosaic.) Third, and most important, in
Freud's Leonardo we see in brief form the full range of problems that
afflict virtually all works of psychohistory, up to and including
those of Erik H. Erikson, likely the best of the genre. These
problems can be sorted into four general categories: problems of
fact; problems of logic; problems of theory; and problems of culture.
It is worth a cursory look at them.
  Problems of fact is a self-explanatory category. It includes such
things as fiction writing to "fill gaps" in the historical record. A
well-known example of this, from the work of Erikson, appears in his
Young Man Luther. As did Freud in his book on Leonardo, Erikson
begins his second chapter with a description of a key event in his
subject's life: the time when, it is reported, Luther was seated in
the choir of the monastery at Erfurt and, upon hearing a reading
from the gospel of the exorcism of a deaf and dumb demoniac, fell to
the floor "and roared with the voice of a bull"- "I am not!" "I am
not!" By so doing, Erikson says, Luther was in effect making the
childlike protestation of somebody who has been called a name or who
has been characterized with loathsome adjectives: here, dumb, mute,
possessed."
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 60}
  Erikson thinks it would be "interesting to know whether at this
moment Martin roared in Latin or in German." It would, in fact, be
more interesting to know whether he roared at all. It is probable,
considering the quality of the evidence, that he did not. The
evidence for the "fit in the choir" incident is a bit of gossip
filtered through several levels of hearsay and promoted entirely by
outspoken enemies of Luther. For Erikson to repeat the incident and
to use it as the key event in the first analytic chapter in his book
is, as one theologian notes, "rather like citing seriously and
discussing extensively a report about Freud whose only source is a
succession of Nazi anti-Semites, and which was published by one of
them only in its fourth retelling." *(17)
  Erikson, it must be acknowledged, recognizes the weakness of the
evidence that the fit in the choir ever took place and dutifully
refers to it at one point as "this alleged event." But before long
it has been integrated fully into his argument and is referred to
without qualification; that is, as fact. He even goes so far as to
justify its inclusion in his analysis by saying that it does at
least have a "ring of truth"; and the fact that Luther himself never
mentioned the alleged event may be because "he may well have had an
amnesia," another irresponsible passing comment blithely plucked
from thin air to shore up an edifice of sheer conjecture.
  A similar process occurs in Erikson's description of Luther's
father. It is important to Erikson's case that Luther have a
malicious and tyrannical father, in order that the young man's harsh
image of the "Father in heaven" can be analyzed as a projection of
the image of his earthly father. So, Erikson gives Luther a brutal,
malicious, and tyrannical father. Again, like Freud, Erikson readily
admits that there are almost no facts extant regarding Luther's
childhood, but one fact that he asserts is that Luther's parents were
"hard, thrifty, and superstitious, and beat their boy." Much is made
of this parental oppression and general "maltreatment" of the young
boy. But what is the evidence? The evidence consists entirely of two
references, attributed to Luther by others, to beatings received as
a child- one delivered by his mother, one by his father- and each
reference closes by indicating that the parent either meant well
(the mother) or subsequently made an effort to win back the boy's
affection (the father). Further, even this negligible evidence of
mistreatment is of questionable value since its source is Luther's
Table Talk, a collection of sayings recorded by his students when he
was fifty years old, produced in differing versions and never even
seen by Luther. In addition, this flimsy anecdotal evidence runs
directly contrary to a comparative wealth of material indicating
that a great deal of love and respect obtained within the household
of Luther's childhood. It is this sort of loose overstatement in the
face of patently contradictory evidence that has led even the most
open-minded of authorities on Luther, men such as Roland Bainton and
Heinrich Bornkamm, to refer to Erikson's "violent distortions," his
"heap of exaggerations and groundless speculations." In both cases
these critics were not at all unfriendly to the idea of
psychohistory, but were simply insistent that "a pyramid of
conjectures" was insufficient grounding for such an effort- as
Bainton put it, one must first simply "get the facts straight." *(18)
  Problems of logic. This category is central to the failings of
psychohistory . As with all of these categories, parallels between
Freud's Leonardo and virtually all subsequent psychohistorical
efforts abound. The one (of many) I mention here overlaps with the
problem of fact. Not only do Freud, Erikson, and others of much
lesser eminence and talent violate basic rules of evidence by
inventing numerous facts crucial to their arguments, but in their
most common method of doing so they breach one of the most
fundamental principles of logic. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc describes
the error built on the assumption that if event B followed event A,
then B must have happened because of A. This is a common enough
mistake in all historical writing, but since Freud it has been given
a dizzying new twist: it is now apparently no longer necessary to
historically establish the existence of A. So long as B is found to
exist, it is assumed that A must have happened since B is a
psychoanalytically posited consequence of A. Once having ascertained,
then (by means of conjecture), the alleged existence of A, the cause
of B's existence is made clear: it exists because of A- even though
there may be not a shred of real evidence that A ever existed. An
example should make this problem more clear.
  In his psychohistorical study, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson
and the Subjugation of the American Indian, Michael Paul Rogin
encounters the same initial problem encountered by Freud with
Leonardo and Erikson with Luther- no information on his subject's
early childhood; that is, in the logical sequence, no A. Rogin
compounds this difficulty by using an analytic approach borrowed from
Melanie Klein, an approach that concentrates the crucial
personality-shaping influences within the first two years of life
and, in fact, places greatest emphasis on the first six months. *(19)
Rogin knows nothing about this period of Jackson's life, except the
fact that Jackson's father died before he was born and that he was
raised by his mother in his sister's household. He does, however,
know a good deal about Jackson's adult life, ranging from his quick
temper to his varied medical problems, which Rogin claims are
"commonly" derivative of "tensions in the early maternal tie."
Simpler explanations that have at least some evidentiary credibility
(such as the quite plausible possibility that mercury poisoning was
responsible for some of his medical difficulties) are given short
shrift. *(20) In no time at all, Kleinian theory, along with bits and
pieces of other psychoanalytic ideas (at least one of which is
thoroughly misused), has allowed Rogin to explain these and other
aspects of Jackson's adult life in terms of his earliest childhood,
even though almost nothing is known about that childhood. *(21)
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 65}
  This would be reckless enough, it would seem, but Rogin takes his
analysis an immense step further, adding still more to the logical
muddle. Arguing that "a great man embodies in extreme form the
central cultural tensions of his time" (certainly itself a dubious
assumption) and that "Jackson was no ordinary President" (without
telling us who, in contrast, was an "ordinary President"), Rogin
claims that through Jackson's psychological biography we can view,
writ small, nothing less than the psychological biography of
antebellum America. After all, Rogin asserts, "to pick Jackson to
represent ante-bellum America . . . is to make the same choice as his
contemporaries." By this logic, every President (except, for some
reason, those who can be deemed "ordinary") can be seen, since they
were elected by their contemporaries, as being the psychic
embodiments of their times. This kind of historical and psychological
naivete has not been seen among "ordinary" historians for decades. In
purely logical terms, however, it is reminiscent of the story told by
David Hackett Fischer in his discussion of "the fallacy of the lonely
fact":
-
  There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a scientist who published
an astonishing and improbable generalization about the behavior of
rats. An incredulous colleague came to his laboratory and politely
asked to see the records of the experiments on which the
generalization was based. "Here they are," said the scientist,
dragging a notebook from a pile of papers on his desk. And pointing
to a cage in the corner, he added, "there's the rat." *(22)
-
At least with the rat there is a good chance that something is known
about his (or her) childhood.
  Problems of theory. This problem involves the method that the
psychohistorian uses to invent the facts of a subject's childhood
before showing those facts to be the causes of adult behavior. One
can read through stacks of psychohistorical writings without ever
encountering evidence that the authors did anything but take
psychoanalytic theory as a scientific given- as Freud put it, "the
"key" to understanding action. If psychoanalytic theory is such a
key, then at least some of the weakness inherent in the problems of
fact and logic might be dissipated. But it is not. In Freud's
Leonardo I have already pointed out that much of his argument depends
on the accuracy of his hypothesis concerning the etiology of
homosexuality and that that hypothesis has not been confirmed by
empirical evaluations of experimental data. Such evaluations, of
course, postdate Freud. Psychohistorians today, however, have no
excuse for proceeding to make analytic statements based on hypotheses
that are at best unconfirmed and at worst disconfirmed.
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 70}
  For an example more recent than Freud, we might turn to the
psychohistorical work on Hitler, surely the psychohistorian's
favorite subject to date, although Richard Nixon may be fast catching
up. The analyses of Hitler differ from one writer to the next, but a
theme that commonly occurs in the work of most writers concerns the
psychoanalytic defense mechanism of projection. Projection, to use
Walter C. Langer's definition in the original psychoanalysis of
Hitler, "is a technique by which the ego of an individual defends
itself against unpleasant impulses, tendencies, or characteristics
by denying their existence in himself while he attributes them to
others." It is now commonly held that Hitler's anti-Semitism (with
its roots in his early childhood) was in large measure the result of
projection: "Because Hitler's hatred of the Jews was monumental,"
writes Robert G. L. Waite, "his feelings of guilt and self-loathing
must have been very great indeed." *(23) This is, of course, possible
and perhaps plausible, as are any one of a number of hypotheses. But
as a simple minimal requirement for accepting the notion of
projection in any particular psychohistorical explanation, we should
have some solid evidence indicating that the mechanism itself exists.
We do not have such evidence. To be sure, common sense and everyday
experience tell us that something like projection seems to exist;
but "something like" it is quite different from the specific
psychoanalytic meaning of the term, which derives from Freud's
insistence that projection is inextricably linked to the development
of paranoia. *(24) Empirical efforts to confirm the existence of this
postulated mechanism have failed to do so. *(25)
  As we will see in a later chapter, empirical testing of various
psychoanalytic hypotheses has confirmed some, has disconfirmed
others, and has sometimes found the hypotheses too vague or too
premised on other disconfirmed ideas to permit adequate testing. It
should not be asking too much of would-be psychohistorians to suggest
that they at least familiarize themselves with these empirical
studies before they employ what are all too often clearly mistaken-
if marvelously imaginative- products of Sigmund Freud's creative
genius.
  Problems of culture. One of Freud's failings in his study of Leonardo,
we have seen, involved a lack of familiarity with certain
conventions in artistic expression prior to and during Leonardo's
lifetime. There are other examples of this in his book that were not
mentioned earlier. For example, in establishing the image of
Leonardo's contradictory personality, Freud takes as evidence of
Leonardo's gentleness his habit of buying and freeing caged birds.
What Freud failed to note, however, was that this practice is a very
old and popular folk custom that was believed to bring good
luck. *(26) This is not to deny that Leonardo was often gentle and
kind but merely to point out that what appears to the modern reader
to be evidence of one characteristic may in fact be entirely
explicable in other terms if one simply knows enough about the
cultural world in habited by the subject. This is just common sense
to the traditional historian; indeed, understanding cultural context
is one of the basic and preliminary tasks involved in the writing of
history. Cultural context is, however, something repeatedly ignored
in the writing of most psychohistory. An example to illustrate this
point can be found in a recent psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson.
  In Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History Fawn Brodie makes much of
Jefferson's involvement with his young slave, Sally Hemings. The
story of Jefferson's alleged intimacy with Hemings is not new; it has
been a matter of gossip for a century and a half and was examined
with care, thoroughness, and sensitivity by Winthrop Jordan only six
years prior to the publication of Brodie's book. But Brodie is
interested in something more. She is intrigued with the idea that
Hemings was a "special preoccupation" of the Virginian, with the
depth of his love for the "forbidden woman," and with the
relationship of this preoccupation to his "inner needs." Thus, she
finds in his journal of a trip through Holland, while Hemings was
supposedly on his mind (though there is, of course, no evidence for
this), descriptions of the landscape that include fully eight
references to the color of the land as "mulatto." Brodie contrasts
this journal with a similar journal Jefferson kept earlier, "just
before Sally Hemings' disturbing mulatto presence had come to trouble
him," and finds that the word mulatto appears but once. (Actually,
the word appears twice.) This and other "psychological evidence" of
Jefferson's supposed obsession, including such telling items as his
designing a plow (with its "ancient symbolism") during the fateful
trip and his reference in a letter to an ironic tale concerning noses
(which is seen as possibly the only nonwhite trait possessed by
Hemings), mean much to Brodie the analyst. Unfortunately, Brodie the
historian had not done her homework.
  As Garry Wills has pointed out, the word "mulatto" was commonly
used by eighteenth-century Americans to describe the color of soil-
as were red, gray, reddish-brown, and black, which Jefferson also
used frequently in his journal. But why did "mulatto" appear four
times as often in the later journal? Perhaps for the same reason that
"red" appeared more than five times as often in the earlier journal:
the trips covered substantially different terrain and the soils were
in fact different in color. *(27)
                                                        {CH_1 ^paragraph 75}
  If this sort of silliness were confined to Brodie's book, it would
be merely (to use one of her own favorite words) curious; but it is
not. All of the books mentioned in the previous several pages share,
in varying degrees, the problem of making much of matters that are
notable only for their lack of singular importance once they are
placed in their cultural context. All of them also share all of the
other problems that have been pointed out. The studies of Luther,
Jackson, Hitler, and Jefferson all build complex arguments on
virtually nonexistent evidence; all violate elementary rules of
logic in developing those arguments; and all analyze data using
theories that fail to withstand empirical examination and
experimental testing.
  This should not be surprising, for all of these works are guided by
a collection of hypotheses- one version or another of psychoanalytic
theory- that itself suffers from problems of illogic, experimental
nonconfirmation, and cultural parochialism. To examine this problem
more closely is the task of the following chapters. In the first of
these chapters, however, another element is introduced. What I have
called "problems of fact" is not something that can be removed from
the examination of specific historiographical applications of
theory. Something of a parallel does exist, nonetheless, between the
problem of fact in history writing and the problem of therapy in
psychoanalyzing. History writing begins with the accumulation of
data; the most basic test of a work of history is whether or not the
facts "work" when shaped into an argument. Psychoanalytic theory
begins with therapy; the most basic test for a theory grounded in
clinical therapeutic experience is whether or not that theory "works"
when applied to therapy. Thus, the first of the four chapters that
make up the middle section of this book concerns itself with the
fundamental question: does psychoanalytic therapy work?

INTRO_TO_CH_2
-
  "What-no wooden legs?"
-
                  -Anatole France on viewing the discarded crutches
                   and other medical paraphernalia at Lourdes.

{CH_2
                                2
                     The Problem of Therapy

  SOME say that one of the common characteristics of the aged person
of genius is a susceptibility to depression. *(1) Whether or not this
is a demonstrable fact need not concern us at the moment. Let us
assume it to be true. Let us further assume that depression was a
problem encountered late in life by someone of interest to the
psychohistorian- say, Goethe. What can be made of this fact? How can
we find out the cause of this condition? We might try common sense:
according to Ortega y Gasset, Goethe was caught in a constant
struggle with himself over how to live his life, and his alleged
depression was one sign of his "living contrary to his vocation." *(2)
But this is perhaps too simple, too superficial an explanation- at
least for those who seek "deeper" answers. Let us then turn for
assistance to someone of expertise in curing such maladies as
depression.
  His name is Digat Anak Kutak. He studied for many years in
preparation for his occupation as therapist among the Iban people of
Borneo, and he has an excellent reputation. If presented with the
problem of Goethe's depression (or anyone else's, for that matter),
he would have a ready diagnosis: Goethe's soul had obviously been
stolen by an evil spirit. Should we betray some pessimism with regard
to this judgment, Digat could readily assure us that years of
successful clinical experience had led him to such a conclusion, a
conclusion held by all the other therapists known to him. In short,
repeated good fortune in the curing of depression- by covering
himself with a blanket, journeying to the realm of the spirits,
recapturing the lost soul, and blowing it back into the patient's
skull- has convinced Digat and his colleagues that they know the
cause and the cure of this problem. After all, he would perhaps
reason, if they were wrong about the cause of the affliction their
therapy could not work; since the therapy does work (and even Western
authorities agree that it does), they must be right about the
cause. *(3)
  I think it fair to say that, despite Digat's assurances, most
historians would still be skeptical of an account that soberly blamed
soul-stealing evil spirits for a historical figure's mental troubles.
Even the most open-minded among them would ask for more evidence than
that provided by the Iban therapist's private clinical experience.
What sort of evidence would they want? Well, are there any statistics
supportive of the therapist's claim- statistics on his actual cure
rate, on his cure rate compared with that of other forms of therapy
(e.g., primal screaming, devil exorcism, animal magnetism,
psychoanalysis), or on his cure rate compared with that afforded by
an absence of therapy? This would be a beginning.
  To be sure, even if it were found that the Iban therapist's efforts
were far more (or less) successful than any other form of therapy,
the presence (or absence) of soul-stealing evil spirits would still
not definitely be indicated. To establish or reject the entire system
of causation and explanation would require evidence of a quite
different sort. Since, for extraneous reasons such as therapist
suggestion, Iban therapy might succeed despite the nonexistence of
the posited spiritual world (just as the therapy may fail though the
spiritual world may exist), testing of the efficacy of that therapy
could not fully confirm or deny the proposition that Goethe was
depressed because his soul was stolen. Should such tests show Iban
therapy to be greatly superior to other forms of therapy, however,
further investigation would at least be called for. If, on the other
hand, Iban therapy were shown to be inferior to other forms of
therapy, at the very least a deeper skepticism concerning the
explanatory power of the Iban therapist's causal system (those
soul-stealing evil spirits) would seem equally warranted.
  But this is not a book about Iban therapy. It is about
psychohistory- in practice, psychoanalysis as applied to history.
Still, the same questions remain. Psychoanalysis is at base a
therapeutic method. Its formal data derive from clinical experience,
and its primary practical application is to clinical work. Further,
as with Digat Anak Kutak, in his efforts to cure, the psychoanalyst
claims to be encountering the forces of an invisible world- those
demons residing in the unconscious. Should we ask a psychoanalyst to
explain Goethe's alleged depression we would be equally obliged to
ask him the same questions we asked the Iban therapist: since your
explanation is at least initially based on your experience in
therapy, how well does your therapy work? If it works well, fine, we
can go on from there with our evaluation of the total system of
psychoanalytic explanation; and if it fails to work well, then it
must be considered thenceforth with at best a very skeptical
attitude.
                                                         {CH_2 ^paragraph 5}
-
  We must begin by acknowledging that psychoanalysts do not at all
appreciate "outside" efforts at scrutinizing and evaluating their
clinical activities. Indeed, they insistently claim that statistical
studies cannot do justice to the subtlety of their ideas and the
uniqueness of each case. Thus, following Freud, they most often
argue that rather than using large-scale scientifically controlled
experiments to determine the validity of psychoanalytic therapy "it
is wiser to examine one's individual experiences." *(4) This is the
sort of behavior, when roles are reversed, that the analyst labels
"resistance." And it is worthy of note that this attitude was rather
late to develop in Freud. Earlier in his career, when Freud was much
more optimistic about the positive effects of his therapy, he
welcomed and even boasted of what he considered experimental
confirmation of theory. *(5) In any case, to reject experimental
investigation out of hand is tantamount to admitting that
psychoanalysis is not a science or even a coherent body of
replicable procedures: to deny in advance the efficacy of
experimentally testing the value of therapeutic techniques is, ipso
facto, to strip them of scientific pretension.
  Even if we ignore this problem, however, and attempt to do what the
analyst wishes- that is, accept only the information he or she
provides us- a battery of further difficulties is in store. The first
of these is the fact that different psychoanalysts, confronted with
identical typescripts of an analytic session, show great difficulty
in agreeing on interpretations of that session. *(6) This is caused by
the fact that in the absence of objective and verified data analysts
are free to emphasize one aspect of psychoanalytic theory and
deemphasize or disregard others, as Freud well knew. Thus, at a time
when Karen Horney's early criticisms of his ideas regarding female
sexuality were gaining adherents, Freud observed: "We shall not be
very greatly surprised if a woman analyst who has not been
sufficiently convinced of the intensity of her own wish for a penis
also fails to attach proper importance to that factor in her
patients. But," he then casually added, "such sources of error,
arising from the personal equation, have no great importance in the
long run." With this dismissal Freud provided a classic example not
only of the evidentiary hollowness typical of his theories, but of
the remarkably prescientific and even primitive fashion in which
debates among analysts are resolved: analyst "prestige and
authority," coupled with "enthusiasm, persuasiveness, or even just
plain dogmatism . . . without any check" determine the outcome of
such disagreements. Or so says at least one analyst who should know,
since he served for sixteen years as Director of Research for the
London Institute of Psychoanalysis. *(7)
  Another matter of concern, at least to anyone who might wish to
make general extrapolations from the psychoanalytic encounter (as the
psychohistorian does and must), is the extraordinary degree of
demographic bias that is present. Various studies have shown this to
be true. The patients of psychoanalysts tend to be mostly white,
predominantly Jewish, relatively young, exceptionally affluent,
highly educated, and very well informed as to the nature of analytic
therapy. One study even reported that fully half of the patients
surveyed were themselves "engaged in work related to psychiatry and
psychoanalysis." *(8) To use this population sample to generalize
about contemporaries who do not fit this demographic profile is
certainly dubious; to use it to generalize about people who lived and
died centuries ago borders on the absurd- but more about that in a
later chapter.
  Not only is the psychoanalytic patient strikingly nonrepresentative
of the population at large in terms of race, religion, age, income,
and education, he or she is also nonrepresentative of the total
population in therapy of one sort or another. This is because of the
highly selective criteria applied in the screening of prospective
patients. Studies have shown, for example, that as few as four
percent of patient applicants may be accepted for treatment and that
those accepted are much less disturbed to begin with than those who
are accepted by nonpsychoanalytic therapists. A report on the outcome
of psychoanalytic treatment in the Columbia University Psychoanalytic
Clinic, for example, concedes that the only people admitted to
treatment were those who, after careful screening, possessed
"sufficient motivation" for improvement and who showed, before
treatment, a favorable prognosis based on a "symptomatology of a
relatively short duration" and a capability of "effective
functioning, either currently or in the recent past." *(9) In other
fields of therapeutic endeavor this would be called stacking the
deck. In psychoanalysis it is, and always has been, common practice.
                                                        {CH_2 ^paragraph 10}
  But there is more. Psychoanalysts make it very difficult to
evaluate the outcome of therapy, even on their carefully selected
patient population, by insisting on two totally unacceptable ground
rules. The first of these is that the inquirer must accept the
analyst's own judgment as to his degree of success or failure. Even
on its face this provision would be unsatisfactory because of the
possibility of distortion, both accidental and intentional, but it is
made all the more unacceptable by the evidence that such distortion
is not only possible but common. Analysts have been shown, for
example, to be more likely than other therapists to perceive positive
change where none existed in fictitiously constructed and taped
therapy session "excerpts" alternately labeled "early" and "late,"
and they are more likely than other therapists to perceive
interviewees as "significantly more disturbed" when presented as
"patients" than when described as "job applicants." *(10) Further, and
this is true of therapists of various persuasions, there is evidence
that they may be twice as likely as their own patients to declare a
treatment a success, despite the fact that placebo studies invariably
show that patients report improvement even when no "legitimate"
therapy has taken place. *(11)
  The second unacceptable ground rule insisted upon by the analyst is
the definition of a "complete" analysis. To the psychoanalyst a
treatment is complete only when it is successful- no matter how long
that takes. As Stanley Rachman has observed, it is thus possible
that a patient who discontinues analysis after seven unsuccessful
years (say, 1500 hours) "would be regarded as a premature terminator
rather than as a failed case." *(12) By using this sort of semantic
sleight-of-hand the American Psychoanalytic Association has been
able to report a success rate (as determined by their analysts) of
over 95% among a surveyed sample of patients who completed analysis,
while blandly noting that at least half the patients in the survey did
not complete the therapy.
  In point of fact, this APA study began with a sample population of
ten thousand patients whose profiles had been provided by members of
the Association. For some unexplained reason each follow-up inquiry
resulted in a dramatic failure of the majority of originally
participating analysts to submit reports, and eventually a total of
595 neurotic patients was determined. Of these, 289 (or 49%) "did
not complete" the treatment. That left 306. On further inquiry only
210 of the 306 patients were reported on; of these, 35 patients were
reported to be fully cured (that is, symptom-free), while the
remaining 175 ranged from "cured," but with residual symptoms
remaining, to "improved." On the basis of these results the
Association concluded that "about 97% of the patients who undertake
analysis for neurotic reactions and 'complete' it, are 'cured' or
'improved.'" *(13)
  Surely, this will not do. Perhaps, since it was Freud who first
directed that any inquiries regarding the efficacy of analysis focus
on individual cases, we will do better by looking at his own
therapeutic record. Freud's writings cover a span of more than half a
century of work, filling the pages of nearly two dozen books and well
over a hundred papers in addition to his voluminous correspondence.
These writings include pronouncements on a staggering variety of
themes ranging from slips of the tongue and the meaning of jokes to
the history of humankind and the future of religion- all drawing from
and elaborating on, in one way or another, his psychoanalytic method.
It may then come as a surprise to some that in all this writing Freud
discussed at length no more than half a dozen of his own cases, all
of which were handled within a relatively short period of time: the
cases known as Dora (1905); Little Hans (1909); Lorenz, or Rat Man
(1909); Schreber (1911); Wolf Man (1914); and the female homosexual
(1919).
  On closer examination, however, as Michael Sherwood of the Harvard
Medical School has pointed out, even this small number must be
qualified. Dora was treated only briefly with no discernible
positive effect. Little Hans only met Freud once, very briefly- the
entire "analysis" having been carried out by the boy's father, a
close follower of Freud. Lorenz was a complete and apparently
successful analysis. The Schreber case was only a historical
reconstruction based on published memoirs. The Wolf Man case dragged
on for many years, with different analysts and resulted in the
eventual apparently paranoid breakdown of the patient. The female
homosexual, like Dora, quickly terminated after virtually no attempt
at treatment and with no effect. Thus, as Sherwood notes, "only the
Lorenz case is a complete analysis," and even with it there are
possible problems of therapist suggestion. *(14)
                                                        {CH_2 ^paragraph 15}
  Of course, Freud did see many more patients than this. A thorough
search of all his works by one researcher has turned up 145 cases of
at least passing mention in his writings. * But, for whatever reasons,
Freud chose not to discuss most of these cases at length. It is
little wonder that in the most recent and rather friendly large-scale
survey of psychoanalytic theory and therapy, Seymour Fisher and Roger
Greenberg are forced to admit, with delicate understatement, that
"Freud chose to demonstrate the utility of psychoanalysis through
descriptions of largely unsuccessful cases" and that he "never
presented any data, in statistical or case form, that demonstrated
that his treatment was of benefit to a significant number of patients
he himself saw." *(16) In short, if we accept Freud's advice that it
is only the individual cases that matter in evaluating the merits of
of psychoanalytic therapy, we must conclude that his own
self-selected and reported therapeutic record hardly inspires
confidence.
-
  * It should be noted that these cases showed precisely the same
sorts of demographic bias that would become the rule for
psychoanalysis. For example, the vast majority of Freud's patients
were upper-class females and, in his entire reported case load, only
two patients were beyond the age of forty-five; of those twelve
patients who received more than cursory mention, nine were between
the ages of eighteen and twenty. *(15)
-
  This modest conclusion is reinforced when we observe that there is
evidence indicating that the use of hastily trained college students
and even psychiatric patients as therapists can produce positive
clinical results superior to those reported by Freud and equal to or
better than that obtained by modern professional therapists of
various persuasions. *(17) In addition, other forms of therapy
frequently report anecdotal success (admittedly, like that reported
by psychoanalysts, unverified) at least as impressive as Freud's:
scream therapy, dance therapy, pet therapy, "rage" therapy (which
involves "physical stimulation of the rib cage area"), shopping
therapy, "rebirthing" (extended snorkeling in a hot tub), computer
therapy (talking to a computer programmed with a vocabulary of set
psychiatric interview questions such as, "Is that the real reason?"),
"direct" therapy (which is an all-out emotional assault often
requiring that the therapist lie to, cheat, humiliate, terrorize, and
possibly insist on sexual intercourse with the patient), jogging
therapy, and, of course, the much more substantial therapies of
shamans, priests, and witchdoctors. So far, however, no one has
seriously attempted a work of psychohistory using the findings of
these therapies as a theoretical underpinning. *(18)
                                                        {CH_2 ^paragraph 20}
  It seems clear that for a large number of theoretical and
substantive reasons no resolute investigator can assent to the
psychoanalyst's admonition that he or she examine only those cases
the analyst cares to divulge and accept in those cases the analyst's
own criteria for evaluation. As even some longtime friends of
Freudian theory have begun to recognize, to maintain this traditional
stance is to only further damage the already sullied reputation of
psychoanalysis. Thus, for example, Hans H. Strupp, in an address to
his colleagues in the Council of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists,
has complained of the "failure of psychoanalysis to have cultivated
a spirit of open inquiry," of its treating "its theories, techniques,
and insights as a secret lore, a kabbala, open only to the initiated"
and has lamented the fact that "to put it bluntly, psychoanalysis has
lost its scientific respectability." *(19) Into this troubled state of
affairs the examination of experimental and statistical data might
seem like a breath of fresh air; it might even, as Fisher and
Greenberg suggest, "do a great deal for the self-feeling of
analysts." *(20) It might. But whether it does or not, that is where
our inquiry must now take us.
-
  During the 1930s and 1940s a number of studies were carried out
that either directly concerned or were relevant to the evaluation of
psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. The results were
printed in various professional journals where they lingered for
years, causing barely a ripple of concern in the therapeutic
community. But then in 1952, Hans J. Eysenck, the outspoken and
iconoclastic University of London psychologist, published a
five-page paper in the Journal of Consulting Psychology that caused
that community to erupt in shock and outrage. Probably the single
most frequently quoted title in the literature on therapy evaluation
during the past quarter century, Eysenck's little paper initiated
debates that continue today and that form the starting point for
virtually every effort to assess the value of psychotherapy. *(21)
  What Eysenck did in his paper that was so upsetting was to draw on
those earlier studies, involving a total of over seven thousand
patients, to make an admittedly crude attempt to establish a rate of
"spontaneous remission" from neuroses- that is, a rate of recovery
without benefit of psychotherapy- and then to compare that rate with
reported recovery rates of patients who had received psychotherapy.
He found that the available studies all pointed in one direction:
there appeared to be "an inverse correlation between recovery and
psychotherapy" of any sort, and as for psychoanalysis it showed the
worst recovery rate of all approaches, and by a very wide margin.
  Psychotherapy, and particularly psychoanalysis, appeared in fact to
be a danger to mental health, its main effect iatrogenic- a term used
to describe illness caused by medical care. In this initial
calculation Eysenck classified those patients who had stopped
treatment without improvement as therapeutic failures. However,
recognizing what he referred to as "the peculiarities of Freudian
procedures," he recalculated his figures to give the benefit of the
doubt to psychoanalysis by considering only "the percentage of
completed treatments which are successful." This resulted in a
psychoanalytic improvement rate of approximately 66%, about the same
as with other forms of therapy and slightly less than that for
patients who had received no formal treatment at all.
                                                        {CH_2 ^paragraph 25}
  Eysenck's most generous conclusion, then, which caused such an
understandable furor among psychotherapists, was that "roughly
two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve
to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their
illness, whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not."
Further, "this figure appears to be remarkably stable from one
investigation to another, regardless of type of patient treated,
standard of recovery employed or method of therapy used."
  One of the first responses to Eysenck indicates the sort of
confusion his paper wrought. Noting that "it is obvious that some
people change in some ways under the influence of some kinds of
therapeutic activities while other people do not change, or change
in different ways, under the same therapeutic activity, and that
still other people change in ways similar to the above without any
therapeutic activity," this incisive writer urged that the wisest
reaction to Eysenck's challenge was to make believe it hadn't
happened. *(22) His colleagues understandably did not heed the advice.
  Since the amount of writing on this topic now runs into many
thousands of pages, we obviously cannot treat it here in any detail.
Nevertheless, certain main lines of argument stand out. The first of
these arguments concerns the concept of spontaneous remission.
Analysts and their supporters claim that the studies Eysenck used to
calculate the spontaneous remission rate were inappropriate for that
purpose because of variations in the criteria used to determine
improvement and because the supposed non-treatment control groups
often did receive some sort of palliative care, though not formal
therapy.
  The question of improvement criteria is one that may never be
satisfactorily answered so long as we accept the therapists own
evaluations of their work. Apart from the problem of bias already
discussed, there is the matter of agreeing on a definition of
success. To take one admittedly extreme example, the form of
treatment known as primal therapy claims it has attained success when
the patient has a significantly lowered interest in work, politics,
sex, and activity in general. Thus, one cited instance of therapeutic
success is a Ph.D. candidate in English who now reads nothing but
fairy tales. Of other patients surveyed in a follow-up study by
Arthur Janov, the founder of primal therapy, "nearly all . . . said
that they had much less sex than before" and in fact "do less, go
less, want less, talk less- everything is less." *(23) Not
surprisingly, there have been some skeptics who have questioned
whether such affectless, alienated placidity is to be considered a
desirable sign of health. *(24)
  In contrast, the criteria used in the studies consulted by Eysenck
to locate the phenomenon of spontaneous remission ranged from the
hospital discharge rates of diagnosed neurotic patients who received
only custodial care to the self-reported ability of individuals who
had been receiving disability insurance for neurotic disorders, but
had not undergone psychotherapy, to return to work, function
socially, and remain symptom-free. Though far from ideal (as Eysenck
admitted), these criteria were at least based on relatively objective
data that were accessible to outside scrutiny. If anything, these
criteria may have been biased against recovery, since the
hospitalized patients were possibly more disordered than the others,
and the patients on disability insurance were to some extent being
encouraged to remain unwell. But whatever the bias problems in
Eysenck's calculations, subsequent studies using much tighter
controls (such as actuarial analyses of clinical work and comparisons
of patients treated therapeutically with those who, though diagnosed
as in need of treatment, were left to linger on therapists' waiting
lists) have supported the claim that spontaneous remission is a
genuine phenomenon- though actual rates of remission and therapeutic
success have fluctuated. *(25)
                                                        {CH_2 ^paragraph 30}
  The other criticism, that Eysenck's (and others') nontreatment
control groups did receive some care- though not psychotherapy is
 usually linked to the conclusion, arrived at by Leo Subotnik, that
"there is no evidence that improvement is a function of time, as the
hypothesis requires." *(26) This criticism simply misses the point, as
it confuses "spontaneous" with "uncaused." Certainly the control
groups received some treatment. Eysenck admitted as much when he
noted that the patients in at least one of the studies he consulted
"were regularly seen and treated by their own physicians with
sedatives, tonics, suggestion and reassurance . . . the
stock-in-trade of the general practitioner." They may also have
benefited from spousal comfort, financial windfall, or any of a
number of personally helpful experiences- or, they may not have.
Eysenck's point was not that, left to their own devices, under even
the worst environmental conditions, neurotics would necessarily
improve as "a function of time"; it was, simply, that in the absence
of formal psychotherapy a certain percentage of persons afflicted
with neuroses would still show improvement and that the rate of
improvement would be at least comparable to that attained by formal
psychotherapy. The first part of this argument, that at least some
persons would recover without psychotherapy, now appears beyond
dispute- as even common sense would dictate. To argue the contrary is
to take the position that in all of human history before the
invention of modern psychotherapy neurosis, once developed, never
disappeared. The second part of the argument remains in a state of
debate; that is, how does the rate of spontaneous remission compare
with the success rate for psychotherapy? We don't yet have a precise
answer. But we do know that, at best, the difference is not great, if
it exists at all.
  Thus far we have only discussed the arguments that have taken place
regarding spontaneous remission and psychotherapy in general. What
about psychoanalysis as therapy? How does it compare, in terms of
success rate, with no treatment and with other forms of therapy?
Here, there is less disagreement and we can draw conclusions more
easily. Even among those researchers who insist that therapy of one
sort or another for neurotic disorders is more beneficial than no
treatment at all (including simple custodial care) and who accept the
psychoanalyst's insistence that unhelped treatment dropouts don't
count, there's general agreement, according to Fisher and Greenberg,
that "psychoanalysis has not been shown to be significantly more
effective than other forms of psychotherapy with any type of
patient" and that therefore "there is at present no justification
for a patient to assume that he will achieve a greater degree of
improvement in a therapy called psychoanalysis than in a therapy
given another label such as analytically-oriented, client-centered,
or behavioral." *(27)
  As for the contention that through the process of transference the
psychoanalytic patient gains "insight" that leads to more lasting
change than that attained by other forms of therapy (something that
even Freud expressed doubts about near the end of his career), the
most sanguine view- again that of Fisher and Greenberg- is that this
"has not yet been demonstrated" and that it is in fact contrary to
"a voluminous empirical literature" indicating that "the application
of direct behavioral techniques without any attempts to promote
insight" produce changes that "do not usually appear to result in
either substitute symptoms or shorter-lived cures." *(28)
  This, as I say, is the generous view. Others- behaviorists,
generally- point to a significant body of experimental literature in
concluding that, in Rachman's words, " there is still no acceptable
evidence to support the view that psychoanalytic treatment is
effective." *(29) In a 1973 review of the twenty-year accumulation of
research that followed his original paper, Eysenck is more definite:
"the evidence is completely congruent with a view that if
psychoanalysis has any effects over and above spontaneous remission,
these cannot be large or important, if they exist at all." He adds
that, although this conclusion is always subject to reconsideration
in the face of new evidence, the indications at present are all
negative, and he notes that "certainly there is no hypothesis in
experimental psychology which would still be maintained by any
serious worker if so much negative evidence were available to
contradict it." *(30)
  Subsequent work in the field continues to provide this "new
evidence"- and also to support Eysenck's general contention. For
example, an extensive, sophisticated, and well-controlled recent
study conducted at the Temple University Psychiatric Outpatient
Clinic rated a group of patients who had received behavior therapy, a
group who had received analytically oriented therapy, and a group of
wait-listed controls who received no formal therapy at all. Initial
patient assessments were made and compared with later follow-up
assessments to establish degrees of specific and overall improvement.
While the two groups of treated patients appeared to improve at a
similar rate (the behavior therapy subjects showed slightly greater
overall success), and both of them at a somewhat greater rate than
the non-treatment group, by the conclusion of the study over fifty
percent of the wait-list group were considered "improved or recovered
symptomatically." But even this validation of a high rate of
spontaneous remission was biased in favor of the treatment
groups- first, because all subjects "wished to receive psychotherapy"
and the wait-list patients received frequent assurances "that they
were not forgotten and would soon be assigned to treatment"; second,
because the final assessments were arrived at by combining the
evaluations of the patients themselves, their therapists, and
psychiatrically trained outside assessors who were kept uninformed
as to the treatment (or non-treatment) categories of individual
patients. In the opinion of just this latter group- surely the most
objective measure- all three groups improved dramatically and with no
significant differences among them. *(31)
                                                        {CH_2 ^paragraph 35}
  Studies of this sort continue to be done, generally producing
support for Eysenck's overall argument, but also invariably
generating disagreements concerning a wide variety of specific
sub-problems. Faced with these sorts of disagreement, what is the
layman to conclude? The most prudent response, obviously, is to avoid
taking sides on the specific issues that remain a matter of serious
professional debate. That is what we shall do here. But at the very
least we can find it instructive that so limited a number of major
issues are in fact still genuinely problematic. The arguments now
center on whether or not psychoanalytic therapy has a greater rate
of success than that accomplished by no formal therapy at all. There
is widespread agreement that psychoanalytic therapy is, at best, no
more successful than any other therapeutic technique. Even Freud
seems finally to have come to recognize this fact. Only a few years
before his death, and perhaps in anticipation of the final
pessimistic thoughts on psychotherapy that he would express in
"Analysis Terminable and Interminable," he wryly observed: "I do not
think our cures can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many
more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in
the existence of the unconscious." *(32)
  Freud need not have looked to so exotic an example as Lourdes to
draw such a gloomy conclusion. The somewhat comparable recovery rates
of psychoanalysis, non-psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and spontaneous
remission are also about the same (actually, a bit lower) as those
achieved for all patients- not only a careful selection of what we
would call neurotics today- at the Friend's Asylum in Pennsylvania
during the middle years of the nineteenth century. *(33) In those
unenlightened days the guiding therapeutic technique at the most
successful institutions was "moral treatment"- kindness, trust,
encouragement, and respect directed toward the promotion of
self-esteem. As Stanley Rachman suggests, "it may turn out, in the
long run, that psychotherapy does no more than provide the patient
with a degree of comfort while the disorder runs its natural
course." *(34)
-
  It is not the purpose of this chapter to dissuade those in need
from seeking professional advice, nor to suggest that such people
would do just as well to talk with a witch doctor or a college
student or a psychiatric patient about their problems, although in
individual cases, it seems, that may be good advice. (There is little
doubt that in many cultures witch doctors are more successful than
any Western psychotherapist might be- and one cannot but find
troubling the report in a famous study by D. L. Rosenhan that a group
of feigned mental patients in a variety of public and private
institutions were readily identified as such by other "legitimate"
patients while the resident psychiatrists persisted in treating the
feigned patients as schizophrenics.) *(35) We are not concerned here
with therapy except as it concerns evidence for the validity or
nonvalidity of a total system of behavior explanation that may be
useful in helping us understand the lives of historical figures. But
in those terms all the evidence does support one conclusion: there is
no reason to believe, based on its therapeutic usefulness, that
psychoanalytic theory is better than any other theory for the conduct
of historical inquiry. On this evidence, at least, there appears to
be no reason for the discriminating reader to even seriously
entertain the explanatory notions of the psychohistorian, or at least
to give them more credence than any other explanations.
  As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, disconfirmation of
therapeutic efficacy (whether of psychoanalysis or witch doctoring)
does not necessarily imply disconfirmation of the total system of
explanation in question, any more than confirmation of therapeutic
efficacy would necessarily confirm the validity of that system. But,
though not sufficiently determinative to confirm or deny by itself
the theoretical foundations on which psychohistorical analyses are
built, the lack of evidentiary support for psychoanalytic therapy is
hardly irrelevant.
                                                        {CH_2 ^paragraph 40}
  In an essay on the scientific stature of psychoanalysis written
twenty years ago, the philosopher Sidney Hook remarked that he was
"sorely puzzled that some psychoanalysts seem inclined to dismiss the
question of therapeutic efficacy as an irrelevant intrusion into the
evaluation of its truth claims. It is as if," he went on, "a
meteorologist dismissed the significance of his daily weather
predictions as irrelevant to his science." *(36) No doubt there are
times when meteorologists wish they could do just that- and for the
same reason that psychoanalysts do do just that. The credibility of
meteorological theory, however, would obviously be seriously
diminished if such an attitude were generally maintained. In the case
of psychoanalysis the situation is more extreme. To continue the
comparison, it is as if meteorologist not only dismissed the
relevance of their daily weather predictions, but also insisted on
the scientific nature of their endeavor while denying others access
to their predictions. I think it is clear that major questions would
be raised if, in addition to such efforts at concealment, it were
subsequently found out (as it has been with regard to psychoanalysis)
that the predictions of meteorologists were in fact no more accurate
than those of any other weather predictors- say, the local drug-store
almanac or even the proverbial man in the street.
  I will strain the analogy no further. Psychoanalytic theory has
other problems deserving of our attention.

INTRO_TO_CH_3
-
  "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.
  Humpty-Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't- till I
tell you. I mean 'there's a nice knockdown argument for you!'"
  "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument," Alice
objected.
  "When I use the word," Humpty-Dumpty said in a rather scornful
tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor
less."
  "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so
many different things."
  "The question is," said Humpty-Dumpty, "which is to be the master-
that's all."
                                                {INTRO_TO_CH_3 ^paragraph 5}
-
                                -Lewis Carroll,
                                 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

{CH_3
                                3
                      The Problem of Logic
-
  DURING the course of a 1963 symposium on philosophy and history,
the historian Bernard Bailyn considered some of the matters under
discussion- "the problems of objectivity and subjectivity, the
involvement or detachment of the inquiring mind, the nature of facts,
and the predictive value of historical knowledge"- and wondered aloud
"whether, if what one is concerned with is the actual problems of the
working historian, he should be talking about such matters as these
at all." *(1) Had they known of this remark, multitudes of "working
historians" no doubt would have applauded Bailyn's words.
  But if philosophy has generally found a cool reception among
historians, its reception among members of the psychoanalytic
community has more often been truly glacial. In a general sense this
is so because of the field day philosophers of science have had with
the scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis. In a more specific
sense it is so because in their multi-faceted attacks on the
pretentiousness of psychoanalysis many philosophers have gone so far
as to argue that the very core subject of psychoanalytic concern- the
unconscious- does not even exist. It is here, then, that any
consideration of the logical status of psychoanalytic theory must
begin.
  Freud has, time and again, been hailed as the "discoverer of the
unconscious." This is inaccurate, of course, as Freud himself
recognized. "The poets and philosophers before me discovered the
unconscious," he once acknowledged (indeed, he might have added, the
word itself- at least as Freud used it- was coined by Coleridge);
"what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious
can be studied." *(2) This discovery, no mean achievement in itself if
correct, was accomplished, first, by turning what had traditionally
been a nonsubstantial quality or concept into an actually existing
"thing." For Freud and his followers the unconscious thus became
"something actual and tangible," "a mental province," an "abode" of
imaginary essences, a "special realm" of activity- to use phrases
Freud himself used on numerous occasions. To his famous and probably
most devoted disciple, Ernest Jones, Freud's great accomplishment was
locating and examining the nature of "a strange mental world quite
foreign to that of consciousness.... [a] buried stratum of the mind
. . . extremely primitive in nature, and closely akin to the mind of
both the infant and of the savage." *(3)
  The unconscious became, in short, an actual place into which things
(ideas, fears, desires) were deposited and hidden. This place, to
the psychoanalyst, filled as it is with all manner of forgotten
experiences, is of especial importance to the individual. It is, in
fact, the primary force behind all mental activity and as such is
singularly fundamental to psychoanalytic theory. By literalizing
what he himself admitted was but a "facon de parler" to his
predecessors, Freud in a sense repeated the process that Franz Anton
Mesmer had pioneered a century earlier: he invented a substance
(Mesmer called his substance fluidum) and then claimed to be able to
understand and control its functioning. *(4) But most philosophers
remain unconvinced of its existence.
                                                         {CH_3 ^paragraph 5}
  Gilbert Ryle has referred to the psychoanalytic idea of the
unconscious, and to all such ideas rooted in the Cartesian
conception of a body-mind dichotomy, as "the dogma of the Ghost in
the Machine." Such dogma, Ryle says, is a "logical howler" that
derives its existence from a massive "category mistake." *(5) He
illustrates this point with reference to a series of hypothetical
situations. One of them asks the reader to imagine a foreigner
watching his first game of cricket:
-
  [He] learns what are the functions of the bowlers, the batsmen, the
fielders, the umpires and the scorers. He then says, "But there is no
one left on the field to contribute the famous element of
team-spirit. I see who does the bowling, the batting and the
wicket-keeping; but I do not see whose role it is to exercise esprit
de corps." Once more, it would have to be explained that he was
looking for the wrong type of thing. Team-spirit is not another
cricketing-operation supplementary to all other special tasks. It
is, roughly, the keenness with which each of the special tasks is
performed, and performing a task keenly is not performing two tasks.
Certainly exhibiting team-spirit is not the same thing as bowling or
catching, but nor is it a third thing such that we can say that the
bowler first bowls and then exhibits team-spirit or that a fielder
is at a given moment either catching or displaying esprit de
corps. *(6)
-
  In the same way, Ryle and others have argued, for an individual to
"have" a particular character trait means that one has a tendency
for a certain type of behavior; brusqueness, amiability,
suspiciousness, and the like are not substantive entities that one
can actually possess. Thus, as Alan R. White writes:
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 10}
-
  Because acquiring knowledge, or traits, or habits, is not thus
analogous to acquiring material possessions, the ability to produce
our knowledge, or the tendency to manifest our traits and our habits,
does not imply the existence of a place where the as yet unproduced
knowledge, or unmanifested traits and habits, is kept- in the way
that the ability to produce a notebook does imply the existence of a
place in which the notebook is kept when it is not in use. There is
no more an answer to the question "Where is my knowledge when I am
not recalling it?" than there is to the question "Where is my conceit
when I am not displaying it?" Whether or not I am always, or ever,
conscious of my habit of dropping my aspirates, it is a mistake to
suppose that, when that habit is not at work, it has either
disappeared or is being kept hidden in some place, perhaps a
psychical place. *(7)
-
  The problem of mind-body dualism has had a profound influence on
the philosophic problem of "other minds," a corollary of the
philosophy of mind debates that have concerned a great many analytic
philosophers since Wittgenstein. The "other minds" problem grows
directly out of the skepticism implicit in Descartes' questioning of
his own existence and, indeed, has roots dating back at least to
Plato's question in Theatetus: "Are you quite certain that the
several colors appear to a dog or to any animal whatever as they
appear to you? . . . or that anything appears the same to you as to
another man?" As two recent philosophers have put the problem: "What
justification, if any, can be given for the claim that one can tell,
on the basis of someone's behavior, that he is in a certain mental
state?" *(8)
  The answer of the skeptic is that no justification at all can be
given, since mental and physical states are different things. To
determine another's mental state on the basis of his behavior is,
they say, impossible. The only reliable way of determining another's
mental state is through direct, shared experience of that state; as
that is logically impossible, the skeptic claims, it follows that it
is impossible to reliably determine the mental state of another
person.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 15}
  Since humans spend much of their lives and predicate much of their
behavior in determining the mental states of others, however, this
skepticism has understandably troubled philosophers. The traditional
rejoinder some philosophers have given the skeptic has been based on
an argument from analogy. Though constantly rephrased and refined,
essentially the argument rejects the impossibility of determining
another's mental state on the basis of his or her behavior and claims
that either by repeated observation of one's own physical reactions
to particular mental states or by observation of the reliability of
others' repeated determinations of one's own mental states on the
basis of their reactions to one's own observed behavior, a fairly
reliable model can be constructed to enable determination of another's
mental state on the basis of his or her behavior. But the endlessly
problematic nature of such a determination- to say nothing of the
assumption in both the argument of the skeptic and in that of the
answer by appeal to analogy of the viability of the mind-body
dichotomy- has resulted in the rejection by most philosophers of both
the skeptical argument and the argument from analogy. In their place
one form or another of philosophical behaviorism has generally been
substituted.
  As subject to revision and modification as is the argument from
analogy, the behaviorist argument has an equally fundamental
disagreement with the skeptical position. Those who accept the
argument from analogy deny the impossibility of determining
another's mental state on the basis of his or her behavior; those
who accept the behaviorist argument deny the essential difference
between mental and physical states. The purely mental phenomena of
the mind-body dualist, most behaviorists point out, are by definition
private and inaccessible to study; therefore, it is argued, they are
at best unintelligible, at worst nonexistent. Unconscious mental
states are seen as a contradiction in terms: what is "mental," the
critic points out, is by definition conscious. Speculations on the
existence of something called the unconscious are- and can only be-
nothing more than speculations, speculations rendered unnecessary
by behaviorist theory.
  In brief, the more radical behaviorists deal with the "other minds"
problem simply by denying its problematic nature as usually stated.
Thus, Rudolf Carnap writes, "a sentence about other minds states
that the body of the person in question is in a physical state of a
certain sort." Since, in Carnap's words, "a sentence says no more
than what is testable about it," any assertion about another person's
so-called "inner state" of being is nothing more than "a metaphysical
pseudo-sentence." *(9) Not all behaviorists would agree with such an
extreme position, and not all critics of body-mind dualism are
behaviorists. All such opponents of the Cartesian dichotomy,
however, behaviorists or not- and they represent the vast majority of
philosophers- either implicitly or explicitly deny the existence of
the "Ghost in the Machine." They approach the problem of "other
minds" by directing themselves solely to evidences of behavior and/or
language. J. J. C. Smart speaks for a substantial, if perhaps radical
philosophic community, when he suggests "that even the behavior of
man himself will one day be explicable in mechanistic terms. There
does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world
but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents." *(10)
  What has all this to do with psychohistory? Simply this: if the
logical critique of the philosophical behaviorist is accurate,
psychoanalytic theory, founded as it is on the requisite existence
and nature of the Freudian unconscious, must collapse. And with the
collapse of psychoanalytic theory goes the essential underpinning of
psychohistorical explanation.
  As the psychological behaviorist would be quick to point out,
however, the collapse of psychoanalytic theory would not require the
abandonment of explanation for phenomena allegedly explained by the
psychoanalyst, since for every psychoanalytic explanation there is a
behavioral counter-explanation. This is important in logical terms
since it has become something of a scientific axiom that theories
are never thoroughly undermined merely by criticism, but only by the
development of superior theories. A case in point that the
behaviorist might use is Freud's famous Analysis of a Phobia in a
Five-Year-Old Boy- the case of "Little Hans." *(11)
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 20}
  The case of Little Hans has long been recognized as one of Freud's
most important case histories. It is repeatedly cited in the
psychoanalytic literature as a seminal proof of the validity of
psychoanalytic theory. Edward Glover, for one, calls it "one of the
most valued records in psychoanalytical archives. Our concepts of
phobia formation, of the positive Oedipus complex, of ambivalence,
castration anxiety and repression, to mention but a few, were
greatly reinforced and amplified as the result of this
analysis." *(12)
  Hans was a five-year-old boy referred to Freud because of the
"nonsense," or phobia he exhibited concerning large animals-
especially horses. The immediate precipitating experience was the
child's witnessing the fall of a horse drawing a bus in the street,
although the boy had undergone at least two prior negative
experiences involving horses. As noted in the last chapter, Freud
actually carried out his analysis with the boy's father as
intermediary, a man who was enthusiastically familiar with Freudian
theory and who went to great lengths to elicit involuntary admissions
from Hans and to interpret the "actual meaning" of vague and
ambiguous language. (For example, he reports a response of "Hm,
well," to a leading question concerning the boy's affection for his
sister as flatly "assenting.")
  It is impossible to outline the entire process of Hans's analysis
here or to go into it in any detail, but in the end Freud concluded
that the fundamental source of the boy's phobia was repressed Oedipal
anxiety. "Hans was really a little Oedipus," Freud writes, "who
wanted to have his father 'out of the way,' to get rid of him, so
that he might be alone with his handsome mother and sleep with
her." *(13) He had "transposed from his father on to the horses" his
jealousy and hostility. The phobia thus gave the five-year-old boy an
excuse to spend more time with his desired mother:
-
  The content of his phobia was such as to impose a very great
measure of restriction upon his freedom of movement, and that was its
purpose.... After all, Hans's phobia of horses was an obstacle to his
going into the street, and could serve as a means of allowing him to
stay at home with his beloved mother. In this way, therefore, his
affection for his mother triumphantly achieved its aim. *(14)
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 25}
-
Hans's phobia eventually disappeared with the resolution of his
Oedipal conflicts, Freud concluded: Hans imaginatively married his
father to his father's mother, "instead of killing him. With this
phantasy both the illness and the analysis came to an appropriate
end." *(15)
  There are, to begin with, some serious- if basic- evidentiary
problems with this analysis. Psychohistory enthusiasts, such as Hans
Meyerhoff and H. Stuart Hughes, frequently claim that history and
psychoanalysis have a strikingly similar goal: "to liberate man from
the burden of the past by helping him to understand that past." *(16)
This may be so, but one can only wonder what a properly skeptical
historian would think of such "evidence" as the constant
interpretation of a five-year-old subject's real meanings by a father
who saw himself as the object of the boy's antipathy (of which
nothing was directly reported by the boy himself) and a man whom
Freud regarded as "among my closest adherents." On several occasions
when Hans (what the historian would call the "primary source") made a
statement unsupportive of the psychoanalytic theory being used to
analyze his case, his father would parenthetically insert for the
official record such characterizations as "hypocritical" or
"disingenuous." And finally, there is the following admission by
Freud:
-
  It is true that during the analysis Hans had to be told many things
which he could not say himself, that he had to be presented with
thoughts which he had so far shown no signs of possessing and that
his attention had to be turned in the direction from which his father
was expecting something to come. *(17)
-
Freud's justification for this sort of procedure, which, as others
have pointed out, runs throughout his work, *(18) would be cold
comfort to the historian:
-
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 30}
  This detracts from the evidential value of the analysis but the
procedure is the same in every case. For a psychoanalysis is not an
impartial scientific investigation but a therapeutic measure. Its
essence is not to prove anything, but merely to alter something. *(19)
-
Had Freud been consistent in this latter view, psychoanalysis and
psychohistory would doubtless be very different fields today; but on
more occasions than not, particularly as the early claims of
therapeutic efficacy began to appear increasingly dubious, Freud
actively claimed therapy-transcendent scientific status for his work.
  The purpose of examining this case, however, is less to dissect it
or compare its regard for rules of evidence with that common among
historians than it is to contrast its explanatory system with that
of the behaviorist. In 1960 a non-psychoanalytic interpretation of
the case of Little Hans was published.
  Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman devote much of the space in their
reconsideration of the case to a review and criticism of Freud's
analysis. This criticism is of less importance to the present study
than is their own counter-explanation of the boy's phobia. All
phobias, they claim, "are regarded as conditioned anxiety (fear)
reactions.... If the fear at the original conditioning situation is
of high intensity or if the conditioning is many times repeated the
conditioned fear will show the persistence that is characteristic of
neurotic fear." *(20) Citing evidence that a single experience can
induce a phobia, the authors take Hans's words at full value when he
says to his father: "No. I only got it [the phobia] then. When the
horse in the bus fell down, it gave me such a fright, really! That
was when I got the nonsense." Although the data provided are
insufficient for full non-psychoanalytic analysis, Wolpe and Rachman
note that the gradualness of Hans's recovery is consistent with the
frequent spontaneous decline and disappearance of phobias in
children reported by many researchers. Gradual refamiliarization
with the phobic stimuli in nonthreatening situations has been shown
time and again to be highly successful phobia therapy. The authors
suggest that the repeated discussions of the incident were helpful
in acquainting Hans with his particular phobic stimuli, thus perhaps
easing the anxiety factor, but they claim that the excursions into
the hypothetical world of the Oedipus complex were of no direct
therapeutic value.
  The obvious fundamental difference between the psychoanalytic and
the behavioral explanations of Hans's phobia, for the general
purposes under discussion here, is that between Freud's belief in
the dynamic importance of repression and the unconscious and Wolpe
and Rachman's considerably more mechanistic view of phobia
acquisition and recovery. Given the accuracy of the premises
underlying each explanation and discounting specific evidentiary
problems, the details of each theory seem reasonably consistent and
complete. The key, then, to determining the most satisfactory
explanation must reside within those basic premises. Some of the
difficulties in accepting the psychoanalytic model have already been
reviewed; the behavioral model is not without difficulties of its
own.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 35}
  Behaviorists, as we have seen, have been critical of the
psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious as a studiable entity
because it is by definition private and directly inaccessible; its
very existence can only be hypothesized. But the psychoanalyst may
readily reply that this is not by any means sufficient grounds for
denying the existence of the unconscious. Perfectly legitimate
scientific work is carried out every day by physicists who can do no
more than posit the existence of critically important submicroscopic
entities. The empirical validity of their scientific work rests on
the efficacy of the entire theory surrounding these unobservable
quantities. Various "imagined" entities, such as the unobservable
particles assumed, and even physically described, as part of the
kinetic theory of gases- or the so-called "gluons" of recent quantum
chromodynamic theory- are the everyday objects of scientific study.
What matters is not whether such entities are or are not themselves
detectable, but whether the theory of which they are an essential
part can be empirically substantiated. William P. Alston makes this
point succinctly in a passage that deserves quoting at length:
-
  There is a commonly accepted doctrine, largely derived from a
consideration of physics, according to which a theory involving
unobservables gets empirical significance by virtue of the fact that
it, together with subsidiary assumptions, implies various general
law-like hypotheses which can be directly tested empirically. In this
way the theory can be assessed in terms of the extent to which it
succeeds in explaining and unifying a variety of lower level-laws
which have been empirically confirmed, and on the negative side, the
extent to which it does not imply lower-level hypotheses which have
been empirically disconfirmed. The Bohr theory of atomic structure,
which represents an atom as a sort of miniature solar system with
electrons revolving in orbits around the nucleus, cannot be tested
directly, for an individual atom cannot be observed. However, from
the theory we can derive a variety of testable hypotheses- for
instance, those concerning the constitution of the spectrum of the
light emitted from a given element. *(21)
-
Of course, the example of the atom- and most other such unobservable
entities in science- is quite different from the unconscious in that
the atom is in principle observable though submicroscopic, whereas
the unconscious logically is not. Nevertheless, to temporarily ignore
this important point, what then remains pragmatically crucial is not
the behaviorists' objection to the mysteriousness of the concept of
the unconscious, but whether the theory growing out of this
postulated entity is empirically verifiable. This is the subject of
the next chapter. The behaviorist model has other problems, however,
that deserve recognition before we turn to the question of the
empirical validity of psychoanalytic explanation.
  The philosophic problem of "other minds," discussed earlier, deals
a sharp blow to the Cartesian dualism of body and mind and in the
process seriously undermines the foundations of psychoanalysis. The
primary counter-explanation, which is behaviorism, is not generally
accepted as free from serious flaws of its own, however. Perhaps the
most direct problem of behaviorism is its defiance of the common
sense belief, rooted in virtually all cultures, of the body-mind
(sometimes called body-soul) dichotomy. *(22) Behaviorism has failed
to shake the intuitive conviction of most people in the existence of
a self beyond the mechanistic self of behaviorist theory. Popular
belief may or may not be sufficient reason for doubting its validity,
and in purely logical terms it clearly is not, but behaviorism is
undeniably saddled with a common reaction against its ideas that
recalls Bertrand Russell's words on the skeptic's approach to the
"other minds" problem:
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 40}
-
  We are not content to think that we know only the space-time
structure of our friends' minds, or their capacity for initiating
causal chains that end in sensations of our own. A philosopher might
pretend to think that he knew only this, but let him get cross with
his wife and you will see that he does not regard her as a mere
spatio-temporal edifice of which he knows the logical properties but
not a glimmer of the intrinsic character. We are therefore justified
in inferring that his skepticism is professional rather than
sincere. *(23)
-
  As to the specific problem of "other minds," radical behaviorism
has never successfully freed its theory from the elementary criticism
that humans are possessed of the ability to deceive other humans. The
principle that the body-mind dichotomy is fallacious implies the
ability of one individual to determine another individual's mental
state merely by close observation of his or her behavior. This ability
would seemingly deny the possibility of successful pretense, a denial
of such questionable validity that the problem of "other minds" is
very far from resolution. While modifications of behaviorism have in
many ways blunted the full force of this basic objection, in one form
or another it continues to haunt the philosophical behaviorist. *(24)
  Certain logical underpinnings of behaviorism are, it thus seems,
almost as flawed as the logical premises of psychoanalysis.
Behaviorism cannot, then, be generally regarded as the superior
theory which could completely supplant the questionable explanatory
approach of psychoanalysis, except insofar as behaviorism does not
require the elaborate untestable hypotheses of psychoanalysis. This
simplicity is not, however, insignificant. Since at least the
fourteenth century, the importance of the principle of parsimony in
explanation- known, after its most prolific user, as "Ockham's
razor"- has been widely recognized in philosophy. The principle that
"what can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more"
and its modern version as a thoroughly accepted philosophic dictum
that "entities are not to be multiplied without necessity" is a
powerful argument for the logical superiority of behavioral theory-
one that has not been lost on proponents of psychological
behaviorism. *(25) The problems that psychoanalytic theory purports to
explain can be explained at least equally well by behaviorism; and
since behaviorist explanation is dependent on far fewer questionable
assumptions, the behaviorist can quite properly assert that it is
the superior of the two theories.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 45}
  The critic of psychoanalysis who hopes to reach a general audience,
however, must recognize the realities of he everyday world, and in
that world the principle of parsimony is simply insufficient to
thoroughly undermine psychoanalytic theory. The notion of the
unconscious, however logically problematic, does easily appear to
satisfy, in a popular common sense way, questions raised by
phenomena ranging from dreams to forgetfulness to slips of the
tongue. Thus, whether or not there actually is such a thing (or
place) as the unconscious, logical argument appears at present to be
capable only of raising serious questions about it. There are not
yet adequate grounds for outright rejection of the concept, no
matter how philosophically dubious it may appear. This does not, of
course, mean that behaviorism is "wrong"- or that all or any of the
further ramifications of psychoanalytic theory are "right"- but
merely that until the opponents of body-mind dualism have made their
case considerably more convincingly, the existence and nature of the
Freudian unconscious must remain an open question, at least in the
everyday world of the nonlogician.
-
  The attention thus far paid to the logical status of the Freudian
unconscious is not meant to suggest that it is the only aspect of
psychoanalytic theory that is logically problematical. The logical
status of the concept of the unconscious is the most central and
complex issue, but other logical problems abound. They include the
problem of refutation and the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.
  It is a widely recognized postulate of philosophic and scientific
practice that unless a theory can in principle be refuted it must be
rejected as having no claim to scientific legitimacy. In other words,
any theory that can explain everything- that is irrefutable because
it is incapable of being negated by contradictory observational
evidence- effectively explains nothing. As Ernest Nagel has
succinctly put it, for a theory of any sort to be logically credible
"it must not be formulated in such a manner that it can always be
construed and manipulated so as to explain whatever the actual facts
are, no matter whether controlled observation shows one state of
affairs to obtain or its opposite." *(26) An example that is commonly
used to illustrate this point, since its initial elaboration by Karl
R. Popper, is the contrast between astrology and Einstein's
gravitational theory. One of the key reasons why astrology fails to
measure up to the scientific standards of Einstein's theory is not
that it is not capable of confirmation. Quite the contrary. As Popper
noted, astrologers, "by making their interpretations and prophecies
sufficiently vague . . . were able to explain away anything that
might have been a refutation of the theory had the theory and the
prophecies been more precise." Unlike Einstein's theory, which is
subject to refutation, astrological theory, has about it an
intentional semantic vagueness that is like a room made of mirrors
which endlessly confirms its own reflections. In Popper's words: "In
order to escape falsification [astrologers] destroyed the testability
of their theory." *(27) Since it is thus not in principle subject to
refutation, astrology is neither scientific nor even logically
respectable. That psychoanalytic theory is subject to criticism on
these same grounds can best be seen by example.
  One of the psychoanalytic concepts most heavily used to date both
by psychohistorians and by those anthropologists who have attempted
psychoanalytically to interpret complex cultures from a distance, is
the hypothesis of anal-erotic character traits. The anal-erotic
hypothesis is of central importance in Bruce Mazlish's
psychobiography of Richard Nixon, in Walter C. Langer's and Robert G.
L. Waite's studies of Hitler, and in the wartime work of Geoffrey
Gorer and Weston La Barre on Japanese character, to name but some of
the most prominent examples. *(28) In her recent psychoanalytically
informed biography of Thomas Jefferson, Fawn M. Brodie opens the
first chapter with a recitation of Jefferson's character traits that
might have been borrowed from a psychoanalytic textbook. Jefferson,
it seems, was unusually "acquisitive," "controlled," and "orderly" to
such a degree "that it can be properly called compulsive." Geza
Roheim, in typically grand style, has gone so far as to characterize
all of Western culture as anal. And in an early study Owen
Berkley-Hill, though not quite so ambitious as Roheim, expressed a
similar opinion regarding much of Eastern culture: repressed anal
eroticism, he argued, was the principle source of Hindu character
and behavior. *(29) Such an extraordinarily pervasive condition might
at first seem to suggest that those who have applied the concept to
specific cases have distorted it to fit their purposes. If so, the
problem would reside not with the concept itself, but with such
individual applications of it. This, however, is not the case.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 50}
  Arising from conflicts surrounding childhood toilet training, the
anal-erotic character is traditionally associated with such traits as
frugality, obstinacy, and orderliness, and anal traits supposedly
have a certain sadistic element associated with them as well. *(30)
All such character traits, however, are marked by the latent
possibility of a "reaction-formation" which can produce behavior
precisely the opposite of that noted above. Thus Ernest Jones, in his
classic explication of the anal-erotic character, explains that one
feature of the anal personality "is the extraordinary and quite
exquisite tenderness that some members of the type are capable of,
especially with children . . . [as a result of] the
reaction-formation against the repressed sadism that so commonly goes
with marked anal eroticism." Further, as well as manifesting "the
impulse to gather, collect, and hoard" ("all collectors," Jones
writes, "are anal-erotics"), the anal personality may be marked by
the opposite impulse:
-
  Such people, so far from being proud of their possessions and
productions, take very little interest in them. They are often quite
indifferent to their immediate surroundings, to their furniture,
clothes and so on. As to their own productions, whether material or
mental, their chief concern after the process is finished is to get
rid of them as completely as possible, and they discard them with no
wish to know what becomes of them. *(31)
-
  In brief, an individual (or a culture) may be described as
anal-erotic if he or she (or it) exhibits traits of frugality or
generosity, orderliness or disorderliness, sadism or kindliness.
Since all such traits are marked by a continuum from one extreme to
another, since there is no quantitative device for measuring degrees
of character traits (although psychohistorians are often given to
claims such as that of Bruce Mazlish, who says he has "never dealt
with a public figure as ambivalent as Nixon"), *(32) and since all
individuals commonly display any or all of these characteristics to
some degree at any given time, it is possible to describe virtually
anyone as anal-erotic without distorting the theoretical concept of
the anal-erotic character. So far from being an effective mechanism
for analyzing and explaining human character, then, the anal-erotic
hypothesis is logically and analytically useless. The concept is in
principle irrefutable. Because in theory it is all inclusive, can
accommodate any set of facts supplied, and potentially explains
everything, in truth it is powerless to effectively explain anything.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 55}
  The logical failing of the anal-erotic character is not an isolated
weakness of psychoanalytic theory. In addition to reaction-formation,
the defense mechanisms of sublimation, repression, and denial (all
essential to psychoanalytic procedure) permit the psychoanalyst to
posit the existence of traits and attitudes for which there is no
positive evidence at all, thus making a specific analysis logically
irrefutable. Yet, one cannot examine a work of psychohistory,
regardless of the talent or stature of the author, without
encountering the effects of this crippling logical failing. It
appears in such narrow and detailed work as Kurt Eissler's attempt to
rescue Freud's analysis of Leonardo (he argues that because of the
presence of defense mechanisms, Freud is correct whether or not the
infamous bird was a vulture, whether or not the Caterina in
Leonardo's journal was his mother, and so on) and extends to such
grandiose efforts as Jay Gonen's attempt to psychoanalyze Zionism
(reaction-formation accounts for the alleged fact that "the
self-image of Israelis can shift from schnorring beggars into people
of dignity"). *(33) Further, in camouflaged form the same logical
principle appears in Erikson's Childhood and Society in which he
argues that a person's or a nation's "identity" is derived from a
counterpointing of opposite potentialities. And this insight in turn
led to, among other works, Michael Kammen's borrowing of the
Eriksonian principle to produce an irrefutable and therefore
sophistical analysis of American culture by examining the
"biformities" allegedly peculiar to America's "contrapuntal
civilization." *(34) In the hands of those writers- unlike Erikson
and Kammen- whose imaginations seem to know no restraint at all and
who (to cite but one case) find psychoanalytic meaning in the fact
that Richard Nixon one day ate corned beef hash with an egg on it,
the logical elasticity of psychoanalytic theory attempts to make a
virtue of what G. K. Chesterton long ago recognized as the "sin and
snare" of biographers: the tendency "to see significance in
everything; characteristic carelessness if their hero drops his pipe,
and characteristic carefulness if he picks it up again." *(35)
  "It is a typical soothsayer's trick," Karl R. Popper writes, "to
predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail; that
they become irrefutable." Any theory that rests on such perfectly
circular logic is, as Popper has repeatedly shown, more "myth" than
scientific hypothesis. *(36) And any theory that is more myth than
scientific hypothesis- that becomes retrospective soothsaying in the
hands of the historian- is a very questionable base for historical
explanation. For jokes of a certain sort, however, such logical
circularity is ideal. An example is the one retold by analyst Edgar
A. Levenson that is, he says, "well known in psychiatric circles":
-
  It is said that this family constellation- that is, an aggressive,
domineering, seductive mother and a weak, passive, undermining
father- is characteristic for the alcoholic. But this is also the
classic Jewish family structure. So, it is asked, why are there so
few Jewish alcoholics? The answer is- of course- their mothers won't
let them! *(37)
-
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 60}
  For reasons of avoiding logical circularity of another sort, I will
avoid noting here what Freud had to say about this type of joke.
-
  The logical objection of post hoc, ergo propter hoc is one to which
historians should be acutely sensitive, since, in their everyday work
with severely limited data, this fallacy is virtually an occupational
hazard. Although mentioned briefly in an earlier chapter, it is worth
discussing a bit more fully here. David Hackett Fischer has shown,
for instance, how the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 has been
seen by numerous historians as the "cause" of events ranging from the
decline of the Spanish empire to the flowering of Elizabethan drama-
and how in each case the only actual evidentiary support for such
proposed causality lies in the post hoc, ergo propter hoc
fallacy. *(38) But if the traditional historian must be wary of such
errors in logic, the psychohistorian raises the odds almost to the
point of certainty that he will fall prey to the fallacy, since he is
adding to the pitfalls of historical analysis an explanatory system
that has itself rarely addressed and has never dealt adequately with
this dilemma to which it is intimately tied.
  Murray G. Murphey, one of the more sophisticated and penetrating
thinkers to have addressed problems concerning the relationship
between history and the social sciences, attempted in 1965 to use
psychoanalytic theory to generalize about the group character of a
certain body of early-nineteenth-century residents of the
mid-Atlantic United States. Murphey consulted a large body of
autobiographies, child training manuals, and travelers' reports in an
attempt to arrive at an accurate description of child-rearing
practices during the period under study. He hoped to correlate the
child-rearing data with adult attitudes expressed in the
autobiographies and then to sketch the prevailing personality type of
his subjects. The autobiographies were not helpful in ascertaining
the nature of child-rearing practices, and the child training manuals
and travelers' reports, Murphey recognized, were too class-biased to
permit useful generalizations. In an attempt to deal with this
absence of reliable information on child rearing Murphey compiled a
profile of expressed adult attitudes from the autobiographies and
then- taking at face value psychoanalytic theory concerning the
relationship between child training and adult personality- used these
attitudes as a means to "discover" the otherwise elusive
child-rearing practices. If the adults expressed certain specified
attitudes, Murphey assumed that they must have undergone certain
specified childhood experiences. Then finally, since his subjects
(according to psychoanalytic theory) must have undergone these early
experiences, the experiences themselves (though wholly imaginary)
became causal explanations for the perceived adult attitudes. *(39)
  Although in principle Murphey's study is logically flawed, and
seriously so, it might be argued that it is not necessarily wrong.
Every individual makes frequent decisions and evaluations based on
incompletely proved presumptions of causality, and quite often such
decisions and evaluations prove correct. If a historian uncovers
demographic information suggesting that at a certain place and at a
certain time food supplies dropped drastically and then subsequently
finds evidence of looting in the marketplace of that area soon after
the food shortage broke out, he or she might well theorize- barring
any contradictory evidence- that the looting resulted from the food
shortage. Despite the fact that strictly speaking this would be post
hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning, most other historians would probably
not find serious fault with the hypothesis- assuming again, of
course, no contradictory evidence. This would be because numerous
other examples exist in which people have responded in a similar
manner to conditions of sudden and drastic deprivation. The looting
hypothesis would thus seem analogous to other empirically verified
situations.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 65}
  If Murphey had been able to point to a body of empirically verified
studies showing that individuals possessing the attitudes found in
his autobiographies had in fact undergone the childhood experiences
which he hypothesized, his conjecture would be on firmer ground. That
he could not refer to any such studies is not his fault. For the most
common approach in psychoanalytic work is to do precisely what
Murphey did- to read back from evident adult characteristics to
assumed or "reconstructed" childhood experiences. Each case thus
treated becomes the evidentiary base for subsequent analyses,
although none of the cases in question has any firm empirical
foundation. Popper makes this point neatly in describing an encounter
he once had with Alfred Adler:
-
  Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem
particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analysing
in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not
even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so
sure. "Because of my thousandfold experience," he replied; whereupon
I could not help saying: "And with this new case, I suppose your
experience has become thousand-and-one-fold."
  What I had in mind was that his previous observations may not have
been much sounder than this new one; that each in its turn had been
interpreted in the light of "previous experience," and at the same
time counted as additional confirmation. What, I asked myself, did
it confirm? No more than that a case could be interpreted in the
light of the theory. But this meant very little, I reflected, since
every conceivable case could be interpreted in the light of Adler's
theory, or equally of Freud's. *(40)
-
Obviously, this procedure is logically treacherous. Just how
treacherous it can be, however, can best be seen in one final
example.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 70}
  In a wartime study of the Japanese character structure Geoffrey
Gorer attempted to account for what he referred to as "the most
paradoxical culture of which we have any record." Although brightly
tinged with an understandable wartime xenophobia, the paradoxes he
observed and hoped to explain are worth quoting at length:
-
  How can the same culture- often the same persons- prize and perform
the elaborate, highly ritualized and symbolic Tea Ceremony, with its
elegance, calmness and poetry, and indulge in the almost unbelievable
savagery, lust and destruction of the rape of Nanking? Go out by the
hundreds of thousands to admire the wild cherries in bloom or to
listen to the cicadas, and at the same time systematically and
consciously force whole populations into the degradation of drug
addiction? Hold serious lyrical poetry competitions, in which the
Emperor is a contestant, and build a shrine for the Living Bombs-
three soldiers who fastened themselves to a high explosive bomb?
Develop some of the most refined graphic arts we know, and yet have a
major portion of the work of their most famed artists so pornographic
that much of it has never been seen in Europe or America? Adopt the
most elaborate complications of our modern society and yet retain a
view of the world- part political, part religious, part social- more
consonant with an isolated and primitive tribe than with a major
industrial nation? *(41)
-
  The first problem Gorer encountered in his analysis was strikingly
parallel to that encountered daily by historians- the absence of
available living subjects to examine and question. With the war in
progress he had no opportunity to study the Japanese firsthand.
Instead, he read as widely as possible in the relevant literature
and supplemented his research "by interviews with some two score
informants who were either wholly or partially Japanese, or who have
had prolonged and intimate knowledge of Japanese life." *(42) Still,
generalized information on child-rearing practices was unavailable,
so, in much the same fashion as Murphey twenty years later, and the
psychohistorian in general, Gorer allowed anecdotal reminiscences
and perceived adult behavior to serve as confirmation for his
otherwise highly questionable hypotheses on childhood experience. A
major focus of his study was on the correlation between the alleged
Japanese practice of severe and early toilet training and such
attributed adult character traits as an "excessive fear and dislike
of dirt," the "emotional unimportance of food," an "emphasis on
neatness and tidiness," a "constant urge to control the environment
as completely as possible," and a "deeply hidden, unconscious and
extremely strong desire to be aggressive." These, of course, are
classic symptoms of the anal-erotic personality, so Gorer's
hypothesis seemed to confirm itself: largely because of unfortunate
childhood toilet training experiences, the Japanese people exhibited
the paradoxical and seemingly bizarre behavior the anthropologist had
set out to explain.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 75}
  But the war ended. And here the parallel between Gorer's study and
the work of the psychohistorian came to a close; the subjects he had
been compelled to examine from afar became available for direct
observation. Gorer's study had been published in the 1949 edition of
D. G. Haring's Personal Character and Cultural Milieu. In 1956 a new
edition was published containing two firsthand studies of Japanese
child-training practices which showed convincingly that conventional
Japanese toilet training was not particularly rigid, and Haring
himself added a belated observation that in eight years of living in
Japan he had failed to see any evidence of early or severe toilet
training. *(43) Gorer's article was quietly dropped from the new
edition, a casualty of an all too rare empirical disconfirmation of
a logically contorted psychoanalytic explanation. Not only had
Japanese toilet training practices been shown to be quite
respectably flexible, but three years earlier a massive study had
been published that added insult to the injury: Whiting and Child's
Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Survey had shown
that the American middle-class group sampled in the study was
particularly rigid in its toilet training practices and began such
training a year and a half sooner than the median for all societies
surveyed, "earlier than is reported for any of the primitive
societies reviewed with the single exception of the Tanala." *(44)
-
  The logical status of psychoanalytic theory, and its offspring
psychohistory, is clearly problematic at best. It is beset by serious
challenges to its most fundamental assumption, the existence of the
Freudian conception of the unconscious. It is unavoidably involved in
continual violations of a cardinal rule for all scientific
explanation, the need for theoretical refutability. And it has made
a practice of falling into logical fallacies that confuse mere
temporal relationships with causality.
  Beyond these problems, though directly associated with them, is the
crucial matter of accounting for individual differences among people
who have similar or identical backgrounds. If this cannot be done
successfully then the very best efforts of the very best
psychohistorians become nothing more than empty cliches on the order
of those concerning the temperaments of redheads, the joviality of
fat people, or the various stereotypes commonly applied to this or
that racial, religious, or national group. In short, if the
psychohistorian cannot explain the occurrence of individual
differences among people with similar backgrounds, he or she can
explain little of value. In a review of Walter C. Langer's
psychoanalytic explanation for Hitler's behavior, Robert Coles states
the problem incisively:
-
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 80}
  How did a wretched, deeply troubled, at times pathetic youth- the
"neurotic psychopath" of this book- end up Fuhrer of the Third Reich,
a man not only possessed of authority and power but believed and
heeded by millions? If not Hitler, might it have been someone else?
If only Hitler, then surely it was not his "perversion" or his
disordered mind (the province of the psychoanalyst) that accounts for
his successes.... The Weimar Republic was full of such people;
America has had its share: people who "identify" with various
"aggressors"- and, having done so, get nowhere. As for psychological
recovery or "transformation," psychiatrists can spend long, intimate
months, if not years, with patients and not know why at a particular
moment a person is suddenly, it seems, "better." In retrospect, we
come up with formulations, explanations: such and such was
"interpreted." We are less likely to mention the many times we have
offered similar "insights" to other patients, even to the same
patient, all to no avail. *(45)
-
  This same point has been made in reverse by Jacques Barzun. In his
study of Leonardo da Vinci, Barzun reminds us, Freud had argued that
his subject's habit of leaving work uncompleted derived quite
directly from his (historically disputed) childhood abandonment by
his father, which was a central cause of his (alleged) homosexuality.
But how then, wonders Barzun, are we to explain Goethe, " who also
found finishing difficult, though he grew up with two parents and was
a fairly active heterosexual"? *(46)
  Another example comes from Erikson's work on Luther, in which the
explanation for Luther's attitude toward death is traced to
particularities regarding his father. But, Roland Bainton has asked,
how, then, are we to explain Erasmus with his similar attitude but
very different paternal background? *(47)
  Still another more complex and revealing variation on this problem
can be seen in David Donald's famous argument that the people who
became leaders of the American Abolitionist movement of the 1830s
were drawn to reformist activity because in so doing they were in
fact making an "unconscious attack upon the new industrial system"
that was socially alien to them and that had made of them "an elite
without function, a displaced class in American society." How did
Donald arrive at this conclusion? He laboriously compiled various
personal characteristics of the 106 people he determined to have been
the "hard core" of antislavery leadership and found them to be mostly
non-immigrants with a median age of twenty-nine, who came largely
from rural, respectable, middle-class New England families of
Congregational-Presbyterian background, and who had liberal arts
educations and little connection with industrial activity. Thus,
Donald concluded, in their contemporary social milieu these were
socially "displaced" people- it then following that "basically,
abolitionism should be considered the anguished protest of an
aggrieved class against a world they never made." *(48)
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 85}
  Apart from the many other valid criticisms that have been leveled
at this study, one of shocking simplicity stands out: how do we
explain the elementary fact that in New England in the 1830s there
were a much larger number of non-immigrant, rural, middle-class,
respectable, Congregational-Presbyterians who also had liberal arts
educations and little connection with industry, but who, at around
the age of twenty-nine did not become Abolitionists? For that matter,
what about the non-Abolitionist siblings of the "hard core" group,
with their precisely matched family backgrounds? Unless we can come
up with a credible explanation for the fact that these people with
matched personal characteristics did not become abolitionists, the
background information Donald compiled on the abolitionists tells us
nothing whatsoever about individual or group motivation. Indeed, all
it does tell us is that Donald unwittingly fell prey to a fallacy
almost invariably found in the work of astrologers, numerologists,
and psychohistorians, the fallacy known to statisticians as "the
enumeration of favorable circumstances."
  Instances of this sort can be repeated without end, but the fact
is, no one has been able to adequately deal with the truly crippling
problems for psychoanalytic theory and psychohistory that are raised
by these questions. One major statistical effort to do so, however,
is worth some attention.
  During the 1960s psychoanalyst Raymond Sobel carried out a detailed
four-year study of 400 randomly selected families in rural New
Hampshire and Vermont in an effort to determine, as he put it, "what
went right" in the lives of women who were by all measures mentally
healthy, but whose early lives were "indistinguishable from those of
patients who broke down with schizophrenic illness, neurotic
maladjustment, or just depression and despair." *(49) A team of
researchers collected data using personal interviews and a 600-item
life history questionnaire. Each family was visited twice with an
interval between interviews of twelve to eighteen months, and in most
cases different interviewers carried out the follow-up inquiry. Over
a million bits of life-history information were thus accumulated and
analyzed. From this mass of information indices of childhood stress
and adult mental health were drawn up. The twenty-five women with the
greatest positive discrepancy between childhood and adult indices
were then selected out, since "these cases were the ones who had
suffered the most in childhood and who were the healthiest in adult
life." A series of detailed quantitative and qualitative evaluations
were then performed, using the remaining families as a control
population, to determine any particular characteristics that might
suggest causative differences in the group that had most successfully
made the passage from childhood adversity to adult mental health.
After all this analysis was complete, Sobel concluded that "no
differences could be found": "there seems to be no significant
correlation between the historical data and the eventual
mental-health functioning of the individual, even though there is
ample evidence of both early trauma and adult health."
  Sobel found this statistical failure "frustrating." So, following
the questionable psychoanalytic counsel that individual cases reveal
more than statistical surveys, he turned to a close examination of a
single case. The case he chose was that of a thirty-two-year-old
housewife who had suffered an extraordinarily troubled childhood with
severe economic and educational deprivation, parental physical and
mental instability (including the hospitalization of her father for
schizophrenia), constant parental quarreling, and the death of her
father when she was ten, followed by placement in foster homes and
the homes of relatives. The woman finally married, at age seventeen,
a man with a similar background. This woman came from the study group
of twenty-five who had on every score clearly surmounted what Sobel
called their "traumatized" childhoods; but, he noted, "it would be
easy to find an equal number from the controls with similar childhood
pathology but who, instead, had maladaptation as adults." None of the
statistical scales could explain the woman's adaptation nor could the
personal interview material provide "any clue" as to the reasons for
her success. Sobel finally wondered if his methodology was at fault
(though it was immeasurably more sophisticated and careful than
anything that has even been proposed by clinicians or
psychohistorians), and in the end he was left with a platitude. He
concluded the report on the study with no scientific findings, but
instead with a famous quote from Tolstoi: "All happy families
resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own
fashion."
  This is not much help to the would-be psychohistorian. Sobel, after
all, is a trained psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at
Dartmouth University Medical School. Compared with the totally
uncontrolled characterological and demographic biases of the
subjects of psychohistorical inquiry- to say nothing of the tiny
scraps of fragmented, impressionistic, anecdotal evidence (often of
dubious authenticity) that the psychohistorian has to deal with-
Sobel's subject pool and personal data were incomparably balanced and
comprehensive. The fact that he was reduced to concluding his study
by citing the wisdom of a nineteenth-century Russian novelist to
account for his failure to find any generalizations applicable to
the people his research team had studied and analyzed makes the
simple and straightforward questions of Coles, Barzun, Bainton, and
others impossible to ignore. Stated simply, if each case is
individual and the explanations that apply to one do not necessarily
(if ever) apply to others, how can claims be made that psychoanalytic
theory is even a very low-level "system" of explanation? And if, as
the evidence now more than suggests, it is not a workable system- if
there are too many variables to allow it to be so described because
every case is unique- how can it ever be used profitably by
historians, who must make generalizations while dealing with only
scattered remnants of evidence? The answer is clear: it cannot.
                                                        {CH_3 ^paragraph 90}
  Nevertheless, psychoanalytic critics of conventional "common sense"
historical explanations frequently argue that traditional historical
explanations are themselves ad hoc and unsystematic and that
individual historians often create their own admittedly informal
theoretical models. How much better it would be, they contend, for
historians to agree on and employ a single, informed theory of human
behavior- preferably Langer's "coldly penetrating calculus" of
psychoanalysis.
  In the abstract this argument appears to have merit. But first such
a theory must be shown to exist and be logically and empirically
credible. Otherwise we are merely adding to the confusion by
substituting an unverified and quite possibly harebrained body of
scientifically pretentious and logically reductionist explanation
that stands a very good chance of being dead wrong for the sensibly
diverse, modest, cautious, common sense, experientially derived
wisdom of the traditional historian. That is hardly an improvement.

INTRO_TO_CH_4
-
  "Ancient books also recorded that students could study at night by
the light of fireflies placed in a bag- but I had my retainers in
Jehol collect hundreds of fireflies and place them in a big bag, and
they didn't give out enough light to read a single character."
-
                                                      -K'ang-hsi,
                                                 Emperor of China

{CH_4
                                4
                      The Problem of Theory
-
  FREUD'S theory of the repressed Oedipus complex- in his words, a
sufficient achievement to give psychoanalysis "a claim to be counted
among the precious new acquisitions of mankind" *(1)- borrowed its
imagery from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. What Freud failed to acknowledge
was that more than the imagery was borrowed; the very process of
discovery by individual patients also closely follows Sophocles'
tragedy. In his famous "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,"
Freud referred to Little Hans as "a little Oedipus" after, under much
parental prodding, the child grudgingly seems to have accepted his
father's observation that he wanted his father out of the way in
order to be alone with his mother. In the Greek play Oedipus too
gained his inspiration from a respected outside source: it was on a
special trip to Delphi that Oedipus was told by the oracle that he
was fated to kill his father, marry his mother, and have children by
her.
  Apart from the important fact that in Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus
eventually slew his father and married his mother while still
genuinely unaware of their true identities, it is worth emphasizing
that the entire sequence of events began with the oracle's prediction
to the troubled young man. The same pattern holds with Freud's
analysis of Little Hans (and with psychoanalysis in general), thus
raising a serious question. By whatever variant- be it Karl R.
Popper's idea of the Oedipus effect, referring to "the influence of a
theory or expectation or prediction upon the event which it predicts
or describes" or Robert K. Merton's self-fulfilling prophecy, "a
false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes
the originally false conception come true"- one must consistently
wonder about the influence of analyst suggestion on any and all
psychoanalytic explanations derived from case histories. *(2) And the
fact that one must continue to wonder, after three-quarters of a
century of psychoanalytic history, indicates a major difficulty in
attempting to empirically verify the claims of psychoanalytic theory.
  It is the very nature of the psychoanalyst's practice- the
concentration on carefully chosen individuals with acknowledged
emotional difficulties; the refusal (whatever the therapeutic
reasons) to directly record the patient's conversations; and the
reliance upon the analyst's own fallible memory in later recalling
important aspects of the patient's testimony- that makes rigorous
examination of psychoanalytic case histories virtually impossible.
The enormous biases that are built into the psychoanalyst's
distillations of his or her cases prevent non-psychoanalytic
investigators from doing more than pointing out internal problems of
logic and offering (as in Wolpe and Rachman's review of the case of
Little Hans) any but the broadest of counter-explanations. As with
the question of therapeutic efficacy discussed earlier, if the merits
of psychoanalytic theory are to be validly assessed, it is clear that
something other than individual case histories must be examined.
  A second problem in submitting psychoanalytic theory to close
investigation rests on the quasi-mystical nature of major parts of
that theory. The concepts of the collective unconscious, the genetic
inheritance of ideational tendencies (or "memory traces"), the life
and death instincts, and the "pleasure principle" are among the
aspects of psychoanalytic theory that reside beyond the range of
observation or investigation, and are ideas not, in fact, much used
anymore, even by analysts. The concepts of the Freudian unconscious
and the tripartite division of the mind into id, ego, and superego
are crucial to psychoanalytic theory and are fundamental to
psychoanalytic practice, though these ideas too are equally beyond
the range of empirical examination. For the purposes of this study,
then, the former concepts can readily and properly be ignored. The
latter concepts involving the existence and structure of the
unconscious, must be left as problematic- not because there is any
evidence to support them but only because eliminating them for lack
of evidence would in itself suffice to make further inquiry
unnecessary.
                                                         {CH_4 ^paragraph 5}
  Of the remaining major parts of psychoanalytic theory, only those
that have been and conceivably will be frequently used by
psychohistorians will be reviewed in this chapter. Thus, for example,
because of the general absence of extensive and reliable data on the
dreams of historical subjects, including sufficient information on
context, psychoanalytic dream theory will not be considered. What we
will consider- by examining major experimental studies rather than
individual case histories with their biases and uncontrollable
variables- are the concepts of the Oedipus complex, the defense
mechanism of repression, the psychosexual personality syndromes, the
question of infant experience and personality determination, and the
proposition that paranoid delusions are caused by projections of
homosexual feelings. These concepts have been chosen because they are
relatively susceptible to empirical testing, because they are
potentially relevant to historical explanation, and because previous
reviewers have claimed that these concepts represent the strongest
confirmations of psychoanalytic theory. *(3)
-
  The Oedipus complex, which Freud claimed "may justly be regarded as
the nucleus of the neuroses," *(4) essentially involves an observed
intense sexual attraction in young children for the parent of the
opposite sex and of jealousy and hostility directed toward the parent
of the same sex. The intensity of these feelings is thought to be
unmatched at any other point in life. The theory postulates a peak of
intensity during the "phallic phase" of development (between about
two and a half and six years of age), followed by a resolution of the
feelings with the beginning of the stage of latency. Freud writes:
-
  While he is still a small child, a son will already begin to
develop a special affection for his mother, whom he regards as
belonging to him; he begins to feel his father as a rival who
disputes his sole possession . . . The Oedipus complex can, moreover,
be developed to a greater or less strength, it can even be reversed;
but it is a regular and very important factor in a child's mental
life, and there is more danger of our under-estimating rather than
over-estimating its influence and that of the developments which
proceed from it. *(5)
_
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 10}
  The reasons for the importance of the Oedipus complex, particularly
for the psychohistorian, involve the claim that it is ubiquitous and
has a bearing on adult interpersonal relationships. For example,
since the complex may become "reversed"- that is, the tie may be made
between son and father, rather than son and mother- an adult male's
aggressive behavior toward other males may suggest that he is
defending against latent homosexual tendencies rooted in his Oedipal
phase. Because the persecutory delusions of paranoid schizophrenia
are claimed to be the result of repressed homosexuality (a contention
examined later in this chapter), it is clear that the ramifications
of the Oedipal phase are of major consequence, if the theory can be
shown to be valid.
  An immediate problem encountered in attempting to test any aspect
of the theory of the Oedipus complex is the possibility of inversion.
As was true of the "reaction-formation" hypothesis discussed in the
last chapter, the possibility of inversion tends to make the theory
untestable, for whenever there is apparent failure of confirmation in
individual cases the psychoanalyst is free to claim that what has
been observed is Oedipal inversion. If, in other words, a male has
great fondness for his mother and displays animosity toward his
father (however covertly, for repression is another inevitable factor
in the equation) psychoanalysis can claim that these emotions are
based in his Oedipus complex. If, on the other hand, he exhibits
dislike for his mother and a relative fondness for his father,
psychoanalysis can equally claim that his attitude is rooted in his
Oedipus complex, though in this case it is inverted. The existence of
the Oedipus complex is thus spuriously "proven" by virtually any
emotional feeling of any male for his mother or his father. However,
in the specific case of the Oedipus complex this dilemma can be dealt
with easily. The fact is that no psychoanalyst denies that by far the
most common Oedipal reaction is one which involves heterosexual
drives. If studies of sufficient magnitude and sophistication can be
constructed, it must be hypothesized that the overwhelming majority
of cases will show a heterosexual Oedipal tendency.
  Viewed quantitatively, those studies which have explicitly
addressed the question of the presence or absence of the Oedipal
syndrome suggest that the tendency does not exist and that it is, in
Robert R. Sears's words, "a sharply etched grotesquerie" against
Freud's more perceptive descriptions and analyses of human
development. *(6) But an egalitarian attitude is not necessarily a
virtue in evaluating empirical research. The quality of the studies
Sears relied on in making this judgment is more important than the
number of studies that supported his negative conclusion. And in one
important respect the majority of those studies were qualitatively
flawed. Most of the investigations considered in the Sears report
simply asked subjects which of their two parents they preferred
(though some did this more subtly than others) and in general arrived
at conclusions suggesting that no significant distinctions
appeared. *(7) The psychoanalyst's obvious criticism was that such
tests did not probe the unconscious, where the repressed feelings of
affection and antipathy are said to reside. Recent tests have
attempted to uncover more than consciously expressed feelings, and
some of them have provided low-level support for the Oedipal
hypothesis.
  At least one study often cited in support of psychoanalytic theory,
however, must be treated with a good deal of caution. A work
published by Calvin Hall of the Institute of Dream Research, claiming
to be "an empirical confirmation of the Oedipus complex," relies upon
such uncontrollable and unverifiable data, such questionable
fundamental assumptions (e.g., that male strangers in dreams always
represent fathers), such sociological innocence (failure to consider
the fact that most of the dream material analyzed was directly
reflective of such everyday waking realities as the tendency for men
to be more openly aggressive than women), and is so admittedly
"committed" to "classical Freudian theory" that it cannot be regarded
as fulfilling the criteria for acceptable empirical research. *(8)
  By far the best study supportive of the Oedipus complex to date is
one carried out by Stanley M. Friedman, a student of Hall's, nearly
thirty years ago. *(9) Friedman devised a series of six methods by
which a sample of 305 boys and girls, randomly selected from a
suburban Midwest school district and evenly distributed by age from
five to sixteen, would indicate their feelings toward each of their
parents. One of the six methods employed a fairly direct question,
similar to the techniques used by the studies cited in the Sears
summary; the other five used considerably more sophisticated and
covert techniques, all of them substantively unrelated. They included
showing the children drawings of boys and fathers and boys and
mothers, girls and fathers and girls and mothers, in situations in
which generational conflict was a possible but not a necessary
interpretation. In this example- as in all except the direct
question- conflict themes appeared to be significantly higher between
parents and children of the same sex. The method of direct
questioning produced differences that could not be ascribed to more
than chance. Thus, within the limits of time and place- the suburban
Midwest in the late 1940s- Friedman's conclusions seem supportable.
Although the great age diversity of the subjects dilutes the focus of
the study from the Oedipal phase somewhat by introducing other
possible factors concerning the problems of adolescence, there does
appear to be at least a general correlation in child-parent attitudes
similar to that predicted by the Freudian hypothesis, and "the fact
that all techniques yielded significant results with the sole
exception of the one which projectively asked for the preferred
parent, would indicate that the reason for failure is the inadequacy
of this method for uncovering Oedipal manifestations." *(10)
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 15}
  A few years prior to the Friedman study an investigation based on a
smaller sample (but one better focused and controlled as to age
group) also used both direct and projective techniques, but concluded
that Freud's hypothesis was contradicted. *(11) Another more recent
study which also used both direct and projective techniques,
similarly failed to confirm the hypothesis. *(12) While there is still
disagreement on this matter, the overall conclusions of all
experiments that have concerned themselves with young children, in
the words of the recent and relatively uncritical Fisher and
Greenberg survey, "have not delineated the kinds of shifts in
attitude toward same-versus opposite-sex parents that Freud suggested
would occur in the vicinity of the Oedipal period." *(13)
  Still, if only for the sake of argument, it is instructive to
proceed as though the only study worthy of note was the one most
supportive of psychoanalytic theory- that of Friedman. What does it
tell us? We must recall that the theory of the Oedipus complex is
multifaceted: it postulates that the complex derives from the child's
jealousy of the parental performance of the sex act and, further,
that there are specific adult personality patterns that arise from
the repressed Oedipus complex. Neither of these matters was confirmed
or even tested by Friedman, nor have they been successfully tested by
anyone else. Friedman's findings can be seen, then, as possibly
important, but very limited. They show that in a particular cultural
setting support was found for the hypothesis that, though not openly
admitted, boys of all ages show a greater degree of hostility for
their fathers than for their mothers and girls from the same age
distribution show a greater degree of hostility for their mothers
than for their fathers. This is interesting, noteworthy, and
potentially valuable information (though we must not forget that we
have ignored here the majority of studies that contradict these
findings), but it is a long way from confirming or even providing the
claimed "strong support" for the full psychoanalytic concept of the
Oedipus complex.
  The question of the ubiquity of the Oedipus complex is one that has
now been pursued, on and off, for half a century. In the 1920s
Bronislaw Malinowski and Ernest Jones engaged in a well-known debate
on the subject, Malinowski having been convinced by his
anthropological fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands that the Oedipus
complex was not universal. The psychoanalytic hypothesis was based on
an assumption of "triangularity" in family relationships involving
father, mother, and (for purposes of discussing the classic Oedipus
complex) son. The situation in the Trobriands, Malinowski noted, was
also triangular, but the triangle involved brother, sister, and
sister's son. The Trobrianders did not recognize biological
paternity, and the father of a boy was not seen as his guardian.
Moreover, and it was on the basis of this observation that Malinowski
founded his criticism of the Oedipal concept, the most common
relationship between fathers and sons was one of closeness and
affection, while ambivalence and hostility often characterized a
boy's attitude toward his mother's brother.
  Jones's replies to Malinowski covered a variety of matters, but the
answer that has had the longest life is that in the Trobriands the
hostility for the mother's brother is the result of a displacement of
the antipathy that occurs in patriarchal and patrilineal societies.
If this argument is accepted- and it widely is, despite the slippery
logic involved- some support is regained for the minor thesis of
universal generational conflict between boys and adult males.
Irrevocable damage, however, is done to the central argument that
the source of the Oedipus complex is sexual jealousy, since
Trobriand husbands, wives, and children share a common abode from
which the mother's brother is generally excluded, and there exist
exceptionally strict incest taboos involving sisters and brothers.
There is no sexual relationship between mothers and their brothers
to account for the hostility felt by many boys for their mother's
brothers; and there is a sexual relationship between fathers and
mothers (of which children doubtless become aware at an earlier age
than in most Western societies) which does not result in the
development of hostile feelings directed from son to father. If there
are universal feelings of antipathy between boys and some adult males
involved in some kind of interpersonal relationship with the boys'
mothers- and there is evidence that this may perhaps be true *(14)-
the source of that antipathy will have to be found in something other
than sexual jealousy. *(15)
  As to the possibility that adult personality patterns and
characteristics grow out of a repressed Oedipus complex, there simply
is no direct evidence available that meets any empirical criteria.
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 20}
-
  The concept of the ego defense mechanism is central to all
psychoanalytic theory. The defense mechanism can take a variety of
forms; repression, denial, projection, sublimation, and displacement
are the forms most commonly encountered in psychoanalytic literature.
So little empirical support has been found for denial and projection,
although they are still heavily used by psychoanalytic writers, that
even as sympathetic a reviewer as Paul Kline, (whose work is an
acknowledged effort to "put psychoanalysis back among the sciences")
admits that there has been no objective verification of the existence
of these mechanisms. He concedes that little better can be said for
the concept of sublimation. Displacement, on the other hand, has been
rather well confirmed, at least in terms of superficial
manifestation, and is widely regarded as a major force behind
anti-Semitic and racist attitudes. *(16) Displacement is the
well-known process of redirecting aggressive feelings away from a
threatening source and toward a more acceptable one; the salesman who
becomes unwarrantably angry with a subordinate after a difficult time
with a client would be a common example.
  Defense mechanisms are conventionally divided between successful and
unsuccessful defenses- between those which find an outlet and those
which do not. The most important and frequently noted of the
unsuccessful defenses is repression. Repression essentially involves
the exclusion from consciousness of painful material such as
memories, emotions, or desires. Such material is, in a sense, pushed
back into the unconscious, or so it is hypothesized, and does not
then exist as far as the conscious mind is concerned. What makes
repression so important to psychoanalysis is that, although the
conscious mind is unaware of the existence of the repressed material,
such material does not fail to exert influence on behavior. On the
contrary, as with the Oedipal hypothesis, psychoanalysis sees
repression as a major unconscious influence on behavior.
  Needless to say, obtaining objective verification of the mechanism
of repression is far from simple. The most frequently used
investigative method for many years was the attempt to measure
emotional responses, through various covert techniques, to "emotive"
and "neutral" words. Recognition thresholds were computed, on the
assumption that emotive or "taboo" words will show a higher emotional
recognition threshold than neutral words if the mechanism of
repression really exists. Another similar technique was to flash on a
screen sentences of both neutral and "repressible" content-
especially sexual and hostile parental impulses- and then to test for
recall, on the assumption that if repression exists recall will be
higher for the neutral sentences. Most such studies did indeed
confirm the most superficial aspects of the repression hypothesis,
but the design problems of such studies were obviously manifold.
Other experimenters, for instance, repeatedly showed that outside
factors, such as general familiarity with the words presented and
whether or not preliminary instructions had created an expectation of
taboo words or forbidden ideas, greatly affected the experimental
results. The positive results of these early tests are still taken
seriously by some, but the central critical problems have changed
only in degree since Leo Postman and Gerald S. Blum raised them in an
exchange in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in the
mid-1950s. *(17)
  Most recent work on repression has been considerably more
sophisticated- and has consistently failed to support the
psychoanalytic hypothesis. It is important to emphasize here that
these varied studies have not concluded that, as one survey puts it,
"there is no selectivity in what persons are able to report of their
previous experiences," but rather that "the patterning of the
selectivity is often inconsistent with the predictions derived from
the theory of repression, and/or the findings can be better accounted
for by processes other than repression." *(18) The most generous
currently-held scientific opinion on the concept of repression- the
concept that Freud himself termed "the cornerstone on which the whole
structure of psychoanalysis rests" *(19)- is aptly summed-up by
psychologist David S. Holmes:
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 25}
-
  Clearly, it appears that either new research must be conducted
which will support the concept of repression, or the concept of
repression must be discarded and the variety of concepts related to
or dependent upon the concept of repression will have to be
reevaluated or reinterpreted. In view of the amount and consistency
of the data accumulated to this point, and pending new data
supporting the concept of repression, the continued use of repression
as an explanation for behavior does not seem justifiable. *(20)
-
  As for the entire range of psychoanalytic hypotheses concerning the
so-called defense mechanisms, what we now know with any assurance is
only that people often do not admit into their everyday thinking
unpleasant or uncomfortable memories, emotions, or desires, and that
people often focus their aggressions on objects less threatening than
those which inspired the aggression. But that, really, is about all
we know- and I shall leave it to others to decide whether or not
pre-Freudian common sense wisdom might not have made the same
deductions. The crucial point, however, is that the psychoanalytic
web that has been spun about these phenomena is, after all these
years, still nothing more than speculation- and speculation that is
directly contrary to the findings of a now enormous body of
scientific research.
-
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 30}
  The psychoanalytic theory of psychosexual personality syndromes has
been of major importance to those historians who use psychoanalytic
concepts in their constructions of historical explanation. A division
is customarily made by psychoanalysts between the so-called
pregenital characteristics, those referred to as oral and anal, and
another set known as urethral and phallic- these latter two initially
suggested by Ernest Jones. There is, it can be flatly stated, no
empirical evidence for the so-called urethral and phallic personality
constellations; they have been largely ignored by psychohistorians
and are not even very important in recent psychoanalytic theory. *(21)
  The hypothesis that there are constellations of personality traits
derived from repressed oral and anal eroticism is, however, of great
importance to psychoanalytic theory, has been of much use to
psychohistorical explanation, and has considerable potential for
confirmation by objective testing. In brief, Freud's theory of
psychosexual personality patterns postulates that "it is an untenable
error to deny that children have a sexual life and to suppose that
sexuality only begins at puberty with the maturation of the genitals.
On the contrary, from the very first children have a copious sexual
life, which differs at many points from what is later regarded as
normal." *(22) The initial stage of childhood differing from normal
adult sexuality appears during the first year of life and involves a
concentration on oral satisfaction. Either excessive or inadequate
satisfaction can allegedly produce a fixation on the oral stage of
infantile sexuality, and through the process of reaction-formation or
sublimation this fixation may appear in an adult personality pattern
characterized by ambition, envy, and impatience. There are many other
traits often alleged to be part of the oral character, but they are
most often subsumed under this famous triad.
  Beginning around the middle of the second year and extending until
the ages of four to five, the second phase of psychosexual
development- the anal phase- is said to appear. Most psychoanalysts
since Anna Freud, however, accept the probability of overlap between
all stages of infant sexuality. The timing and rigidity of toilet
training, among other factors, may, it is claimed, produce fixation
on this stage of sexuality, which will be expressed in an adult
character marked by the traits of frugality, obstinacy, and
orderliness. Again, as with the oral character, this triad is only a
summary of a great many more specific traits, such as attention to
detail and a desire to dominate.
  The first and most direct way of testing these psychoanalytic
hypotheses is to attempt to determine if the traits in question do in
fact tend to cluster in individual personalities. Because, once
again, clinical evidence based on individual cases is inevitably
fraught with problems of bias, what is required for this sort of
investigation are large-scale studies, preferably of both "normal"
and "abnormal" populations.
  The first of two large studies on the oral character conducted by
Frieda Goldman and published in The Journal of Personality focused on
the presence of oral trait clustering in a normal sample of 115
adults in London. Analytic questionnaires were administered that
sought information on the subjects' behavior in given situations
rather than their self-evaluations, an important improvement over
previous studies. The oral character is said to be generally
manifested in two patterns known as oral optimist and oral pessimist-
once again introducing the ever-present problem of irrefutability.
Nevertheless, tentative confirmation that most of the hypothesized
traits were clustered among a significant proportion of the sample
led Goldman to conclude that there is empirical support for the
thesis that character traits corresponding to the psychoanalytic oral
character types do tend to occur in certain personality
constellations. *(23)
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 35}
  Certain problems in Goldman's study, such as the relative
homogeneity and limited size of her sample and the fact that she used
a rather loose interpretation of traits described as oral, were
reduced in a subsequent study by Charles A. Barnes that examined the
entire theory of psychosexual development. A larger, somewhat more
heterogeneous sample, was analyzed, and greater specificity was given
the traits sought. Barnes' findings were quite contrary to Goldman's:
there was some suggestion that certain traits clustered, but these
were too insubstantial to support the psychoanalytic hypotheses. *(24)
  A third and still more recent study by A. Lazare, which also sought
confirmation of the entire theory of psychosexual development,
concentrated on ninety female subjects who had previously been
diagnosed as neurotic. The traits sought were the same as those
sought in Goldman's work. The results showed tentative support for
the oral personality syndrome. *(25)
  The citing of such studies could continue at some length, but
conclusions to date remain contradictory. There appears to be some
empirical support for the contention that personality traits tend to
cluster in a way suggested by the psychoanalytic concept of the oral
character. That some sophisticated studies have failed to find a
significant correlation among these personality traits, however,
strongly suggests that the concept is either very weak or severely
limited in applicability.
  The existence of a personality constellation resembling that of the
psychoanalytic anal character has more support than does the oral
hypothesis. The study by Barnes, though it concludes that none of the
psychosexual personality syndromes receives adequate support, does
at least show a higher tendency for traits of an anal nature to
cluster. Lazare's study of female neurotics shows overall support for
the psychoanalytic hypotheses and greater support for the anal than
the oral character. A 1957 study of school-age subjects by Halla
Beloff in Northern Ireland further showed support for the existence
of a personality type resembling that characterized by psychoanalytic
theory as anal, though no support was shown for a relationship
between this personality type and any particular type of toilet
training experience. *(26)
  A final study worth mentioning is one carried out by Paul Kline in
Ghana in 1969. An exceptionally careful analysis of a Ghanaian
student population showed a marked tendency for the so-called anal
traits to cluster, and a comparative study of British students
indicated a relatively higher incidence of that pattern's occurrence
among the Ghanaians. Apart from its statistical significance, this
study is worthy of note because of its revelation of the personality
syndrome among a non-American and non-British population, the sources
of almost every other important study. *(27)
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 40}
  In summary, then, it seems safe to say that the psychoanalytic
hypothesis that certain personality traits tend to cluster-
specifically the so-called anal traits of frugality, obstinacy, and
orderliness- receives some confirmation from empirical investigation.
The clustering of oral traits is considerably more problematic than
that of anal traits, but the negative evidence, though strong, is not
conclusive. It is essential, however, to stress the limited meaning
of these research findings. All that these studies have shown is that
if an individual has a tendency to be frugal, obstinate, or orderly,
there is a fairly significant likelihood that he or she will also
have a tendency to display the remaining two traits. There is a
potential, but lesser, likelihood that if an individual has a
tendency to be either ambitious, envious, or impatient, he or she may
also have a tendency to display the remaining two traits. The
possibility that most people who have never read a word of
psychoanalytic theory would tend to make similar or identical trait
associations and predictions suggests a certain banality to these
findings, but Freud and his followers did construct the theory, and
it has tended to find at least mixed support in empirical
investigation. What remains to be seen is whether there is any
evidence to support the claim that these personality patterns derive
from childhood experiences. If they do not, the most that can be said
for psychoanalytic theory in this regard is that it has provided
labels- and inaccurate and misleading ones at that- for certain
commonly recognized trait clusters.
-
  The hypothesis that adult personality patterns and characteristics
derive directly from infant and childhood experiences is so ingrained
in modern thought that to question it seems almost foolish.
Philosophers and others long before Freud stated and repeated the
dictum that the molding of a child's attitudes meant the molding of
the adult's. They generally spoke of the positive aspects of this
process. Schopenhauer spoke from another perspective when he wrote:
"There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted
in the human head if only you begin to inculcate it before the age
of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity."
But whatever the value placed on childhood malleability, it has long
been popularly accepted as fact. To this view, Freud brought the
apparatus of psychoanalysis in his attempt to transfer what had
become a platitude into a scientific system. With remarkable insight
and imagination he constructed a complex of hypotheses that became
perhaps the most celebrated concerns of psychoanalytic theory,
hypotheses that themselves rested on the fundamental importance of
infancy and childhood in the molding of the adult.
  What remained was to test those hypotheses to see how much
substance lay behind the pure ideas. If the postulated links between
specific infant experiences and specific adult character patterns
could be experimentally demonstrated and replicated, many of the
other shortcomings of psychoanalysis (therapeutic failure and logical
turbidity, for instance) might at least be overshadowed by these
great discoveries. Without demonstrable evidence of this sort of
causality, however, the hypotheses would remain just that-
imaginative constructs, not unlike those of astrology: complex,
vague, logically circular, intermittently accurate (the result of
chance and/or suggestion), and of scholarly interest primarily to the
historian of strange ideas.
  We have seen that the psychoanalytic view is that certain adult
character patterns derive in large measure from early or late weaning
and its severity, early or late and rigid or flexible toilet
training, and the nature and duration of affection or antipathy for
each of one's parents. Certainly children do undergo a variety of
experiences regarding each of these matters; and certainly there are
people who exhibit the personality clusters psychoanalytically
labeled oral-erotic, anal-erotic, and- to mention one to be discussed
later- paranoid schizophrenic. The question that is crucial, however,
remains: is it empirically demonstrable that these childhood
experiences do actually produce or even significantly contribute to
the character types described?
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 45}
  A great deal of research has been devoted to this question. All,
attempts to validate the hypotheses, however, have been beset from
the start with a basic and almost insurmountable methodological
problem: how to establish accurate information concerning the
specific childhood experiences and specific adult personality
patterns of a sizable body of individuals. Psychoanalytic sources of
such information- the selective and highly questionable infant and
childhood memories of patients under care- are totally unacceptable
to the researcher seeking confirmation or disconfirmation of the
theory, since even parents' memories concerning dates of weaning and
toilet training have been shown to be seriously inaccurate after as
short an interval as one year.
  One rather comprehensive study which artificially inflated the
probability of accurate parental recall asked participating parents
to submit progress reports both in writing and in person throughout
their children's infancy. The study tested parental recall when the
children were only three years old and found common inaccuracies of
as much as six months (an enormous discrepancy in discussing just two
to three years of life) in remembered dates of weaning, the onset and
conclusion of bowel training, and other milestones of infancy. Only
slightly more than one-third of the fathers and one-half of the
mothers questioned remembered accurately whether the child had been
fed on a schedule or on a demand basis, and- in striking support of
the idea that suggestion is an ever-present problem- almost all of
the distortions tended to be in the direction of the schedule
recommendations contained in Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care.
The sample of parents studied was, as a group, highly educated, and-
of great importance- they were aware that their memories would be
checked against the records they themselves had prepared. *(28)
  Needless to say, evidence of this sort casts serious doubt on the
accuracy of psychoanalytic patient recall and on studies relying on
parental recollection of childhood training, experiences, and events.
Thus, the substantial body of studies that employ parental recall in
gathering infant training data must at best be treated with great
caution. Nevertheless, it is at least worth noting that since the
first such studies of any size or complexity were conducted in the
1930s, there has to date been only one of any sophistication that has
found even tentative support for any psychoanalytically hypothesized
links between specific infant care and specific adult personality
patterns. And this study flatly contradicts other parts of the
orality hypothesis. *(29) That research has so consistently resulted
in negative findings does not, of course, reduce the significance of
possible flaws in the research design, but neither should these
findings be totally ignored.
  An improvement on the retrospective types of investigation are the
types known as current and longitudinal. Current and longitudinal
studies seek direct confirmation of childhood training procedures,
either by interview, questionnaire, observation, or a combination of
these measures. These studies, however, are not without problems of
their own. While the data on infancy and childhood successfully deal
with the problem of veracity, many of these studies have plotted
these data against personality patterns apparent only in pre-pubertal
children. The psychoanalyst's objection here is obvious: repression
is said to be most successful during the pre-pubertal or "latency"
stage of development, so it is only natural that the predicted
personality syndromes will not be evident. This is a legitimate
objection, at least so long as one accepts the concept of repression.
Nonetheless, it is understandable why the psychoanalyst is quick to
raise it: not a single current or longitudinal study of reasonable
size or sophistication has shown any links between childhood training
and subsequent personality. *(30)
  The one study that best addresses the problems inherent in both the
retrospective and longitudinal techniques was reported on by M. I.
Hernstein in 1963. Hernstein maintained careful records of the type
and duration of infant feeding experiences for close to 100 children,
evenly divided by sex. He then followed his subjects' progress into
adulthood, noting any overt displays of personality problems and
administering various psychological tests of personality development
to all the subjects at ages twelve and eighteen. None of the
evidence, at any point, supported the hypothesis that infant feeding
experiences have an effect on subsequent personality. *(31)
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 50}
  Most recently, in a comprehensive 1979 review of research to date
on the etiology of the so-called anal character, Jerrold M. Pollak
has shown that "there is little, if any, empirical evidence for the
classical psychoanalytic position on the etiology of the
obsessive-compulsive or anal character type," further noting (as had
others before him) that what little positive evidence there is can be
more readily correlated with an overall style of long-term parental
influence, rather than specific toilet training practices. *(32)
  There is little need to go on. The conclusions of all these studies
overwhelmingly indicate that the specific links psychoanalytic theory
alleges to exist between infant care and adult personality are little
more than imaginary. This judgment appears to be so contrary to what
is popularly considered fact (a condition, to borrow Schopenhauer's
words, probably resulting from decades of repeating the alleged
truism "with an air of great solemnity") that objections arise
immediately. Paul Kline asserts that failure of confirmation is due
to deficiencies in research design; we must reserve judgment, he
says, until superior testing techniques are devised. This same
objection is posed from another perspective by Anthony F. C. Wallace,
who thinks the reason that empirical investigation has failed in its
efforts to confirm psychoanalytic theory is rooted in the
labyrinthian intricacies of that theory: "they are so fantastically
complex and so protracted that empirical observation cannot record a
sufficient number of relevant dimensions." *(33)
  All of this may be so. But the fact is that dozens of sophisticated
independent investigations of the relationship between infant
experience and adult personality have repeatedly failed to find any
significant support for psychoanalytic theory in this regard. If
there are design difficulties in these investigations, there is, of
course, good reason to treat their conclusions with care. But it
simply will not do to denounce them and proceed to act, without any
supporting evidence, as though the psychoanalytic hypotheses were
true. To take this position is to mimic the religious zealot whose
faith in the spirits remains unshaken by the repeated failures of his
or her mystical predictions- an individual, by the way, whose
"pathological" behavior has been of great interest to Freud and his
followers.
  The unavoidable conclusion is clear: given the present and not
inconsiderable state of scientific knowledge, there is no support
for the psychoanalytic hypotheses that relate personality syndromes
to specific aspects of infant care and experience. The results of
dozens of investigations are virtually unanimous on this point. "As
a set of hypotheses [psychoanalysis] was a great achievement fifty
years ago," observed the philosopher Michael Scriven in 1959, but "as
no more than a set of hypotheses it is a great disgrace today." *(34)
That was twenty years ago. Harsh though Scriven's judgment may sound,
there is even more reason to hold to it now. To escape that judgment,
more than rhetorical flourishes concerning inadequate test design are
required; after all, the burden of positive proof rests with the
psychoanalyst. To many, however, such a long and complete record of
failure is now sufficient: "The original psychoanalytic variables of
interest- duration of nursing, severity of weaning, and age of toilet
training- are no longer of interest today." So writes Jerome Kagan,
widely regarded by psychologists as the foremost living expert on
early childhood. *(35)
  This conclusion does not mean, of course, that childhood
experiences are irrelevant: it means that psychoanalytic theory
regarding those experiences is empirically unsupportable.
Post-Freudian modifications of orthodox theory by such writers as
Horney, Fromm, Sullivan, Erikson and others have attempted to appear
more closely aligned with certain of the empirical findings; but
these modifications have been slight, have too often been politically
motivated and sociologically naive, and- most important- have not
themselves been the subject of rigorous, empirical examination. *(36)
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 55}
  This conclusion also does not mean- and this is a point deserving
emphasis- that a great deal of non-psychoanalytic psychological
research on the importance of childhood should be denigrated,
although (and this too deserves emphasis) the best recent work now
suggests that the popularly presumed effects of any infant
experiences on subsequent personality have been vastly
overrrated. *(37) All that is specifically affected by the research
discussed above is psychoanalytic theory. Unfortunately, however, it
is psychoanalytic theory that has provided the psychohistorians with
their models.
-
  So far we have reviewed the empirical status of the Oedipus
complex, repression, the anal and oral personality syndromes, and the
importance to adult personality of infant care and experience.
Although in certain cases, disconfirmation of one psychoanalytic
hypothesis, either by logical or empirical criteria, clearly implies
de facto disconfirmation of other hypotheses dependent upon the
first, I have avoided employing this kind of domino theory approach.
Each hypothesis has been regarded as employing acceptable primary
assumptions, whether or not those assumptions were shown elsewhere
to be untenable, in order to test the hypothesis in its strongest
state. Before proceeding further, it seems worthwhile to recapitulate
these earlier findings.
  It has been seen that there is some empirical support for the
thesis that in a number of cultures male children may develop a
rather early sense of antipathy for a certain adult male involved in
a close relationship with the child's mother. In the West this
attitude, when it appears, is generally directed at the boy's father,
but this is not necessarily the case in every culture- and even in
the West its degree of conventionality remains a matter of debate.
There is virtually no support for the contention that this antipathy
is founded on sexual jealousy, although if "sexual" is defined
broadly enough some meager support might be found. There is some
support for the thesis that when this antipathy exists it can persist
at least into puberty, but that often it is not readily confessed to
by the child. Whether this is due to repression (and the emotion is
thus not conscious) or merely social pressure is as yet unknown. What
has never been demonstrated, however, is that these childhood
emotions have any effect whatever on adult personality. If, simply on
the basis of common sense, we were to reject the best recent findings
and assume that these childhood emotions must have some impact on
adult character, we must conclude that one person's guess is as good
as any other's concerning the nature of that impact. There is simply
no empirical evidence to go on.
  We have seen that of the psychoanalytic mechanisms of defense, only
displacement has to any extent at all weathered the rigors of
empirical investigation. Repression, by far the most important
defense, has been shown to exist only if it is defined merely as the
tendency to forget or otherwise not admit into everyday thought
unpleasant or uncomfortable memories, emotions, or desires. The
belief that such matters are secretly lurking in a place known as the
unconscious has been seen as logically untenable, and there is also
no empirical evidence concerning the systematic effects of repression
on behavior or personality. If, as with the so-called Oedipus
complex, we assume that such forgotten matter might have some
influence on personality, the nature of that influence remains
unknown.
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 60}
  We have seen that the personality trait constellations labeled by
psychoanalytic theory as oral and anal do sometimes find tentative,
partial support in empirical investigation. That is, the traits of
frugality, obstinancy, and orderliness may tend to appear together
in certain individual personalities; to a lesser, but still possibly
significant extent, the traits of ambition, envy, and impatience also
may cluster in certain individuals. This is a fairly trivial
discovery, however- at least in terms of verifying psychoanalytic
theory- unless support is also shown for the contention that such
personality syndromes have their roots in specific experiences of
infancy and childhood.
  We have seen that the virtually unanimous conclusion of dozens of
empirical studies over the past few decades has been that there is no
discernable link between specific child-rearing practices and adult
personality patterns as postulated by psychoanalytic theory. No doubt
some childhood experiences do influence subsequent personality
characteristics, particularly when those experiences are of a
profound and enduring nature. Depression, for example, appears to
have a disproportionately high rate of occurrence among individuals
who were orphaned during early adolescence, and other empirically
verified connections between childhood experience and adult
personality can  be found in the literature of experimental
psychology. *(38) The crucial point in this discussion, however, is
that the most fundamental psychoanalytic hypotheses concerning such
relationships have repeatedly failed to find empirical support.
  For the purposes of the historian, then, the value of
psychoanalytic theory appears largely limited to its providing a kind
of shorthand for superficially describing observable behavior that
otherwise would require more detailed and complex verbal elaboration.
Thus, historians Richard Hofstadter and David Brion Davis once found
"paranoid style" a convenient way of labeling social attitudes that
are laden with conspiratorial imagery, though they both cautioned
that they were not speaking of the "disease of paranoia." The
paranoid style as they defined it "has to do with the way in which
ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or
falsity of their content." *(39) Even with this caution, however,
reviewers of their work often ignored the caveat and upbraided them
for failing to distinguish between the "truth or falsity" of the
conspiratorial frame of mind. *(40) Since Hofstadter and Davis both
seemed to be using the term only in an effort to achieve incisiveness
in communication, and since they both seem to have been widely
misunderstood, it might be prudent for historians in the future to
think twice before following their lead.
  Other historians have been far less judicious in their use of
paranoia as an explanatory term. Bruce Mazlish, for instance, calls
Richard Nixon's fervid anti-communism during the 1950s and early
1960s evidence of "paranoid fear" (an affliction, Mazlish fails to
note, shared by millions of Americans other than Nixon and one from
which Nixon apparently recovered during his first term in
office). *(41) Psychohistorical work on Hitler has, of course, been
riddled with such references. But as Mazlish and other
psychoanalytically informed historians well know, paranoia is a
phenomenon that in the psychoanalytic lexicon has a specific meaning
with specific antecedent causes. The most fundamental cause,
discussed at length initially in Freud's analysis of Dr. Schreber, is
the projection of homosexual desires. The formula, as Freud
explicated it is: "I (a man) love him (a man)." Since this emotion is
unacceptable, it takes the form of a reaction-formation against
homosexuality and becomes: "I do not love him- I hate him." The
explication continues:
-
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 65}
  This contradiction, which must have run thus in the unconscious,
cannot, however, become conscious to a paranoic in this form. The
mechanism of symptom-formation in paranoia requires that internal
perceptions- feelings- shall be replaced by external perceptions.
Consequently the proposition "I hate him" becomes transformed by
projection into another one: "He hates (persecutes) me, which will
justify me in hating him." And thus the impelling unconscious feeling
makes its appearance as though it were the consequence of an external
perception: "I do not love him- I hate him, because HE PERSECUTES
ME." *(42)
-
  If Mazlish and others who use paranoia as an explanation for
behavior are not merely indulging in hyperbole for literary effect
(as I suspect they are not), and if they are not merely echoing
Hofstadter and Davis without their disclaimers (as I also suspect
they are not), they must be able to historically justify their
selection of such highly specific clinical language- unless, of
course, there is no empirical evidence to support the connection
between repressed and projected homosexuality and paranoid behavior.
Should this turn out to be the case, their analytical language is
necessarily reduced to metaphor.
  A good deal of research, both clinical and experimental, has been
conducted on the psychoanalytic hypothesis linking paranoia and
repressed homosexuality. The results have been mixed. At least as
many studies have failed to support the theory as have claimed to
verify it, and a good many others have admitted substantial ambiguity
in their findings. Since it is impossible to review here all the
relevant major studies, it seems most appropriate to at least examine
the two works that have been hailed by proponents of psychoanalysis
as providing the strongest support for the theory. For, whatever the
strengths or weaknesses of the contradictory studies, the most
minimal requirement for even tentatively accepting the psychoanalytic
hypothesis is that its strongest empirical support should withstand
general scrutiny.
  In a study published in 1956, P. G. Daston submitted seventy-five
subjects- twenty-five "normal," twenty-five diagnosed as nonparanoid
schizophrenics, and twenty-five diagnosed as paranoid- to a word
recognition test with the aid of a tachistoscope (a device commonly
used in psychological research that exposes visual stimuli for
extremely brief periods, often a tenth of a second or less). The
words flashed varied widely in reference and emotional content, but a
number of words with clear homosexual reference were included among
them. As hypothesized, the group diagnosed as paranoid showed a
superior ability to identify the homosexual words than did either of
the other two nonparanoid groups. Daston concluded that this outcome
indicated support for at least this one aspect of the psychoanalytic
hypothesis. *(43)
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 70}
  Two years following Daston's report, H. S. Zamansky published the
results of a similar but more complex study. Zamansky selected twenty
paranoid and twenty nonparanoid hospitalized psychotics and showed
them pictures in pairs, one of which depicted a male and one of which
depicted a female. Some pictures in each case depicted the subjects
in positions suggestive of homosexuality. Since previous study had
shown that homosexuals spend more time looking at male than at female
pictures, Zamansky hypothesized on the basis of psychoanalytic theory
that the paranoids in his study would also spend more time looking at
male than at female pictures and that their time so spent would
exceed that spent by the nonparanoid (but still psychotic) subjects.
Zamansky then added a second intriguing hypothesis: if psychoanalytic
theory regarding repression of the homosexual impulses were correct,
paranoids would acknowledge their preference of male over female to
a lesser degree than was indicated by their selective viewing time of
the pictures, and the degree of difference between acknowledged and
unacknowledged preference would be greater than that for the
nonparanoid subjects. Both of these hypotheses were supported by
Zamansky's experiment. *(44)
  But did these studies actually confirm the psychoanalytic
hypothesis? Even if all the studies with contradictory conclusions
are discounted, what Daston and Zamansky found was that in a specific
cultural setting (the Midwestern and Northeastern United States in
the early and mid-1950s) the appearance of homosexual impulses
occurred more frequently in a population diagnosed as paranoid than
in populations not regarded as paranoid. Zamansky added the further
observation that "men with paranoid delusions tend to avoid explicit
or direct manifestation of homosexual object preference." *(45) This
is a long way indeed from psychoanalytic theory, which posits a
causal connection between repressed homosexuality and paranoia. Both
the relatively small sample sizes and the fact that only a slightly
higher degree of apparent homosexuality was observed among the
paranoid subjects than among the control groups suggest the
possibility that factors not considered may have been responsible for
the discrepancy; after all, no matter how a population of such
limited size is divided, some characteristics (physical as well as
psychological) will invariably occur more frequently in one group
than in another. Even if we disregard this obvious shortcoming,
however, we are still left without any evidence of causation. Forget
for the moment any and all internal problems with these studies.
Accept without question the claim that there is a correlation between
homosexual tendencies and paranoid behavior. We still have no way of
knowing if this correlation is due to a causal link between the two
entities (in one direction or another) or if both entities are
independently caused by a third factor.
  As to Zamansky's finding that a covert method of testing for
homosexuality resulted in a higher proportion of discovered
individuals with homosexual tendencies than did an overt method of
testing, that is what anyone would logically predict. In a culture
that regards homosexuality unfavorably, it is only reasonable to
expect a certain amount of concealment. There is no need, and no
justification, for regarding the discrepancy between overt and covert
results as evidence of repression unless there is evidence to
indicate that no conscious deception was involved in the subjects'
replies to direct questions. And no such evidence exists. Neither is
it a surprise that the discrepancy between the overt and covert tests
was higher for the paranoid group than for the nonparanoid group.
After all, if we accept the initial findings, the paranoid group had
the most to conceal in that it showed in the covert test a higher
tendency toward homosexuality than did the nonparanoid group- a
difference, in fact, somewhat higher than that measured for the
overt/covert discrepancy.
  Even this is excessively generous. These two studies are generally
regarded as the strongest empirical support available for the
psychoanalytic thesis concerning repressed homosexuality and
paranoia (though the researchers themselves are more circumspect in
their claims). *(46) What they show is interesting, but limited. They
suggest that in a specific cultural setting men who have been
diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics will probably spend more time
than will nonparanoid schizophrenics in looking at pictures of men,
particularly men who may be homosexual, than at pictures of women. In
the earlier study, men who have been diagnosed as paranoid appear to
be more responsive than do nonparanoid schizophrenics to words
charged with homosexual meaning. Well, of course they do. Paranoid
people are, after all, by definition especially suspicious of and
alert to anything that may be regarded as threatening. And men,
particularly sexually "deviant" men, may well appear more threatening
than women. Why do the diagnosed paranoids not acknowledge their
apparent preference as readily as do the nonparanoids? The most
obvious reason, again, provides the most likely explanation: because
they are paranoid. As paranoids they would, of course, quickly
interpret the overt suggestion as threatening and deny it, whereas
the nonparanoid schizophrenics would by definition be less likely to
behave in any systematic fashion. In short, all that these two
studies clearly show is that paranoids appear to act more paranoid
than do nonparanoids.
  Nevertheless, even if the studies are accepted without scrutiny,
the most that they indicate is that there appears to be a minor
statistical probability that homosexual tendencies will occur more
frequently among individuals diagnosed as paranoid than among
nonparanoids. Zamansky's study adds the claim that paranoids with
apparent homosexual leanings are not always willing to admit them
openly, or to provide obvious clues to the existence of the tendency.
Even examined in the most uncritical light possible, these studies
provide no evidence of any causal relationship, one way or another,
between homosexuality and paranoia, nor do they provide any evidence
for the existence of the mechanism of repression. In short, they do
not support the psychoanalytic hypothesis and thus join in their
failure at confirmation other, larger, more recent studies that
flatly disconfirm psychoanalytic conjecture. *(47)
                                                        {CH_4 ^paragraph 75}
  Since the psychoanalytic explanation of the origins of paranoia is
not supported by empirical investigation of the theory, it might be
suggested that, paradoxically, the psychohistorian is thus freed to
use the concept of paranoia more loosely than ever in historical
explanation. There is, for example, no need for the psychohistorian
to produce evidence of a subject's repressed homosexuality to justify
a reference to that subject's "paranoid fears," since there is no
evidence to support the psychoanalytic contention that one is
antecedent to the other. On the other hand, the psychohistorian is
left with a concept- paranoia- that is virtually bereft of any except
very general and colloquial meaning as a label for behavior he or she
regards as motivated by unrealistic feelings of persecution. The most
that can be said for its use in this fashion (though the critics of
Hofstadter and Davis would probably not accept even this generosity)
is that as an informal label it is relatively innocuous. That is not
exactly an achievement calling for celebration.
-
  It must be acknowledged, before closing this chapter, that some
supporters of psychohistorical analysis are quite aware of the
abysmal record of psychoanalytic theory when it is subjected to
logical scrutiny and empirical research. Their response has been to
try to immunize their work from the consequences of such failure by
stressing a radically endopsychic view of the psychoanalytic
endeavor. This is the view, espoused by the French philosopher Paul
Ricoeur, that frankly admits that as long as psychoanalysis is held
to the same logical and empirical standards "as other theories in the
natural or social sciences" the sort of criticism reviewed in the
past three chapters is "unanswerable." However, Ricoeur goes on,
psychoanalysis should not be held to these standards because it "is
not a science of observation; it is an interpretation." What this
means, he claims, is that the nature of a subject's empirically
verifiable life experiences are irrelevant to psychoanalysis.
Instead, "what is important to the analyst are the dimensions of the
environment as 'believed' by the subject; what is pertinent to him is
not the fact, but the meaning the fact has assumed in the subject's
history." Such beliefs and meanings, of course, are said to be buried
in the unconscious and, in the words of historian Christopher Lasch,
who appears to be a supporter of this general view, "have been so
ruthlessly repressed that they can be brought to light only with the
greatest difficulty." Thus, what matters is not whether a given
individual actually experienced certain events that influenced his or
her subsequent life history (the analysis of which is then subject to
recognized logical and empirical examination), but whether- deeply
repressed in his or her unconscious- an individual has given certain
unique and behaviorally consequential meanings to phenomena which may
in fact be wholly imaginary (a view which makes utterly irrelevant
actual life experience and the individual's interaction with others).
Solipsism thus becomes the final defense of a psychological theory
that consistently has failed to weather the rigors of experimental
verification.
  The implications of this position for psychoanalysis are troubling
enough, but for psychohistory they are nothing short of devastating.
For in trying to use this argument to speciously extricate
psychoanalytic theory from the effects of logical failure and
experimental disconfirmation, thus hoping to free it for acceptable
use as a method of historical explanation, Lasch and the others who
follow this approach are caught in the trap laid by the
psychoanalysts themselves: that is, that only deep, prolonged, and
face-to-face personal encounters with a subject- encounters
involving, writes famed analyst Heinz Hartmann, the psychoanalytic
"gathering of data" not only on the subject's "verbal behavior," but
also "his silences, his postures, and his movements in general, more
specifically his expressive movements"- can even hope to reveal in a
completed and successful analysis (a very rare bird, as we have seen)
the "ruthlessly repressed" and extremely subjective individual
interpretations that are allegedly the motives underlying a
particular condition. In sum, either historically verifiable life
experiences (Luther's relationship with his parents, Jackson's
absence of a father, and the like) are relevant- in which case the
theory which claims to analyze them is subject to the sort of
logical scrutiny and empirical examination which, even Ricoeur
admits, it cannot withstand; or, such experiences are not relevant,
except in terms of their repressed and individually unique "meanings"
the nature of which can only be revealed by a prolonged and
therapeutically successful period of direct psychoanalytic contact
with a living and fully cooperative individual. In either case, by
either criterion, psychohistory is readily shown to be both a
historical and a psychological sham. And the psychohistorian becomes
(to paraphrase a remark once made by R. D. Laing) an individual
hunting a hare whose tracks exist only in the mind of the
hunter. *(48)

INTRO_TO_CH_5
-
    "The past is a different country;
     they do things differently there."
-
                                    -L. P. Hartley,
                                    The Go-Between

{CH_5
                                5
                     The Problem of Culture
-
  At one point in his widely and justifiably admired study of family
life in Plymouth Colony, John Demos ingeniously unites two
independent observations- "the few recorded cases of conflict within
a family, and the very many such cases among neighbors"-  to form
what he calls "the germ of an hypothesis": cramped living conditions,
which created frequent "occasions for abrasive contact" within the
family situation, combined with a countering force- the need for the
family "to maintain a smooth kind of operational equilibrium"- to
cause a displacement of hostility from family members to neighbors.
Thus, Demos suggests, "a man cursed his neighbor in order to keep
smiling at his parent, spouse, or child." *(1)
  This fascinating insight, if accurate, could shed a great deal of
needed light on seventeenth-century colonial American behavior. It
is, however, unsteadily dependent on a single, questionable
assumption- that the settlers of Plymouth did have to endure the
hardship of cramped living conditions. What, after all, constitutes
cramped living conditions? It would be belaboring the obvious to
point out that living space varies so much from society to society
and from individual situation to individual situation within all
societies that hard and fast formulae defining the nature of
inadequate conditions would be hard to come by. True, ethologists
have for some time been studying this problem with animal experiments
(the overall results of which are not, by the way, supportive of the
hypothesis Demos extends), but nothing resembling verifiable data yet
exists for human populations in general. *(2) If the Plymouth
settlers' housing was sufficiently confining to produce the behavior
Demos suggests, confirmation must be sought in the records and
diaries and literary remains of the colonists themselves. Since Demos
is an expert on this material (and since we may expect at least some
of it to be covertly expressed) we might turn to him for this
information.
  All Demos has to say on the settlers' own reactions to their
housing conditions is that to his eye and to that of modern students
of architecture the homes of the early colonists seem "oppressive" to
the extent that "many settlers ought to have looked on their homes as
'decidedly substandard.'" But the settlers themselves apparently did
not share this opinion; "they did not especially complain" about
their living conditions, Demos admits, and "were presumably quite
content with such houses." *(3)
  Demos's reasoning on this matter is a classic example of the sort
of historical presentism that appears to be an inevitable
accompaniment of even the best psychohistorical explanations. The
colonists' recorded reactions to their situation are completely
ignored in forming the explanation, and an assumption is inserted in
their place based on the criteria of the historical present. "Can we
picture ourselves in such a setting?" Demos asks rhetorically at one
point, assured of the modern reader's negative reply. *(4) The modern
reader would also undoubtedly reply in the negative if asked whether
he or she could picture himself or herself in a setting so bereft of
the benefits of modern hygiene- and one can readily imagine the
provocative hypotheses that might be advanced on the premise that the
Plymouth settlers constantly felt dirty, because they were, all
moderns would agree, decidedly unclean.
                                                         {CH_5 ^paragraph 5}
  If this picture seems perhaps overdrawn (though I am by no means
sure most psychohistorians would consider it to be), I hope it is at
least clear. * The psychohistorian employs theoretical models and
cognitive assumptions created from the material of the present- and
then imposes them on the past. In so doing, he or she must assume
that in most fundamental ways all people, at all places, at all
times, have viewed themselves and the world about them in
substantially the same fashion. If man qua man were not always
essentially the same, the behavior of many past individuals (to say
nothing of whole cultures) would be psychoanalytically
unintelligible. Their actions and motives would be operating at a
level beyond the reach of psychoanalytic concepts and suppositions,
which are products of the direct study of primarily urban,
post-industrial, literate, twentieth-century, Western individuals-
and mostly "abnormal" and demographically non-representative ones at
that.
-
  * By "most psychohistorians" I am not here including Demos who,
despite the logical gaffe I have pointed to, is a cautious, skilled,
and sensitive historian.
-
  The assumption of immutability in man's basic vision of himself and
his environment has, of course, been sharply challenged. While not
always addressing directly the then still exotic vogue of
psychoanalysis, such great early twentieth-century historians as
Huizinga and Febvre (who were by no means always in agreement with
one another) both implicitly and explicitly suggested that the
historical past was in fundamental ways a very different world from
that of the present. More recently, a historian of the Middle Ages,
D. W. Robertson, Jr., has argued that the people of medieval London
were devoid of "something that most of us enjoy today:
'personality.'" Instead, he contends, medieval men "thought of one
another . . . as moral characters whose virtues or vices were
apparent in their speech and actions"; as a result, "the less
inclined we are to think of medieval men sentimentally as being
'human like ourselves' the more fruitful will be our study of the
medieval city and its people." Psychoanalyst J. H. van den Berg
argues similarly and eloquently that his profession is disastrously
wedded to the mistaken assumption of psychic uniformity in time and
place. Psychologist Bernard G. Rosenthal warns of the "scientific
provincialism" such assumptions imply. And in his pathbreaking study
of the family in Western history, Philippe Aries notes that the "lack
of reserve with regard to children" observed as late as the early
seventeenth century "surprises us: we raise our eyebrows at the
outspoken talk but even more at the bold gestures, the physical
contacts, about which it is easy to imagine what a modern
psychoanalyst would say." He adds: "The psychoanalyst would be
wrong." *(5)
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 10}
  A list such as this could continue at some length, but even if
extended indefinitely it would run into two serious objections. The
first has been alluded to by Erik Erikson, who wrote in his epilogue
to Young Man Luther. "I will not discuss here the cultural relativity
of Freud's observations nor the dated origin of his term [the Oedipus
complex]; but I assume that those who do wish to quibble about all
this will feel the obligation to advance specific propositions about
family, childhood and society which come closer to the core, rather
than go back to the periphery of the riddle which Freud was the first
to penetrate." *(6) Erikson may well be engaging here in what David
Hackett Fischer has called the "fallacy of the presumptive proof" and
forgetting or ignoring the fact that the burden of responsibility
"rests squarely upon Erikson, and not his quibbling critics, to
advance specific propositions which come closer to the core." *(7) But
clearly Erikson does touch a nerve in his critics. If it is not their
responsibility to write better psychoanalytic theory, it does at
least seem incumbent upon them to show that their quibbling has
empirical  support and is not merely founded on the suspicion that
cultural differences are sufficient to blunt the validity of
psychohistorical explanation.
  The second objection is more philosophical and speculative. In a
sense it is the reverse of Erikson's critique. What if the critics of
the immutability assumption are right? Where does it end? As Hans
Jonas has pointed out:
-
  . . . the proposition of the irreducible uniqueness of all
experience and the ever-otherness of man in history can also lead to
the radically skeptical conclusion that "true" historical
understanding is a priori impossible; and that what we take for it is
always a translation of the foreign signs into our own language- a
necessarily falsifying translation, which creates the deceptive
appearance of familiarity where in fact we only explicate ourselves
and can recognize ourselves in the past because we have first
projected ourselves into it. *(8)
-
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 15}
  Such extreme skepticism would seem to support the old arguments of
Croce and Oakeshott that historical knowledge based on discovery and
interpretation is impossible. It would also almost inevitably endorse
the more recent "Construction Theory" of Jack W. Meiland which argues
that the best a historian can do, since the past can never be known,
is to "'tell a story' which is in the past tense." *(9) Meiland's
position, however, falls prey to the traditional rejoinder that such
skepticism is not limited to history, but extends to all knowledge
of others; it is most properly a general, and quite traditional,
question of epistemology. Further, it is a self-defeating and
eventually, at least in the eyes of most historians, meaningless
position of self-reinforcing negativism. It becomes the kind of
problem seemingly so removed from the world of working historians
(psychohistorian and non-psychohistorian alike) that they most often,
and quite properly, regard it as armchair philosophizing- and then
return to the work at hand.
  Clearly, if the argument is to be successfully advanced that
psychohistory in its present form fails to deal with the
"differentness" of distant individuals and cultures, these two
objections will have to be faced. It must be demonstrated that
cultural milieux can and do seriously affect the most fundamental
aspects of human life and cognition; and it must be shown that some
sort of generalization (if not conventional, culture-bound
psychoanalysis) is still possible once the effects of cultural
influence are seen.
  On the other hand, if these criteria can be met, if the common
psychoanalytic assumption of immutability can be shown to be false,
the work of the practicing psychohistorian will have to be regarded
with whatever respect would be given a physician who treated all his
or her patients with superficially similar symptoms in precisely the
same manner, without ever considering the possibility that the
phenomena at the source of the symptoms may well differ from patient
to patient- thus still further compounding the problem that this
physician is using a method of treatment that is, in the best of
circumstances, flagrantly illogical and incapable of weathering the
most elementary tests of scientific inquiry.
  The phenomenon perhaps most fundamental to, and most near the
"source" of human behavior, is perception. Before an individual- or
any organism, for that matter- can act, he or she must perceive the
environment in which he or she is acting. The individual must acquire
information and somehow "process" that information before it can be
acted upon. No matter how one construes the nature of "mind," it is
obvious that, as one psychologist writes, "perception is the
information system of the mental apparatus." *(10) Thus, the question
of cultural variability in perception seems a logical place to begin
an investigation of the immutability of the human condition.
-
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 20}
  Freud's observation, noted earlier, that the poets and philosophers
long before him had discovered the unconscious, was one that might be
made of the scientific "discovery" of any number of phenomena. Almost
two thousand years before psychologists began inquiring into the
effects of environment on perception, for example, Protagoras had
pointed out that the same wind can appear cold to one person and warm
to another. According to this most famous of the Sophists, in matters
of perceptual disagreement there is no correct and objective answer.
On the contrary, the wind that appears warm is warm, and the wind
that appears cold is cold, and all perceptions are thus in a sense
"true." Yet, at least according to one student of scientific thought,
conventional nineteenth-century science tended to view the human mind
as "an inanimate and impartial motion-picture film which accurately
records the succession of physical events. It is a
percept-registering or fact-registering organ with the attributes of
a scientific instrument." *(11)
  But the poets continued to disagree. In his preface to The Portrait
of a Lady, Henry James wrote:
-
  The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million....
at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with
a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a
unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an
impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbors are
watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees
less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big
where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees
fine. *(12)
-
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 25}
  It was not long after this that modern novelists, most notably
James Joyce and William Faulkner, began expressing in detail the
theme that what people see in others is to a large extent a
reflection of themselves. Anthropologists, beginning with W. H. R.
Rivers in 1901, started working on the implications for their
investigations of the possibility that, as Levy-Bruhl wrote,
"primitives perceive nothing in the same way as we do." *(13) Finally,
in the middle of the twentieth century psychologists and
anthropologists, in a movement they called the "New Look," were
working on a scientific method by which the phenomenon of relativity
in perception might be studied.
  It was not until the late 1940s, however, that substantial
psychological and anthropological explanations were advanced
concerning the phenomenon of the influence of a perceiver's cultural
history on his or her perceptions. *(14) Anthony F. C. Wallace later
summarized the implications of this position:
-
  This quasi-independence of perception from the "objective" reality
of nature makes possible two mental phenomena: first, the ability of
the perceiver to say that two sensibly different experiences involve
the "same thing" ("sameness" being determined by constancy of
configuration, by continuity over time in space, or by various other
criteria); second, the possibility of two perceivers, or the same
observer at different times, perceiving the "same" object
differently, depending on differences in their own perceptual
equipment and experience. *(15)
-
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 30}
  This latter phenomenon was something with which field
anthropologists had long been familiar. For some years
anthropologists had observed the reactions of people who had never
seen a camera, to a photograph of one or another local scene. One of
them, Melville Herskovits, later described and explained one such
experience:
-
  To those of us accustomed to the idiom of the realism of the
photographic lens, the degree of conventionalization that inheres in
even the clearest, most accurate photograph, is something of a shock.
For, in truth, even the clearest photograph is a convention; a
translation of a color transmuted into shades of black and white. In
the instance to which I refer, a Bush Negro woman turned a photograph
of her own son this way and that, in attempting to make sense out of
the shadings of greys on the piece of paper she held. It was only
when the details of the photograph were pointed out to her that she
was able to perceive the subject. *(16)
-
  Starting from isolated, anecdotal experiences such as these, social
psychologists began testing the influence of experience on perception
in controlled environments. To select but one example, Hans H. Toch
and Richard Schulte reported in 1969 on an experiment conducted at
Michigan State University in which nine pairs of slides were
presented to a selected group of students through an enclosed
stereoscope. Each pair consisted of one "violent" and one "neutral"
scene- the subject matter of the former scenes including acts of
murder, theft, and suicide, that of the latter, scenes of a farmer at
work, a radio announcer, and a mailman. At the exposure time of half
a second, the students perceived only one of the simultaneously
presented scenes (since image in the other monocular field was
dominated by the one unconsciously "selected") and were asked to
identify the scene observed. The groups of students consisted of
sixteen advanced students in police administration, sixteen
first-year students in police administration, and twenty-seven
introductory psychology students. The series of slides was presented
twice, in alternate eye order, so that each eye of each student was
exposed to all eighteen pictures. The results showed the average
number of "violent" percepts to be 9.37 for the advanced police
students, 4.69 for the first-year police students, and 4.03 for the
psychology students. The lowest number of violent scenes perceived by
the first group was six, the highest fifteen, while for the other two
groups the figures were two and nine for first-year police students
and one and seven for the psychology students.
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 35}
  To be sure, this experiment leaves much to be desired. One might
wish to have test results on the first-year police students after
further training, for example, to see if there was an increase in the
number of "violent" scenes perceived. But in any case, the resulting
hypothesis of Toch and Schulte does not seem unwarranted. Law
enforcement training, they conclude, establishes in its subjects an
increased familiarity with violent scenes. Thus, "the law  enforcer
may come to accept crime as a familiar personal experience, one which
he himself is not surprised to encounter. The acceptance of crime as
a familiar experience in turn increases the ability or readiness to
perceive violence where clues to it are potentially available." *(17)
In more general words- to a certain extent perception appears to be
controlled by learning experiences.
  Two years after the Toch-Schulte study, R. L. Gregory and J. G.
Wallace published a monograph reporting their findings on experiments
conducted with a man in his mid-fifties who, blind from very early
childhood, had just recovered his sight as a result of successful
corneal grafts to both eyes. They began their examination forty-eight
hours after the completion of the first operation. Among the many
tests administered to the subject shortly after recovery of his
vision were a series of common visual illusions, "about which,"
Gregory and Wallace write, "a great deal is known for normal
observers, even though explanations for many of them are
lacking." *(18) Gregory and Wallace sought the subject's responses to
the Hering illusion (a parallel line distortion), the Zolner illusion
(a parallel line distortion), the Poggendorf illusion (distorted
continuity of a broken line), the Necker Cube (depth illusion), the
Staircase Illusion (depth illusion), the Muller-Lyer illusion (length
estimate illusion), and a perspective size illusion. ş€stan129.cifş€[See Figures
1-6.]ş€stan130.cifş€ Despite good visual acuity at the time these tests were
administered, the subject repeatedly failed to be "deceived" by the
illusions. He had not yet learned to be deceived.
  More recently still, anthropologist Roy G. D'Andrade administered
the Kohs Block Test to a group of Hausa children in Northern Nigeria.
The Kohs test, in which children are asked to arrange a group of
multicolored blocks according to various drawings of identical blocks
arranged in patterns, is part of a well-known I.Q. battery and has
been widely praised because its nonverbal approach is supposedly
culture-free. Previous investigators had found Hausa children to be
very poor performers on this test and generally regarded the
children's failure as evidence of poor analytic skills.
  D'Andrade discovered that the Hausa did indeed have great
difficulty in copying the arrangements depicted, and further found
that no matter how he adjusted the test, there was very little change
in results. Finding himself at an impasse, he tried having the
children copy the pattern of another actual set of blocks rather than
the more convenient pre-drawn pictorial representations. The
children's performance ratings jumped dramatically. D'Andrade then
replicated this sequence successfully with a subsequent group of
children from the Accra area of Ghana. Upon further investigation
D'Andrade determined that representational pictorial or graphic art
is almost totally foreign to most West African cultures, and he
suggested the following explanation for the discrepancy in test
scores derived from the different methods of examination:
-
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 40}
  [West African] individuals are not only unaccustomed to the highly
developed conventions of European art, such as the use of
perspective, but more basically they appear to be unaccustomed to the
use of line and color on flat surfaces as a means of representation.
Designs appear to be created and appreciated not as symbols of
something else, but as things in themselves. Thus it seems most
probable that it is not a deficit in intelligence which makes for
poor performance on the Kohs block test, but instead a lack of
experience with one special method by which reality can be
symbolized. The use of lines and colors on paper are such a common
technique for the construction of reality for Europeans that they
often believe pictures, maps, and graphs are a universal language,
immediately understandable in any culture. When this turns out to be
false, the first reaction seems to be to downgrade the intelligence
of those who are unfamiliar with graphic representation rather than
to become aware of the fact that pictures are a special way of
constructing reality. *(19)
-
  It would not be difficult to fill pages with similar examples of
recent studies testifying to the influence of learning or motivation
on perception. *(20) Instances of this phenomenon, described by John
R. Platt as "the transactional relation of an organism to its
environment," clearly "illustrate the idea that everything we meet-
or more objectively, everything a decision-network meets- whether a
human being, a stray cat, a flower, or a rock, is the other side of a
feedback loop of our learning and storage system, is in some sense
our cousin under creation." Thus, "the perception of an object by an
organism or by this kind of decision-system involves dynamic
participation by the organism.... To apply Martin Buber's language to
this kind of objective situation, the organism cannot detect an 'it'
but only an 'I-it.'" *(21) Or, as Stephen C. Pepper has argued, there
are "two essential elements in the perceptual act- a dynamic act of
anticipatory references and a pattern of sensory materials stimulated
by an environmental object as their source." As a result of this
dualism, although at any given moment a multitude of light rays may
be impinging on the retinas of a man's eyes, "only those which have a
relevancy to his interest . . . [or, one might add, his
experience-molded anticipation potential] yield perceptual
material." *(22) In plain language this can be seen in the everyday
phenomenon of someone sleeping or reading or otherwise functioning
without disturbance despite the presence of certain noises to which
he or she is accustomed, but then responding alertly to another noise
that, though not "objectively" different from the rest, has specific
significance to that individual. This dynamic screening principle
also helps account for the reverse phenomenon of finding imagined
patterns of meaning in sensory materials that otherwise appear to be
randomly formed: the children's game of perceiving animal shapes in
clouds is one simple example; a better one, discussed earlier, is the
spurious "discovery" by some of Freud's followers of the image of a
vulture in Leonardo's Anna Metterza. In these, as in all such cases,
the unique perception of significance has attained the quality of
significance for that individual only through a process of learning,
experience, or expectation.
  To return to Toch and Schulte's psychology students: they had
simply not learned to see in the same way as the police
administration students, and they therefore saw different images of
the same objective phenomena. Gregory and Wallace's newly sighted
subject did not yet have enough visual knowledge of his environment
to be able to be deceived by optical illusions in the same way as
"normal" observers. And in the case of D'Andrade's West African
children, they were unfamiliar with a form of abstract representation
that most Westerners have come to regard as reflecting reality and so
were unable to recognize that a two-dimensional picture was the "same
thing" as the three-dimensional patterns they were creating. To sum
up in psychological shorthand, there is no such thing as "immaculate
perception."
  Abstract and at first glance seemingly removed from the problems of
psychohistory, the implications of these experiments for the
psychohistorian are in fact acute. For if an individual in the past
did not even perceive a person, event, or other seemingly "objective"
phenomenon in the same way as does the modern historian, it would
clearly be a mistake to apply retrospectively contemporary
psychoanalytic or any other highly structured explanatory concepts of
motivation to the historical figure's behavior.
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 45}
  But thus far we have only seen how environment and experience can
affect individual perception. If we are to avoid the trap of
solipsism and make methodologically creative use of this material, we
must be able to expand the data to some levels of generalization.
There must be shown to exist intra-cultural regularities, such as
those suggested by D'Andrade- that is, some viable bases for certain
generalizations (or covering laws) within cultures- however narrowly
conceived the initial evidence for such generalizations may be. *(23)
The first  large-scale work on this problem was begun two decades ago
by a team of psychologists and anthropologists at Northwestern
University.
  In the Preface to their study, The Influence of Culture on Visual
Perception, Marshall H. Segall and Donald T. Campbell offered the
background rationale for initiating their work:
-
  A running debate at Northwestern University between Melville
Herskovits and Donald Campbell, in which the former stressed that
cultural differences might well be of sufficient magnitude to
influence perceptual tendencies and the latter argued that the
biological homogeneity of culture-learning man would preclude such
influence, led to the decision, in 1956, to go into the field with
the appropriate psychological instruments and techniques and attack
the problem empirically. *(24)
-
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 50}
  The result of their study was an extensive report, covering their
own research and the historical background of the subject. Of
principal concern to us, however, is what Segall, Campbell, and
Herskovits called their "carpentered-world hypothesis":
-
  Western societies provide environments replete with rectangular
objects; these objects, when projected on the retina, are represented
by nonrectangular images. For the people living in carpentered
worlds, the tendency to interpret obtuse and acute angles in retinal
images as deriving from rectangular objects is likely to be so
pervasively reinforced that it becomes automatic and unconscious
relatively early in life. For those living where man-made structures
are a small portion of the visual environment and where such
structures are constructed without benefit of carpenters' tools (saw,
plane, straight edge, tape measure, carpenter's square, spirit level,
plumb bob, chalk line, surveyor's sight, etc.), straight lines and
precise right angles are a rarity. As a result, the inference habit
of interpreting acute and obtuse angles as right angles extended in
space would not be learned, at least not as well. *(25)
-
  Since, in general, "European and American city dwellers have a much
higher percentage of rectangularity in their environments than any
residents of non-Europeanized cultures," Segall, Campbell, and
Herskovits predicted "that people who live in non-Western
environments would be less susceptible than Western peoples to the
illusions typically noted with these figures [the Sander
parallelogram and Muller-Lyer diagrams and a perspective drawing
illusion]." *(26) ş€stan136.cifş€[See Figures 5, 7 and 8.] The tendency of people
living in "carpentered" environments to interpret two-dimensional
forms as representations of three-dimensional objects should, they
reasoned, make them particularly susceptible to such illusions. On
the other hand, since horizontal-vertical illusions would then have
"more ecological validity for peoples living mostly outdoors in open,
spacious environments, it is predicted that such peoples will be more
susceptible than Western peoples in urban environments" to that sort
of illusion. *(27)
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 55}
  The research team established seventeen different cultural groups
for testing, from residents of the Ankole District of Uganda to those
of Evanston, Illinois- a total of nearly 2,000 respondents. Each
respondent was tested for his or her reactions to fifty drawings
representing five basic geometric illusions. Extensive, careful
analysis of the procedures and received data take up well over one
hundred pages in the published report, but in short, the considerable
support found for both of the hypotheses described above led the
authors to conclude:
-
  Perception is an aspect of human behavior, and as such it is
subject to many of the same influences that shape other aspects of
behavior. In particular, each individual's experiences combine in a
complex fashion to determine his reaction to a given stimulus
situation. To the extent that certain classes of experiences are more
likely to occur in some cultures than in others, differences in
behavior across cultures, including differences in perceptual
tendencies, can be great enough even to surpass the ever-present
individual differences within cultural groupings.
  . . . The findings we have reported, and the findings of others we
have reviewed, point to the conclusion that to a substantial extent
we learn to perceive; that in spite of the phenomenally absolute
character of our perceptions, they are determined by perceptual
inference habits; and that various inference habits are
differentially likely in different societies. For all mankind, the
basic process of perception is the same; only the contents differ and
these differ only because they reflect different perceptual inference
habits. *(28)
-
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 60}
  The significance for the historian of the foregoing quotation
should be fairly readily apparent. In terms of visual perception, a
keystone of motivation and action, people are not "the same" in all
places at all times. The structure of their environments and the
values and standards of the cultures and subcultures of which they
are a part have a powerfully coercive influence on the apparent
nature of the very objects that they see. As George S. Klein has put
it, "perception is an adaptive cognitive act, always rooted in the
intentional life of the person, in his motives and aims vis-a-vis
the environment." *(29) Further, studies and conclusions similar to
those cited above formed much of the basis for Thomas S. Kuhn's
chapter on world-view in his now almost classic study, The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions: "Surveying the rich experimental
literature from which these examples are drawn," he writes, "makes
one suspect that something like a paradigm [the shared assumptions of
a given community] is prerequisite to perception itself." *(30) As
paradigms change, then so must perception.
  Thus far, this argument has emphasized the one-directional effects
of environmental and cultural learning on perception. Critical to an
understanding of the importance of these effects is the reverse of
this phenomenon: the effect of perception on learning and motivation.
Because of its seeming obviousness, *(31) the effect of perception on
learning and motivation has received little recent study. *(32) As
George Klein has pointed out, however: "in a context of action,
perception is both a condition for changing behavior (a 'stimulus')
and a response. We act in terms of the meaning and quality of a
percept. It is tied up with intention and with consequences in
action, producing a change in one's relations in the
environment." *(33) The effects of this interactional influence
between perception and action, while endlessly individuated on one
level, are not necessarily always so random. Not only is this
superficially obvious- people within specified cultural contexts do
perceive objects, symbols, and other people in at least functionally
similar ways (otherwise communication would be impossible)- but it is
empirically verified in the evidence of intracultural regularity
found in the work of D'Andrade and of Segall, Campbell, and
Herskovits, and others. The objection of solipsism, in other words,
is not tenable in this case any more than it is in the mind-body
controversy discussed in a previous chapter. *(34)
-
  The work just discussed has been concerned only with object
perception. Studies of this sort are easiest to design, analyze, and
replicate with a body of well-anchored controls, and they are of
primary importance because they show beyond doubt that perception is
a dynamic process that mutually influences and is influenced by the
perceiver's environment, knowledge, and attitudes. Further, these
studies indicate that although the quality of a percept can in theory
be unique to a single individual, in fact there are most often broad
similarities in terms of object perception within cultures and social
groups at the same time that there are often great dissimilarities
among different cultures and social groups.
  It must be acknowledged here that, in order to conduct this sort of
analysis with requisite scientific care and rigor, the specific
questions asked have of course had to be drastically narrowed from
those posed by Levy-Bruhl and others early in this century. Thus,
grand conjectures as to whether or not pre-industrial peoples "think"
like us have been translated into studies of whether or not people in
different cultures respond similarly to optical illusions, or whether
or not children in different environments will make similar judgments
regarding quantity when substances are presented in differently
shaped containers. Slowly but surely the questions being asked are
growing in complexity and overall significance. But even at present
these studies in psychological anthropology have shown, and continue
to show, that in the most fundamentally cognitive ways people in
different cultures often do dramatically differ from one another. The
revolutionary importance of this for students of human behavior
should not be overlooked: despite all the questions that remain to
be explored we now have clear scientific support for the idea that in
the conduct of research on human subjects culturally removed from us
we can no longer assume what the social philosopher Alfred Schutz
termed a "reciprocity of perspectives" regarding the researcher's
and the researcher's subjects' basic views of the world. *(35) On the
other hand, and of equal importance, because certain intracultural
generalizations can be made, we are not necessarily trapped by a
self-defeating radical scepticism about any knowledge of others.
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 65}
  In viewing the world, however, people perceive more than inanimate
objects. They also perceive other people and other people's apparent
emotions and attitudes- and they perceive the various forces and
unstructured elements in the world and universe about themselves,
giving structure to those elements and responding to that created
structure in the process. Thus, objects of perception are social and
cosmological as well as physical. They include concepts of time and
space, order and disorder, truth and falsehood, good and evil,
practicality and impracticality, pleasure and displeasure, cause and
effect, autonomy and dependence, harmony and conflict, justice and
injustice, reality and unreality (and, of course, confinement and
freedom, cleanliness and uncleanliness)- to name but a few of the
countless cognitive assumptions, simultaneously derived from and
created by perception, that people in all times and places have
always brought with them to the unexamined, down-to-earth humdrum of
everyday life.
  Despite individual variances, and without arguing for a naive
tabula rasa model of human growth, it is clear that people are born
into and cognitively formed by very general belief systems in the
same way that they are born into and formed by language systems. As
Clifford Geertz has observed: "Just as no man has to invent a
language in order to speak, so no man has to invent a religion in
order to worship." *(36) It could readily be added that one does not
have to invent a time framework, an ethical system, or a life-cycle
model in order to effectively function as a social being. On the
contrary, a framework for effective functioning is provided by the
cultural definitions of reality each individual inherits and absorbs
as he or she moves into and through life in a particular cultural
milieu. But, it is the conclusion of a wealth of studies throughout
several decades of research in anthropology and cross-cultural
psychology that- as with object perceptions- cognitive assumptions of
this sort vary dramatically from culture to culture. *(37)
  Probably the most striking and well-known example of this sort of
phenomenon was provided by Walter B. Cannon almost thirty years ago
when he published his pioneering and now classic essay, "'Voodoo'
Death." *(38) In that work, which Claude Levi-Strauss was to use as
the initial insight in his later arguments concerning the cognitive
power of magic and religion, *(39) Cannon showed how physiological
responses up to and including death could result from "a particularly
intense activity of the sympathetic nervous system" in response to
the perceived reality of spiritual threat within a specified cultural
context that defines such threats as real. Other examples of the
sharp cognitive differences that are found among cultures range from
the seemingly impossible open-sea navigational skills of Trukese
canoeists, to the elaborate taxonomies known among indigenous
Philippine and American peoples of seemingly (to others) indistinct
plant, reptile, and weather categories; from the extreme respect for
individual autonomy from earliest infancy among the Sikhs in British
Columbia and the Wintu of California, to the very great insistence
upon interdependence and collectivity among the Wolof of Senegal;
from the constricted time frame of certain Melanesian and African
peoples, to the linear "envelope" of time of Judaic-Christian
tradition; from the phenomenon of machismo in certain Latin cultures,
to that of paralyzing social "stage fright" in Bali; from the idea
among the Navaho that certain kinds of insanity are caused by moths
in one's head, to the idea among some European-Americans that certain
kinds of insanity are the result of a battle among a trinity of
mystical forces in the mind that are called id, ego, and
superego. *(40)
  A list of this sort could, of course, go on and on. To find
fascination in differences of this nature is a common pastime among
undergraduate students of anthropology. But it is not commonly
recognized that similar lists can be drawn up regarding peoples
separated from us by time rather than by space. Temporal distance, I
am suggesting, can be at least as profoundly influential in this
regard as spatial distance; that is, the subjects of historical
inquiry differ from those of anthropological inquiry only in the
specific manner of their differentness and in the relative scantiness
and obscurity of evidence to study. While we will probably never know
(nor may we care) how uniquely a thirteenth-century burgher, a
medieval Samurai, or a seventeenth-century Quaker housewife would
have interpreted the Muller-Lyer illusion, we can know and should care
about the vast differences in general perceptual and cognitive
assumptions prevailing in the various worlds of the past. And the
best of historians have recognized this for a very long time.
  A sense of that differentness infuses the pages of Huizinga's great
work, The Waning of the Middle Ages. It is dealt with directly in
Aries's complex studies of childhood, family, and death. The world of
perception has been treated with insight by D. W. Robertson, William
J. Brandt, and, with special sensitivity, Carolly Erickson. Dramatic
shifts in the Western sense of space depth and shape have been
described by Thomas Kuhn and Alexandre Koyre. The richness of
differences in material life has been discussed at length by Braudel.
The gulf separating early medieval and later concepts of
individuality and collectivity has been examined by Colin Morris.
Radically different concepts of time and the shape of history in
Western thought have been studied by Peter Burke. Abrupt and deep
shifts in modes of discourse concerning madness, criminality,
sickness, sex, and other subjects have been analyzed by Foucault. The
deep importance of magic in history has been discussed by Keith
Thomas. Dramatic changes in sexual and marital patterns have been
demonstrated by Lawrence Stone. A brief but important view of
infanticide in history has been given us by Maria W. Piers. The
impact of evolving "manners" and long-term changes in personal affect
and control structures has been described by Norbert Elias. *(41)
These are only a few recent examples from the study of European
history since the Middle Ages, but the certain implication in the
substance of all this work is that, in the words of the Dutch
psychoanalyst J. H. van den Berg, "earlier generations lived a
different sort of life . . . [and] were essentially different from
us. *(42)
                                                        {CH_5 ^paragraph 70}
  For some reason- probably because the act of writing history
provides and imposes upon its data a false sense of identifiable,
unfolding tradition, whereas anthropology involves abrupt discovery
and the shock of anachronism- historians have yet to fully confront
the revolutionary importance of much of the work they have themselves
done during the past few decades. It was not so very long ago that a
similar state of affairs existed in anthropology. But the compelling
quality of fundamental human difference among so-called primitive
peoples that was the anthropologist's stock-in-trade- and the further
perceived differences between those peoples and themselves- could not
long be ignored. Doubtless this also accounts for the fact that the
earliest and most complete discussions to date among historians of
such essential differences are to be found among medievalists. Just
as anthropology, however, rapidly moved from analysis of the most
distant and seemingly bizarre cultural settings to others closer to
home, so are historians now beginning to see that they need not look
so far back in time as the Middle Ages to find evidence of dramatic
cognitive differences between themselves and their historical
subjects.
  It thus seems clear that even if psychoanalytic theory were an
effective technique for understanding the world of the present, it
would be a hopeless exercise in intellectual myopia to apply it to
the past. As is true with anthropologists- who have the dual benefits
of a head start in research of this sort and the luxury of
communities of living subjects to question- historians have before
them the task of more carefully structuring their conceptual
arguments, in a sense, from the inside out to conform with the
recognition that they do not share a reciprocity of cognitive
perspectives with their subjects. *(43) Nevertheless, at the very
least, the substantive richness of the best recent work in history
inevitably supports the minimal conclusion that any elaborate
culture-bound theory of behavioral explanation (even one, unlike
psychoanalysis, of logical soundness and empirical validity) is
destined to a large measure of failure in attempting to analyze the
various worlds of the past.
  What is ironic about this fact is that, while numerous historians
(who, of all people, should be sensitive to such matters) have of
late been indiscriminately ripping their subjects of inquiry out of
historical context and analyzing them through the borrowed lenses of
psychoanalytic hypothesis, a number of prominent psychoanalysts have
themselves spoken out on the necessary failure of such an enterprise.
  Over twenty years ago Heinz Kohut (at present a fashionable figure
among the more avant-garde psychohistorians) warned his colleagues of
the dangers inherent in psychoanalytic explanations that failed to
first, through introspection and empathy, take careful account of
the problem of anachronism. Of course, Kohut assumed that once this
imaginative leap was performed (an operation not unlike that
advocated by R. G. Collingwood two decades earlier) psychoanalysis
was still a viable tool. More recently, however, Edgar A. Levenson,
Director of Clinical Services and Training and Supervising Analyst at
the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis,
and Psychology, went still further. In an expansion of remarks made
to a twenty-fifth anniversary gathering of Institute Fellows, he
argued that the failure of his colleagues to recognize "the ephemeral
time-bound nature" of the psychoanalytic enterprise was responsible
for the great "disarray in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis"
that currently exists- not the least of which involves the "entirely
gratuitous operation" of "reanalyzing the patients of the past."
Then, drawing explicitly on the historical work of Thomas Kuhn,
Philippe Aries, and others, he pointed to the "pervasive nonsense"
of those (Erikson is mentioned specifically) who insist on applying
contemporary psychoanalytic models to noncontemporary subjects. With
particular reference to Aries' findings concerning the
conventionality of adult-child sexual play in certain cultures
Levenson went on: "The assumption that a sexually diddled Moslem boy,
a Japanese child sharing his parents' sleeping quarters or a
Victorian fourteen-year-old girl being seduced by a mature man [a
reference to Freud's famous "Dora"] would all have reactions we, in
our era, can predict or empathize with is an egregious error, a
magnificent arrogance of time and place." Put simply, in less
flamboyant language: "a contemporary psychoanalyst attempting to
extrapolate his own experience to another period would be in
error." *(44) Would that historians might learn from this leading
psychoanalyst what he has learned from them.

INTRO_TO_CH_6
-
     "If often he was wrong and at times absurd,
          To us he is no more a person
          Now but a whole climate of opinion . . . "
-
                                                 -W. H. Auden,
                                   "In Memory of Sigmund Freud"

{CH_6
                                6
                  The Failure of Psychohistory
-
  It is time now to do some stock taking and to consider the general
consequences (and some possible objections to them) of what we have
observed in the preceding pages.
  We have seen that, from the earliest endeavors to write
psychohistory to those of the present, individual writings of
would-be psychohistorians have consistently been characterized by a
cavalier attitude toward fact, a contorted attitude toward logic, an
irresponsible attitude toward theory validation, and a myopic
attitude toward cultural difference and anachronism. Some will object
that, though this may be so, psychohistory is still a youthful genre
and one cannot satisfactorily dismiss a method of analysis merely by
pointing out flaws in the work of individual practitioners. Although
repeated failures of this sort should at least suggest cause for
reflection, we have accepted this objection as having a certain
validity. Thus, we proceeded to examine psychoanalytic theory itself-
the theoretical underpinning of psychohistory- to see how well it
dealt with these same problems.
  We have seen that psychoanalysis is unable to provide acceptable
evidence to indicate that it is more successful as a therapeutic
device than any other form of recognized therapy. Further, it is an
open question whether psychoanalysis is even any more therapeutically
successful than simple informal palliative techniques of providing
general comfort and personal encouragement. It may be objected that
this is not in itself a sufficient measure of theoretical validity,
since there are phenomena in other fields (medicine for one,
economics for another) that can be rather well explained by theory,
but that cannot- at least yet- be much altered or manipulated by
formal intervention. This is true. However, when there are a variety
of competing explanatory theories in force, all of which are equally
successful (or unsuccessful) in effecting change in the phenomena in
question, at the very least we have no grounds for accepting the
explanatory scheme of any one over the others. To the extent, then,
that therapeutic efficacy is a valid criterion for evaluating the
truth claims of a generically therapeutic technique that subsequently
evolved into a system designed to explain human thought and behavior-
and, if not sufficient unto itself, such a criterion is certainly not
wholly irrelevant- it must be concluded that psychoanalytic theory
holds no place of positive distinction among its competitors, many of
which take directly contradictory theoretical stances. If,
nevertheless, we are willing to admit that lack of therapeutic
distinction is of itself insufficient ground for dismissing
psychoanalytic theory, we are led to press matters further: to
examine the logical structure of that theory.
  We have seen that psychoanalytic theory is riddled with crippling
logical inadequacies. Among the fallacies discussed- any one of which
may be sufficient to cause the logical collapse of the system- was
its willful effort to resist disconfirmation by claiming that any
eventuality is covered and can be explained by the presence or
absence of the so-called defense mechanisms of reaction-formation,
displacement, sublimation, and the like. Although this apparent
ability to explain everything has no doubt contributed to the popular
appeal of psychoanalysis (as it has with astrology), it flatly
disqualifies psychoanalytic theory from any consideration as a theory
of scientific or even logically respectable explanation. Still, it
can be argued, it is not impossible that psychoanalytic theory may
lead to the occasional discovery of a psychological fact. Just as
there is anecdotal evidence of therapeutic efficacy (as there is for
all therapies) which is totally independent of theory invalidation,
so too can there be anecdotal support for phenomena identification
which is totally independent of logical failure. This is true, as it
is for theories of character explanation based on physiognomy,
climate, race, sex, physique, or any of a large number of things,
including the date and time of one's birth. For example, it is
possible that an apparently significant number of people who are
weaned early, or who have large noses, or who live in the tropics-
and so on- may appear to be characterologically marked in some way.
It is also true that an observation of such apparent fact may derive
from the application of a theory that is blatantly nonsensical. While
it is essential to recognize that such an observation would not save
the theory from rejection, it does deserve some attention and
testing- first to see if the claimed discovery is true, and second
(if it does appear to be true) to see if it is true because of the
claimed causal sequence. *(1) Assuming for the sake of argument that
early-weaned individuals can be shown to manifest certain character
traits, can it be shown that early weaning is the cause of these
traits, as hypothesized, rather than merely another symptom of
something else (in this case, perhaps, a generally rejecting maternal
attitude)? This was the subject we explored next.
                                                         {CH_6 ^paragraph 5}
  We have seen that the psychological facts allegedly discovered as a
result of the employment of psychoanalytic theory are drastically few
in number and even then are not beyond serious dispute; for the most
part they are trivial; and further, no good evidence exists to
establish the validity of psychoanalytically posited causality. To
take one example that was discussed, there is some indication (though
it remains challenged by many experimental psychologists) that the
character traits of frugality, obstinacy, and orderliness tend to
cluster in individual personalities. Without evidence to support the
psychoanalyst's contention that these traits derive from childhood
experience, however, this observation is of negligible psychological
value- and no such evidence exists. Indeed, quite apart from the
matter of specific psychoanalytic hypotheses, the best modern
research now firmly indicates that there are no psychological
structures established in early childhood that are sufficiently
resilient to survive into adulthood without constant environmental
support. Moreover, this quality of psychological malleability clearly
remains present after adulthood is attained. *(2) The objections of
the analyst to all this are predictable: the theory is so subtle and
complex, it is said, that we are not sufficiently advanced in science
to adequately test it; or, we have misunderstood the psychoanalytic
method, it is claimed: what matters to the individual is not what
happened in early childhood, but what, lost in his or her
unconscious, the individual unknowingly thinks happened- an approach
that not only moves psychoanalytic theory to the realm of the
mystical, but that also makes methodologically impossible its
transfer to the analysis of historical data. In any case, it is this
sort of response, added to everything else reviewed here, that has
led many of the normally most even-tempered of scientists to
conclude, with P. B. Medawar, that "psychoanalytic theory is the most
stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and
a terminal product as well- something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin
in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design
and with no posterity." *(3)
  Psychoanalytic theory may well be that. It probably is that. But
even if we were to accept the psychoanalyst's dissembling
explanations for the failure to scientifically confirm psychoanalytic
theory, what would we be left with? We would be left with a fanciful
collection of patently illogical and as yet unverified notions that
are not even especially effective when put to their primary use,
which is therapy. That any historian would use this sort of thing as
a system to guide him in explaining the past seems incredible. Still,
in the preceding pages we took matters yet one step further and found
that even if psychoanalytic theory were logical, confirmed, and
therapeutically effective in the present there is little chance that
it would be a useful explanatory tool when applied to the past.
  Psychohistory, in a word, is ahistorical. That is its ultimate
failing. Perhaps the single most important achievement of modern
historical thinking has been the growing recognition on the part of
the historian that life in the past was marked by a fundamental
social and cognitive differentness from that prevailing in our own
time. Although the detailed exploration of those differences
(concepts of time, space, causation, reality, personhood, sexuality,
and the like) has only very recently begun, the recognition of such
differences is an accomplishment comparable to the similar revolution
in anthropology of half a century ago. It is, therefore, particularly
ironical that the fashion of explaining the past by simplistically
applying to it an illogical and ineffective collection of
narcissistically contemporary notions should reach such heights just
when the best work of an important generation of historians has begun
to show how sadly anachronistic any such present-biased explanation
system must be. Indeed, it is an irony of especial pungency when it
is recognized that the labors of one particularly zealous group of
psychohistorians- those associated with the Journal of Psychohistory-
have resulted in a small mountain of data that undermines their own
interests. In their missionary determination to find evidence that
"the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have just
begun to awaken," these writers have unearthed a substantial body of
material on subjects ranging from infanticide to child rearing that
is itself (even considering their frequent distortions and
exaggerations) striking testimony to the discontinous nature of
historical experience and the utter irrelevance of modern
psychoanalysis in attempting to understand that experience.
-
  The ideas of psychoanalysis have become, as Lionel Trilling once
remarked, "the slang of our culture." *(4) While this doubtless helps
account for the uncritical public acceptance of much recent
psychohistory, it should also serve to suggest to us something else:
slang, after all, is that most ephemeral and transitory of
vocabularies. History is a very old discipline. It has endured much,
including ever waxing and waning exhortations to embark on "new
approaches," "scientific analyses," and "next assignments." To
subsequent generations such endeavors as often as not appear
ludicrous- as eventually, no doubt, will most of the artifacts of the
current vogue of history-as-applied-psychoanalysis. But as artifacts
those writings will not be without interest, for they will someday be
testimony to a time when people attempted once more to codify aspects
of what had become the commonsense realities of their brief
historical instant and to use that codification to explain not only
their lives but those of all others who had gone before them.
                                                        {CH_6 ^paragraph 10}
  It should not be asking too much to suggest that historians might
have a sense of history. Every historical epoch has its own rarely
examined, taken-for-granted climate of opinion on matters pertaining
to the past as well as the present. We live in a time perhaps more
intellectually restless than most, and those who are restless
sometimes seek quietude in one form or another of historical
determinism- as they always have.
  The seventeenth century was another time of intellectual
restlessness. In that it was an era of enormous scientific
achievement and tumultuous social upheaval, it was an era not
entirely incomparable to our own. It was also an era that found the
lure of historical determinism irresistible, though of course it was
a form of determinism appropriate to the moment. Just as the modern
psychohistorian may turn to Grinstein's Psychoanalytic Index for the
ever-available keys to unlock the mysteries of his or her craft, so
the writer of the seventeenth century turned to his own guidebook to
the past and the present. He called it Scripture, and it, too,
answered every question. The universe, to the historian of the
seventeenth century, was in an ongoing state of decay, spiraling ever
downward from an original divinely created state of perfection. With
this sense of revealed truth firmly in mind, there was no human
question that lay beyond the realm of answer. Indeed, so firmly
rooted in its own cultural element was this infallible and
irrefutable explanation system, that those who attempted to dislodge
it encountered the same sort of imbedded dogmatism as have those who
in recent years have raised questions about psychohistory and the
psychoanalytic climate of opinion. Thus, George Hakewill wrote in
1627, "the opinion of the world's decay is so generally received, not
only among the vulgar, but of the learned, both divines and others,
that the very commonness of it makes it current with many, without
any further examination." *(5)
  But, of course, even "the very commonness" of that universal
explanatory scheme gave way in time to the demand for evidence-
evidence exogenous to its own hermetically sealed and endlessly
self-proving logical framework. Despite its own successful
insinuation into the popular discourse of our time (as C. P. Snow
once observed, " a predilection for Freudian analysis has become as
much an American preserve as high-school basketball or Thanksgiving
dinner") psychoanalytic theory has now begun to succumb to the same
fate. *(6)
  For some time psychoanalytic theory has been under attack from what
has appeared to be opposite directions: some have found fault with
what they regard as its repellant "mechanization" of mind, while
others have stressed its scientific nonvalidity. In fact, these are
not uncomplimentary accusations: it is, as we have seen, both
unrealistically mechanistic and helplessly unscientific. There should
thus be little cause for wonder when it is pointed out that, among
its varied progeny, the stripling calling itself "psychohistory" has
little chance for survival.
  It could not be otherwise. For, like the religion-based idea of the
world's decay, psychoanalytic theory, in any and all of its guises,
is an illusion- ironically enough, in the Freudian sense of that
word. An illusion, observed Freud, is not necessarily always in
contradiction to reality (thus it is different from a delusion,
though often bordering on it), but is most clearly marked by an
element of wish-fulfillment. Though "insusceptible of proof," Freud
wrote, and often "so improbable, so incompatible with everything we
have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world, that we
may compare them- if we pay proper regard to the psychological
differences- to delusions," illusions are clung to by many because
they provide ready answers to an entire range of otherwise unbearably
unanswerable questions. Indeed, Freud observed, "in other matters no
sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with
such feeble grounds for his opinions" as one does when one is faced
with matters of such great personal importance, matters in which one
has invested so much. Freud was, of course, here speaking of
religion. The same sort of resistance, however, in the name of which
"people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and
intellectual misdemeanor," is now encountered everywhere in the
wish-fulfilling writings of the embattled defenders of psychoanalytic
theory and psychohistory. *(7)
                                                        {CH_6 ^paragraph 15}
  It is part of the very nature of scholarly endeavor, in the
humanities as well as the sciences, to evolve new understanding of
phenomena by maintaining a vibrant tension between the processes of
hypothesis and critique. On occasion, however, hypothesizing can
become so shoddy, extravagant, and woolly-minded that the essential
tension between creativity and responsibility is broken- and the
possibility of genuine new understanding disappears. What emerges
instead, floating free of the restraints of logical and empirical
rigor, are quirky, dogmatic, often oracular, and wholly unverified-
indeed, illusory- pronouncements. In the sciences, prominent and
relatively recent examples of such pronouncements range from Immanuel
Velikovsky's attempted validation of the mythologically-described
events of various cultures by imagining the existence of certain
catastrophes in the solar system to Erich von Daniken's effort to
explain certain archaeological puzzles by relying on the fantasied
existence of a race of ancient astronauts. *(8) In the humanities the
best recent examples of such excess belong to the world of
psychohistory.
  Perhaps, however, future historians will see in psychohistory's
small legacy something of value- something in content certainly of
less historical significance, but in form not unlike the legacy of
the pseudosciences of the nineteenth century. Phrenology, animal
magnetism, Mesmerism and the like may have properly seemed "coarse
and odious to scientific men," Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed, but
there was at least associated with them and their times "a breath of
new air, much vague expectation, a consciousness of power not yet
finding its determinate aim." *(9) Among psychohistorians, only Erik
Erikson has produced work that, despite its evident limitations,
might be deserving of such praise- and Erikson, not coincidentally,
has of late publicly tried to disassociate his work from that of
other practitioners of the craft. *(10) Still, for all its manifold
failings (to say nothing of its "coarseness and odiousness"),
psychohistory has somewhat jarred the profession of history. It has
forced that profession to look a bit more carefully at its standards
and purposes, and it has insisted that deeper analyses of traditional
historical data are both possible and necessary. While it is now
obvious that such analyses cannot successfully be conducted by
psychoanalytic techniques, by forcing an array of unorthodox modes of
inquiry into the ongoing text of historical discourse the
psychohistorian may have helped facilitate an awakening of sorts in
the historical imagination- an awakening marked by a willingness to
ask different questions.
  It has been most common among historians in general to resist
psychohistorical explanation by vaguely and tentatively asserting
that the specific behavioral explanatory models of one era cannot
appropriately be transferred to another. All the available evidence
now indicates that, at the very least, there is no need for timidity
in making this claim. But perhaps the very challenge of
psychoanalytic explanation will in time be seen to have inspired,
admittedly by way of protest, a general sensitivity among historians
to the need for building temporally bound explanation schemes from
the inside out- that is, for initiating analysis from within the
cultural confines of the common sense world being studied, rather
than imposing on that world highly structured, abstract, empirically
unverified, present-biased systems that are inherently distorting.
  It must now be stated plainly, however, that if this much can be
said for the value of psychohistory, it is all that can be said.
Traditional criticisms concerning vulgarity, reductionism,
trivialization, and the like all remain valid observations on the
psychohistorical enterprise. But the most important and fundamental
reason for the rejection of that enterprise is now clear:
psychohistory does not work and cannot work. The time has come to
face the fact that, behind all its rhetorical posturing, the
psychoanalytic approach to history is- irremediably- one of logical
perversity, scientific unsoundness, and cultural naivete. The time
has come, in short, to move on.

                              THE END


{NOTES TO SHRINKING HISTORY
                      Notes to the Preface
-
  *(1) Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology [orig. pub. 1958]
(New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 18-19.
  *(2) William L. Langer, "The Next Assignment," American Historical
Review, 63 (1958): 283-304.
  *(3) H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York:
Harper, 1964), p. 65.
  *(4) Fawn M. Brodie, "Who Defends the Abolitionist?" in The
Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, ed. Martin
Doberman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 66.
Brodie is here referring to the work of David Donald, a man who, she
says, wields "a deft scalpel" and "lays bare certain signs of
impotence and latent homosexuality in his hero with such subtlety
that the reader is scarcely aware that he is witnessing a surgical
operation."
  *(5) These journals- and they should not be confused- are The
Journal of Psychohistory (formerly The History of Childhood
Quarterly) and The Psychohistory Review. The latter publication is
much the more serious, responsible, intelligent, and self-critical of
the two.
                                            {NOTES TO PREFACE ^paragraph 5}
  *(6) Lloyd de Mause, "The Independence of Psychohistory," in de
Mause, ed., The New Psychohistory (New York: Psychohistory Press,
1975), pp. 22-23.
  *(7) Ibid., pp. 23-24.
  *(8) Ibid., p. 25.
  *(9) See, for example, John Demos's scathing review of Glenn
Davis's Childhood and History in America (a product of de Mause's
psychohistorical cottage industry), which also contains remarks on
de Mause's declaration of independence: The New York Times Book
Review (April 24, 1977), p. 11.
  *(10) See, for instance, Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors:
Psychohistory, Quanto-history, and History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1974); Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The 'New History,'"
Commentary, 59 (January 1975); and Charles Krauthammer, "The
Expanding Shrink," The New Republic (September 22, 1979).
                                            {NOTES TO PREFACE ^paragraph 10}
  *(11) Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, p. 158. This comment and the
one that precedes it should not be taken as a wholesale rejection of
Barzun's fine and eloquent book; on the contrary, I admire his wisdom
and erudition, share most of his views, and have learned much from
him- but I believe our respective works are addressed to different
generations of historians.
  *(12) Sigmund Freud, "An Autobiographical Study," in Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), vol. 20, p. 50.
  *(13) See, for example, David Shakow and David Rapaport's dismissal
of an experimental psychologist's criticism of psychoanalysis in
which they claim that the lack of confirming evidence for the
psychoanalytic hypothesis "stems from the inadequacy of the available
methods for studying the kind of complex relationship he is
surveying." David Shakow and David Rapaport, The Influence of Freud
on American Psychology (New York: International Universities Press,
1964), p. 177.
  *(14) For Freud on this and on his other complaint that
anti-Semitism lay behind his critics' motives, see "The Resistance to
Psycho-analysis," in Standard Edition, ed. Strachey, vol. 19, p. 222;
and "The Question of Lay Analysis," ibid., vol. 20, p. 207.
  *(15) Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis
and History (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 8. See also, along with
remarks intended to distance his work from that of other efforts in
the field, Erikson's reassertion that psychohistory "is the study of
individual and collective life with the combined methods of
psychoanalysis and history." Erik H. Erikson, Dimensions of a New
Identity (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 12-13. In addition, note that
in an ongoing series of bibliographical articles attempting to
explore "Alternatives to Psychoanalytic Psychohistory" (which
identifies not a single published work self-identified as substantive
psychohistory that is not psychoanalytically grounded) William
Gilmore admits that "the majority of psychohistorians accept . . . as
a sensible working definition of psychohistory" an approach guided by
a psychoanalytic method that (here he quotes Bruce Mazlish)
"emphasizes ego and superego as well as id factors, and that pays
special attention to defensive and adaptive mechanisms." "Mainstream
psychohistory," he concludes (meaning everything but the work of de
Mause and associates as well as a vague and ill-defined something
called "the  history of personality") "is decidedly psychoanalytic
psychohistory, however explicit or implicit the theory." The
Psychohistory Review, 7 (1979): 44.
                                            {NOTES TO PREFACE ^paragraph 15}
  *(16) I am excluding with these remarks the work of behaviorists
and experimental psychologists not because their work is not of
potential interest to the historian, but simply because it has been
so infrequently used. This is so even for a figure like Piaget whose
developmental findings might seem of especial interest to historians.
Perhaps historians have been less interested in more
scientifically-based psychological theory because the theorists
themselves have (unlike psychoanalysts) not been much interested in
the applicability of their work to the lives of historical figures-
and perhaps this is so because, as Robert Coles suggests, "a
scientist like Piaget knows full well that the 'variables' that make
up a man's creative life- be it a writer's or a political leader's
or a psychoanlyst's- defy the language and concepts of any particular
psychological theory." See Robert Coles, The Mind's Fate: Ways of
Seeing Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975),
p. 192. The work referred to by Weinstein and Platt includes The Wish
to be Free (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) and
Psychoanalytic Sociology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1973).
  *(17) For some general remarks on this, see Freud's "Introductory
Lectures on Psycho-analysis," Part III, Lecture XXVII, in Standard
Edition, ed. Strachey, vol. 16, pp. 431-37.
  *(18) Freud, "'Wild' Psycho-analysis," in Standard Edition, ed.
Strachey, vol. 11, pp. 219-230. Freud expressed great concern in this
paper that such superficial and uncontrolled uses of psychoanalytic
ideas, without lengthy personal contact with individual patients,
would do serious harm to the cause of psychoanalysis. Then, in that
same year (1910), Freud published his own "wild" analysis of Leonardo
da Vinci.

{NOTES_ON_CH_ONE
                     Notes on Chapter One
-
  *(1) There are several editions of Freud's book on Leonardo. All
references and citations that follow are from the Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by
Alan Tyson and published as a separate volume by W. W. Norton (New
York, 1964).
  *(2) Joseph D. Lichtenberg, "Freud's Leonardo: Psychobiography and
Autobiography of Genius, " Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 26 (1978): 863.
  *(3) The Jung discovery was not published, but it was mentioned by
Freud in a letter to Pfister and is noted along with Pfister's "more
convincing" and published revelation in Ernest Jones, The Life and
Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1955), vol. II, p. 348.
The Stites discovery is reported in his note, "More on Freud's
Leonardo," College Art Journal, 8 (1948): 40. The italics in the
citation from Freud are in the original.
  *(4) Eric Maclagan, "Leonardo in the Consulting Room," Burlington
Magazine, XLII (1923): 54-57.
  *(5) See Jones, Life and Work, vol. II, p. 348; Freud, Leonardo da
Vinci (editor's note), p. 10; K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci:
Psychoanalytic Notes on the Enigma (New York: International
Universities Press, 1961), p. 14; and Lichtenberg, "Freud's
Leonardo."
                                                {NOTES TO CH_1 ^paragraph 5}
  *(6) See Emil Moller, "Der Geburtstag des Lionardo da Vinci,"
Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 60 (1939). Moller shows in
this piece that Leonardo's paternal grandfather recorded his birth
and baptism in the family diary and also named ten godparents, mostly
neighbors of the paternal household, for the infant. At the very
least this suggests that Leonardo was born in his father's home and
was accepted immediately as a member of the household. This
suggestion becomes more compelling when connected with the next
document we have concerning Leonardo, which shows him still to be a
member of his father's household at age five. Freud's contention, on
the contrary, rests on no historical evidence whatsoever.
  *(7) On the matter of castration anxiety and homosexuality the work
most supportive of Freud is reported in L. Bieber et. al,
Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (New York:
Basic Books, 1962). It must be noted, however, that the evidence used
in this study was limited to clinical impressions of patients, not
direct study, and that it lends only metaphorical support to Freud in
concluding that the homosexuals observed may have felt "more
physically vulnerable" when growing up than did heterosexuals- a long
way from castration anxiety, and a finding that, in a homophobic
culture, may indeed be regarded as a simple and accurately perceived
statement of fact. The more important recent studies have found
virtually no support for Freud. See, for example, J. N. DeLuca,
"Performance of Overt Male Homosexuals and Controls on the Blacky
Test," Journal of Clinical Psychology, 23 (1967); and M. Manosevitz,
"Early Sexual Behavior in Adult Homosexual and Heterosexual Males,"
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 76 (1970). On the matter of parental
influence see M. A. Lewis and L. F. Schoenfeldt,
"Developmental-Interest Factors Associated with Homosexuality,"
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 41 (1973); and
especially H. Siegelman, "Parental Background of Male Homosexuals and
Heterosexuals," Archives of Sexual Behavior, 3 (1974).
  *(8) Freud himself acknowledged in a footnote the possibility that
this Caterina was a servant, referring to the fact that this was the
conclusion of at least one of Leonardo's biographers. Nevertheless,
with no evidence to support him, he chose to believe Caterina was
Leonardo's mother. For the first direct criticism of Freud on this
point, see Maclagan, "Leonardo in the Consulting Room." For
Leonardo's other references to Caterina see Edward MacCurdy, ed., The
Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Braziller, 1958), pp. 62,
1129, 1157.
  *(9) Kurt Eissler, in his Leonardo da Vinci, cited above, would
take issue with this matter of irrelevance. To Eissler, Freud can
have it both ways: if this Caterina was Leonardo's mother, Freud's
analysis is correct; however, if she was his servant, Freud's
analysis is still correct since then "we are entitled to assume that
she was selected from among the applicants because of her name, and
that her name, perhaps also her appearance and age, and her function
in the household served to render her a maternal substitute" (p. 92)
There is, of course, no evidence for any of this. But more
importantly, as we shall discuss later at some length, this trick of
using psychoanalytic theory to make any eventuality fit a preordained
thesis- of theoretically rendering that thesis immune to disproof- is
one of the central logical failings of the psychoanalytic method.
  *(10) David Hackett Fischer calls this problem the "fallacy of the
negative proof." It is, as he notes, always worth keeping in mind the
elementary fact that "not knowing that a thing exists is different
from knowing that it does not exist." Historians' Fallacies: Toward a
Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper, 1970), pp. 47-48.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_1 ^paragraph 10}
  *(11) MacCurdy, Notebooks of Leonardo, pp. 13-14.
  *(12) See Meyer Schapiro's typically masterful essay, "Leonardo and
Freud: An Art-Historical Study," Journal of the History of Ideas,
XVII (1956).
  *(13) In the 1923 edition of his book Freud inserted a footnote
acknowledging the earlier dating of the cartoon, but saying nothing
about the smile; rather, in that footnote he pursued other matters
pertaining to the positioning of the two female figures.
  *(14) Schapiro, "Leonardo and Freud," esp. pp. 161-64.
  *(15) Ibid., p. 163.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_1 ^paragraph 15}
  *(16) Many of these parallels are mentioned in Lichtenberg,
"Freud's Leonardo"; other parallels, although not seen as such by the
author, can be found in Jones, Life and Work, esp. vol. II, part 3.
  *(17) George A. Lindbeck, "Erikson's Young Man Luther: A Historical
and Theological Reappraisal," Soundings, 52 (1973): 215.
  *(18) Roland H. Bainton, "Psychiatry and History: An Examination of
Erikson's 'Young Man Luther,'" Religion in Life, 40 (1971); and
Heinrich Bornkamm, "Luther and His Father: Observations on Erik H.
Erikson's Young Man Luther," in Childhood and Selfhood: Essays on
Tradition, Religion, and Modernity in the Psychology of Erik H.
Erikson, ed. Peter Homans (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
1978). In addition, see Lewis W. Spitz, "Psychohistory and History:
The Case of Young Man Luther," Soundings, 52 (1973).
  *(19) It should be noted that of all the variants on Freudian
analysis Klein's is among the lowest in repute, not only among
psychologists in general but among psychoanalysts as well. This is
largely because it makes the most of the least verifiable aspects of
Freud's work (e.g., the death instinct and the insistence that the
superego develops in earliest infancy).
  *(20) See the review by Lewis Perry in History and Theory, XVI
(1977), esp. p. 185. An important lesson in restraint to the
psychohistorian eager to find psychoanalytic grist in medical
histories is provided in Edwin A. Weinstein, "Woodrow Wilson's
Neurological Illness," Journal of American History, 57 (1970).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_1 ^paragraph 20}
  *(21) Rogin at one point applies the work of John Bowlby on
separation anxiety to Jackson- but Bowlby's concern is with maternal
deprivation, whereas Jackson's infancy was marked by the absence of
his father. For this and other pertinent criticisms, see William
Gilmore, "The Individual and the Group in Psychohistory: Rogin's
Fathers and Children and the Problem of Jackson's Health," The
Psychohistory Review, VI (1977-78).
  *(22) Fischer, Historians' Fallacies, p. 109.
  *(23) Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret
Wartime Report (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), p. 186; Robert G. L.
Waite, "Adolf Hitler's Anti-Semitism: A Study in History and
Psychoanalysis," in The Psychoanalytic Interpretation in History,
ed., Benjamin B. Wolman (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 203. Cf.
Waite's more complete treatment, The Psychopathic God, Adolf Hitler
(New York: Basic Books, 1976), and Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the
Germans (New York: Elsevier, 1976), esp. pp. 132-33.
  *(24) Sigmund Freud, "Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical
Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," in Standard
Edition, ed. Strachey, vol. 12, p. 63. Despite its prominence in his
theory of paranoia, Freud never developed very fully his ideas on
projection; see Ernest Jones, Life and Work, vol. II, pp. 270-72.
  *(25) In addition to the studies cited in Chapter 4 on the etiology
of paranoia, see W. D. Wells and R. L. Goldstein, "Sears' Study of
Projection: Replication and Critique," Journal Of Social Psychology,
64 (1964).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_1 ^paragraph 25}
  *(26) See Schapiro. "Leonardo and Freud," p. 175.
  *(27) See the review by Garry Wills, "Uncle Thomas's Cabin," The
New York Review of Books (April 18, 1974), pp. 26-28.

{NOTES_ON_CHAPTER_TWO
                      Notes on Chapter Two
-
  *(1) K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on The
Enigma (New York: International Universities Press, 1961), p. 293;
cf. the same author's Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk
Contra Freud (New York: Quadrangle, 1971), chap. VII.
  *(2) Jose Ortega y Gasset, "In Search of Goethe from Within," in
The Dehumanization of Art (New York: Doubleday, 1948), p. 144;
discussed in Eissler, Leonardo, pp. 290-95.
  *(3) For a discussion of therapists in Ethiopia, Borneo, and
elsewhere (including the example of Digat Anak Kutak) see E. Fuller
Torrey, The Mind Game: Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists (New York:
Emerson Hall, 1972). Torrey is a psychiatrist with the National
Institute of Mental Health.
  *(4) Freud, "New introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (1933),
in Standard Edition, ed. Strachey, vol. 22, p. 152.
  *(5) Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900) in Standard
Edition, ed. Strachey, vol. 5, p. 384.
                                                {NOTES TO CH_2 ^paragraph 5}
  *(6) See, for instance, J. Marmor, "Validation of Psychoanalytic
Techniques," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 3
(1955); and P. F. D. Seitz, "The Consensus Problem in Psychoanalytic
Research," in Methods of Research in Psychotherapy, eds. L. A.
Gottschalk and A. H. Auerbach (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1966).
  *(7) Freud, "An Outline of Psychoanalysis" (1940) in Standard
Edition, ed. Strachey, vol. 23, p. 197; E. Glover, "Research Methods
in Psychoanalysis," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33
(1952): 403.
  *(8) P. Knapp et. al, "Suitability for Psychoanalysis: A Review of
100 Supervised Analytic Cases," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 29 (1960):
463. Among many larger surveys of this sort, see W. Weintraub, "A
Survey of Patients in Classical Psychoanalysis: Some Vital
Statistics," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 146 (1968); S.
Kadushin, Why People Go To Psychiatrists (New York: Atherton, 1969):
and D. A. Hamburg, ed., Report of ad hoc Committee on Central
Fact-gathering Data (New York: American Psychoanalytic Association,
1967). Among the specific figures in these reports are some showing
that a third of surveyed patients derive much or all of their income
from inheritance or investment, that the percentage of them holding at
least an undergraduate degree is ten times that of the population at
large, and that well over half of them are Jewish.
  *(9) H. Klein, "A Study of Changes Occurring in Patients During and
After Psychoanalytic Treatment," in Current Approaches to
Psychoanalysis, eds. P. Hoch and J. Zubin (New York: Grune &
Stratton, 1960); cf. Kadushin, Why People Go To Psychiatrists.
  *(10) See S. L. Weiss, "Perceived Effectiveness of Psychotherapy: A
Function of Suggestion?" Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology, 39 (1972); and E. J. Langer and R. P. Abelson, "A Patient
By Any Other Name . . . : Clinical Group Difference in Labeling
Bias," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42 (1974).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_2 ^paragraph 10}
  *(11) H. Feifel and J. Eells, "Patients and Therapists Assess the
Same Psychotherapy," Journal of Consulting Psychology, 27 (1963).
Among the numerous psychiatric placebo studies, see, for example, P.
Lang et. al, "Desensitization, Suggestibility, Pseudo-Therapy,"
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 70 (1966).
  *(12) Stanley Rachman, The Effects of Psychotherapy (Oxford:
Pergamon,  1971), p. 46.
  *(13) Hamburg, Report of the ad hoc Committee. For discussions of
the report see M. Brody, "Prognosis and Results of Psychotherapy," in
Psychosomatic Medicine, eds. J. Nodine and J. Moyer, (Philadelphia:
Lea Fobiger, 1962); and Rachman, Effects of Psychotherapy, chap. 4.
  *(14) Michael Sherwood, The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis
(New York: Academic, 1969), p. 262.
  *(15) B. Brody, "Freud's Case-Load," Psychotherapy: Theory,
Research, and Practice, 7 (1970).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_2 ^paragraph 15}
  *(16) Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg, The Scientific
Credibility of Freud's Theories and Therapy (New York: Basic Books,
1977), pp. 281, 285.
  *(17) See, among numerous studies, J. C. Beck et. al, "Follow-Up
Study of Chronic Psychotic Patients 'Treated' by College Case-Aide
Volunteers," American Journal of Psychiatry, CXX (1963); J. D.
Holzberg et. al, "College Students as Companions to the Mentally
Ill," in Emergent Approaches to Mental Health Problems, eds. E. L.
Cowen, E. A. Gardner, and M. Zax (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1967); and E. G. Poser, "The Effects of Therapists' Training on Group
Therapeutic Outcome," Journal of Consulting Psychology, XXX (1966).
  *(18) Many of these so-called therapies are mentioned frequently in
the popular press. One that is not, "direct" therapy, perhaps
deserves more attention- and notoriety. A variation on psychoanalysis
for use with psychotic patients, it is described by its developer, J.
Rosen, in Direct Analysis (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1953) and in
A. Scheflen, A Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia (Springfield, Ill.:
Thomas, 1961). Reference to a similar technique, known informally as
"harassment" therapy, and its use in a San Francisco psychiatric
ward can be found in D. L. Stannard, "Ideological Conflict on a
Psychiatric Ward," Psychiatry, 36 (1973).
  *(19) Hans H. Strupp, "Some Comments on the Future of
Psychoanalysis," an address reprinted in Journal of Contemporary
Psychotherapy, 3 (1971).
  *(20) Fisher and Greenberg, Scientific Credibility, p. 15.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_2 ^paragraph 20}
  *(21) H. J. Eysenck, "The Effects of Psychotherapy: An Evaluation,"
Journal of Consulting Psychology, XVI (1952).
  *(22) N. Sanford, "Psychotherapy," Annual Review of Psychology, 4
(1953): 336; quoted in Rachman, Effects of Psychotherapy, pp. 14-15.
  *(23) Arthur Janov, The Anatomy of Mental Illness (New York:
Putnam, 1971), pp. 209-13.
  *(24) See, for example, Walter Kaufmann, "An Anatomy of the Primal
Revolution," Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 14 (1974).
  *(25) It would not be difficult to compile an entire volume
surveying these studies and their various conclusions. Most of them
contain serious limitations (such as one that is critical of Eysenck,
but that uses as its own sole criterion for evaluation hospital
admission rates for any reason at all- mental or physical), and the
best of them are filled with statistical problems that are still
being discussed. Nevertheless, among those that bear citing are the
following: C. Schorer et. al, "Improvement Without Treatment,"
Diseases of the Nervous System, 29 (1968); R. M. Jurjevich, "Changes
in Psychiatric Symptoms Without Psychotherapy," in An Evaluation of
the Results of the Psychotherapies, ed. S. Lesse (Springfield:
Thomas, 1968); and, perhaps the most widely cited assessment since
Eysenck, A. E. Bergin, "The Evaluation of Therapeutic Outcomes," in
Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, eds. A. E. Bergin and
S. Garfield (New York: Wiley, 1970). This last study, though
important, should be read with caution, however, as indicated by the
critique in Rachman, Effects of Psychotherapy, pp. 28-40.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_2 ^paragraph 25}
  *(26) Leo Subotnik, "Spontaneous Remission: Fact or Artifact?"
Psychological Bulletin, 77 (1972): 46.
  *(27) Fisher and Greenberg, Scientific Credibility, p. 341.
  *(28) Ibid., pp. 390, 413. Freud's own doubts about the therapeutic
usefulness of psychotherapy are expressed most clearly in "Analysis
Terminable and Interminable" (1937), in Standard Edition, ed.
Strachey, vol. 23, pp. 209-54. 29.
  *(29) Rachman, Effects of Psychotherapy, p. 63.
  *(30) H. J. Eysenck, The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories
(London: Methuen, 1973), pp. 374-75.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_2 ^paragraph 30}
  *(31) R. Bruce Sloane, et. al, Psychotherapy Versus Behavior
Therapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).
  *(32) Freud, "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (1933),
in Standard Edition, ed. Strachey, vol. 22, p. 152.
  *(33) Thirty-fourth Annual Report of the Friends' Asylum [Asylum
for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason]
(Frankfort, Pa.: 1851), pp. 14-15. The reports of other asylums
during this period are somewhat less reliable and were criticized for
exaggeration by Pliny Earle in a famous piece, The Curability of
Insanity (Utica, N. Y.: Ellis H. Roberts, 1877). However, more recent
study and analysis of Earle's statistics have shown his conclusions
to be questionable; a recovery rate of roughly 50% at the Worcester
Hospital, for example, now seems accurate and typical. That is
somewhat better than the rate achieved by modern psychoanalysts
dealing only with carefully screened neurotics, when premature
termination without success is considered as therapeutic failure. For
a reconsideration of Earle's figures, see J. S. Bockoven, "Moral
Treatment in American Psychiatry," Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease, CXXIV (1956): 167-94 and 292-321. Also see Barbara G.
Rosenkrantz and Maris A. Vinovskis, "The Invisible Lunatics: Old Age
and Insanity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts" in Aging and
the Elderly, ed. Stuart Spicker (New York: Humanities Press, 1978).
Rosenkrantz and Vinovskis also have forthcoming work relevant to
these matters.
  *(34) Rachman, Effects of Psychotherapy, p. 5.
  *(35) D. L. Rosenhan, "On Being Sane in Insane Places," Science,
179 (January 1973). It is worth noting further that when the study
procedure was reversed and psychiatric staff were informed that a
fake patient would soon be admitted to their facility, the staff
members independently identified various patients as the fake- even
though none had in fact been admitted!
                                               {NOTES TO CH_2 ^paragraph 35}
  *(36) Sidney Hook, "Science and Mythology in Psychoanalysis," in
Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy, ed. Sidney Hook
(New York: New York University Press, 1959), p. 219.

{NOTES_ON_CHAPTER_THREE
                   Notes on Chapter Three
-
  *(1) Bernard Bailyn, in Philosophy and History: A Symposium, ed.
Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1963), p. 93.
  *(2) Quoted in "Freud and Literature," in Lionel Trilling, The
Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950), p. 32.
  *(3) Ernest Jones, Papers on Psycho-Analysis, 4th ed. (Baltimore:
William Wood, 1938), p. 2.
  *(4) For a discussion of Mesmer and other precursors of Freud, see
Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History
and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970);
and the frankly combative Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy
(New York: Doubleday, 1978), chaps. 4-6. Szasz also, it should be
noted, has some insightful things to say about Freud's persistent
literalizing of figurative terminology- above and beyond the matter
of the unconscious.
  *(5) Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble,
1949).
                                                {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 5}
  *(6) Ibid., p. 17.
  *(7) Alan R. White, The Philosophy of Mind (New York: Random House,
1967), p. 45.
  *(8) C. S. Chihara and J. A. Fodor, "Operationalism and Ordinary
Language: A Critique of Wittgenstein," American Philosophical
Quarterly, 2 (1965).
  *(9) Rudolf Carnap, "Psychology in Physical Language," in Logical
Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), p. 174.
  *(10) J. J. C. Smart, "Sensations and Brain Processes,"
Philosophical Review, 68 (1959); revised and reprinted in The
Philosophy of Mind, ed. V. C. Chappell (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1962).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 10}
  *(11) Sigmund Freud, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,"
in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), vol. 10, pp.
5-149.
  *(12) Edward Glover, On the Early Development of Mind (New York:
International Universities Press, 1956), p. 76.
  *(13) Freud, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy," p. 111.
  *(14) Ibid., pp. 139-40.
  *(15) Ibid., p. 132.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 15}
  *(16) H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York:
Harper, 1964), p. 47; cf. Hans Meyerhoff, "On Psychoanalysis and
History," Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review, 49 (1962).
  *(17) Freud, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy," p. 104.
  *(18) See S. H. Flowerman, "Psychoanalytic Theory and Science,"
American Journal of Psychotherapy, 8 (1954).
  *(19) Freud, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy," p. 104.
  *(20) Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman, "Psychoanalytic 'Evidence':
A Critique Based on Freud's Case of Little Hans," Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease, 131 (1960).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 20}
  *(21) William P. Alston, "Logical Status of Psychoanalytic
Theories," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan,
1967), vol. 6, p. 513.
  *(22) On the importance of this dichotomy and its apparent
universality see the discussion in Jack Goody, Death, Property and
the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the Lodagaa of West
Africa (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962), chap. 2.
For an insightful discussion of more specific similarities between
psychoanalysis and traditional West African thought regarding the
unconscious, see Robin Horton, "Destiny and the Unconscious in West
Africa," Africa, 31 (1961).
  *(23) Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), p. 482.
  *(24) For particularly incisive discussions of these questions, see
John Wisdom, Other Minds (Oxford: Blackwell & Mott, 1952), esp. pp.
220-35; and Paul Ziff, "About Behaviorism," Analysis, 18 (1958).
  *(25) See, for example, T. R. Miles's use of the principle in
Eliminating the Unconscious: A Behaviorist View of Psychoanalysis
(Oxford: Pergamon, 1966), pp. 36-37, 76-84; cf., for a more
philosophical argument, Smart, "Sensations and Brain Processes."
                                               {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 25}
  *(26) Ernest Nagel, "Methodological Issues in Psychoanalytic
Theory," in Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy, ed.
Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1959), p. 40.
  *(27) Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of
Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1968), p. 37.
  *(28) Bruce Mazlish, In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry
(New York: Basic Books, 1972); Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf
Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York: Basic Books, 1972);
Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God, Adolf Hitler (New York:
Basic Books, 1976); Geoffrey Gorer, "Themes in Japanese Culture," in
Personal Character and Cultural Milieu, ed. D. G. Haring (Syracuse,
N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1949); and Weston La Barre, "Some
Observations on Character Structure in the Orient: The Japanese,"
Psychiatry, 8 (1945).
  *(29) Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New
York: Norton, 1974); Geza Roheim, "The Study of Character Development
and the Ontogenetic Theory of Culture," in Essays Presented to C. G.
Seligman, ed. E. E. Evans-Pritchard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1934); Owen Berkley-Hill, "The Anal Erotic Factor in the Religion,
Philosophy and Character of the Hindus," International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 2 (1921).
  *(30) Anal-erotic character traits were Freud's initial insights
into the theory of psychosexual character development. See his
"Character and Anal Eroticism," in Standard Edition, ed. Strachey,
vol. 9, pp. 167-77.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 30}
  *(31) Jones, Papers on Psycho-Analysis, pp. 547-53.
  *(32) Mazlish, In Search of Nixon, p. 146.
  *(33) K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on the
Enigma (New York: International Universities Press, 1961); Jay Gonen,
A Psychohistory of Zionism (New York: Meridian, 1975), p. 204.
  *(34) Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton,
1950), esp. chaps. 7 and 8; Michael Kammen, People of Paradox (New
York: Knopf, 1972).
  *(35) See Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-history,
Quanto-history and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1974), pp. 84, 54.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 35}
  *(36) Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 37.
  *(37) Edgar A. Levenson, The Fallacy of Understanding: An Inquiry
in the Changing Structure of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books,
1972), p. 73.
  *(38) David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic
of Historical Thought (New York: Harper, 1970), pp. 166-67.
  *(39) Murray G. Murphey, "An Approach to the Historical Study of
National Character," in Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology,
ed. Melford E. Spiro (New York: The Free Press, 1965). I have treated
this study at somewhat greater length elsewhere; see David E.
Stannard, "American Historians and the Idea of National Character:
Some Problems and Prospects," American Quarterly, 23 (1971).
  *(40) Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 35.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 40}
  *(41) Gorer, "Themes in Japanese Culture." p. 273.
  *(42) Ibid., p. 274.
  *(43) Edward Norbeck and Margaret Norbeck, "Child Training in a
Japanese Fishing Community"; Betty B. Lanham, "Aspects of Child Care
in Japan: Preliminary Report"; and D. G. Haring, "Japanese National
Character: Cultural Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and History"; all
in Personal Character and Cultural Milieu, ed. Haring, 3rd ed.
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1956). See also F. N.
Kerlinger, "Behavior and Personality in Japan: A Critique of Three
Studies of Japanese Personality," Social Forces, 31 (1953). In
fairness to Gorer, it should be pointed out that his was but one of a
series of psychoanalytically informed wartime analyses of the
Japanese, virtually all of which shared the same mistaken
assumptions.
  *(44) John W. M. Whiting and Irvin L. Child, Child Training and
Personality: A Cross-Cultural Survey (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953), p. 74.
  *(45) Robert Coles, The Mind's Fate: Ways of Seeing Psychiatry and
Psychoanalysis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), pp. 201-202.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_3 ^paragraph 45}
  *(46) Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, p. 51.
  *(47) Roland H. Bainton, "Psychiatry and History: An Examination of
Erikson's 'Young Man Luther,'" Religion in Life, 40 (1971): 463.
  *(48) David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (New York: Knopf, 1956),
pp. 19-36. See the critique by Robert Skotheim in Journal of Southern
History, 25 (1959): 256-65. Donald's argument, it is only just to
note, was unique in little more than its false tone of methodological
preciseness; in its general thrust- that reformist activity was
socially aberrant and psychologically traceable to status loss- the
argument was quite conventional in the 1950s. See, perhaps the
classic statement of this view, Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform
(New York: Knopf, 1955) and Norman Pollack, "Hofstadter on Populism,"
Journal of Southern History, 26 (1960).
  *(49) Raymond Sobel, "What Went Right? The Natural History of the
Early Traumatized, " in Interpersonal Explorations in Psychoanalysis:
New Directions in Theory and Practice, ed. Earl G. Witenberg (New
York: Basic Books, 1973).

{NOTES_ON_CHAPTER_FOUR
                   Notes on Chapter Four
-
  *(1) Sigmund Freud, "An Outline of Psychoanalysis," in Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), vol. 23, pp.
192-93.
  *(2) Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of
Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 38, fn. 3; Robert
K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Enlarged Edition (New
York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 477.
  *(3) E.g., Paul Kline, Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory (London:
Methuen, 1972). I should perhaps note here that I have chosen not to
review psychoanalytic theory regarding female sexuality because this
subject has received so much critical attention of late that to
pursue it here would be truly to beat a very dead horse. Nonetheless,
it is worth pointing out at least in passing that on the matter of
the Freudian concept of "penis envy" there has been but one serious
study ever conducted that claims to show support for the concept, and
that study- based on dream interpretations- has been shown to be so
riddled with logical flaws, pro-Freudian bias, and male conceit that
its best use today is as a lesson in how not to conduct research. The
study is Calvin Hall and Robert L. Van de Castle, "An Empirical
Investigation of the Castration Complex in Dreams," Journal of
Personality, 33 (1965); see also the critical discussion in Hans J.
Eysenck and Glenn D. Wilson, The Experimental Study of Freudian
Theories (London: Methuen, 1973), pp. 166-67.
  *(4) Freud, "Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis," in Standard
Edition, ed. Strachey (1963), vol. 16, p. 337.
  *(5) Ibid., vol. 15, p. 207.
                                                {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 5}
  *(6) R. R. Sears, Survey of Objective Studies of Psychoanalytic
Concepts (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1943) p. 136.
  *(7) See, for example, R. Stagner and N. Drought, "Measuring
Children's Attitudes Toward Their Parents," Journal of Educational
Psychology, 26 (1935); and L. Stott, "Adolescents' Dislikes Regarding
Parental Behavior and Their Significance," Journal of Genetic
Psychology, 57 (1940).
  *(8) Calvin Hall, "Strangers in Dreams: An Empirical Confirmation
of the Oedipus Complex," Journal of Personality, 31 (1963).
  *(9) Stanley M. Friedman, "An Empirical Study of the Castration and
Oedipus Complexes," Genetic Psychology Monographs, 46 (1952).
  *(10) Ibid., p. 113.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 10}
  *(11) R. B. Ammons and H. S. Ammons, "Parental Preferences in Young
Children's Doll-Play Interviews," Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, 44 (1949).
  *(12) J. Kagan and J. Lemkin, "The Child's Differential Perception
of Parental Attributes," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
61 (1960).
  *(13) Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg, The Scientific
Credibility of Freud's Theories and Therapy (New York: Basic Books,
1977) p. 182.
  *(14) See, for example, Geza Roheim, "The Anthropological Evidence
and the Oedipus Complex," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 21 (1952); and
J. W. M. Whiting et. al, "The Function of Male Initiation Ceremonies
at Puberty," in E. E. Maccoby et. al, Readings in Social Psychology
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1958).
  *(15) A number of well-known "post-Freudian" adjustments have, of
course, been made. Perhaps the most famous are those of Karen Horney
and Erich Fromm which rely heavily on specific cultural situations.
See Horney's New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1939),
chap. 4; and Fromm's "The Oedipus Complex and the Oedipus Myth," in
The Family: Its Function and Destiny, ed. R. N. Anshen (New York:
Harper, 1948). But see also Arnold W. Green's early, though still
acute, critique of these writers for their sociological naivete in
"Sociological Analysis of Horney and Fromm," American Journal of
Sociology, 51 (1946). A more recent and very perceptive treatment is
Anne Parsons, "Is the Oedipus Complex Universal? The Jones-Malinowski
Debate Revisited and a South Italian 'Nuclear Complex,'" in Man and
His Culture: Psychoanalytic Anthropology after 'Totem and Taboo', ed.
Warner Muensterberger (New York: Taplinger, 1969).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 15}
  *(16) The two important early studies here, also mentioned in
Kline, Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory, are John Dollard et. al,
Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939);
and N. E. Miller and R. Bugelski, "Minor Studies of Aggression: The
Influence of Frustrations Imposed by the In-Group on Attitudes
Expressed Towards Out-Groups," Journal of Psychology, 34 (1948).
  *(17) Leo Postman, et. al, "Is There a Mechanism of Perceptual
Defense?" Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 48 (1953);
Gerald S. Blum, "Perceptual Defense Revisited," Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology, 51 (1955). These works discuss the first of
the two methods mentioned. A fairly well-known example of the second
technique is I. M. Rosenstock, "Perceptual Aspects of Repression,"
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46 (1951).
  *(18) David S. Holmes, "Investigations of Repression: Differential
Recall of Material Experimentally or Naturally Associated with Ego
Threat," Psychological Bulletin, 81 (1974), 649.
  *(19) Freud, "On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement," in
Standard Edition, ed. Strachey (1957), vol. 14, p. 16.
  *(20) Holmes, "Investigations of Repression," 651.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 20}
  *(21) On the relative unimportance of post-genital syndromes and on
the lack of any objective verification of their existence, see Kline,
Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory, pp. 11, 28-30, 44, 92-94.
  *(22) Freud, "Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis," in
Standard Edition, ed. Strachey (1961), vol. 15, p. 208.
  *(23) Frieda Goldman, "Breastfeeding and Character Formation,"
Journal of Personality, 17 (1948-49).
  *(24) Charles A. Barnes, "A Statistical Study of the Freudian
Theory of Levels of Psychosexual Development," Genetic Psychology
Monographs, 45 (1952).
  *(25) A. Lazare et. al, "Oral, Obsessive and Hysterical Personality
Patterns: An Investigation of Psychoanalytic Concepts by Means of
Factor Analysis," Archives of Genetic Psychiatry, 14 (1966). See also
the follow-up on this study, "Oral, Obsessive and Hysterical
Personality Patterns: Replication of Factor Analysis in an
Independent Sample," Journal of Psychiatric Research, 7 (1970).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 25}
  *(26) Halla Beloff, "The Structure and Origin of the Anal
Character," Genetic Psychology Monographs, 55 (1957).
  *(27) Paul Kline, "The Anal Character: A Cross-Cultural Study in
Ghana," British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8 (1969);
cf. Paul Kline, "Obsessional Traits, Obsessional Symptoms and Anal
Eroticism," British Journal of Medical Psychology, 41 (1968)- and the
critique in Eysenck and Wilson, The Experimental Study of Freudian
Theories, pp. 95-98.
  *(28) Lillian Cukier Robbins, "The Accuracy of Parental Recall of
Aspects of Child Development and of Child Rearing Practices," Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66 (1963).
  *(29) The study showing limited positive correlation is Frieda
Goldman-Eisler, "The Problem of 'Orality' and of its Origin in Early
Childhood," Journal of Mental Science, 97 (1951). The number of
contradictory studies is too large to enumerate here, but many of
them are mentioned in the following: Kline, Fact and Fantasy in
Freudian Theory, chap. 5; Harold Orlansky, "Infant Care and
Personality" [a now almost classic work], Psychological Bulletin, 46
(1949); and N. O'Connor and C. M. Franks, "Childhood Upbringing and
Other Environmental Factors," in Handbook of Abnormal Psychology, ed.
H. J. Eysenck (New York: Basic Books, 1961). Also, on the
Goldman-Eisler study itself, see the comments in Eysenck and Wilson,
Experimental Study of Freudian Theories, pp. 61-64.
  *(30) For reviews of such studies see Kline, Fact and Fantasy in
Freudian Theory; Orlansky, "Infant Care and Personality"; O'Connor
and Franks, "Childhood Upbringing and Other Environmental Factors";
and especially B. M. Caldwell, "The Effects of Infant Care," in
Review of Child Development Research, eds. M. L. and L. W. Hoffman
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1964), vol. 1.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 30}
  *(31) M. I. Hernstein, "Behavioral Correlates of Breast-Bottle
Regimes Under Varying Parent-Infant Relationships," Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development, 28 (1963).
  *(32) Jerrold M. Pollak, "Obsessive-Compulsive Personality: A
Review," Psychological Bulletin, 86 (1979), 228. On the latter point,
cf. A. T. Carr, "Compulsive Neurosis: A Review of the Literature,"
Psychological Bulletin, 81 (1974).
  *(33) Kline, Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory, p. 94; Anthony
F. C. Wallace, Culture and Personality (New York: Random House,
1968), p. 116.
  *(34) Michael Scriven, "The Experimental Investigation of
Psychoanalysis," in Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and
Philosophy, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press,
1959), p. 226.
  *(35) Jerome Kagan et. al, Infancy: Its Place in Human Development
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 60.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 35}
  *(36) For a lucid, if brief, discussion of the close relationship
between Erikson's evolving politics and his changing psychological
ideas, see Frederick Crews, "American Prophet," The New York Review
of Books, 22 (October 16, 1975), pp. 9-15.
  *(37) See Kagan et. al, Infancy, esp. pp. 164-65; and Jerome Kagan,
The Growth of the Child: Reflections on Human Development (New York:
Norton, 1978).
  *(38) O. W. Hill, "Child Bereavement and Adult Psychiatric
Disturbance," Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 16 (1972). An
excellent example of the kind of empirical research that has been
done on the relationship between childhood experiences and adult
personality is Jerome Kagan and Howard A. Moss, Birth to Maturity: A
Study in Psychological Development (New York: Wiley, 1962). See also
H. E. Jones et. al, "A Progress Report on Growth Studies at the
University of California," Vita Humana, 3 (1959). The fact that both
of these very extensive studies (each a thirty-year-long
developmental study) show little personality correlation between
childhood and adulthood- although no effort was made to test the
specific validity of psychoanalytic theory- should be of major
consequence to psychological theory. Indeed, these and other similar
reports are now being reflected in the new work by Kagan that has
already been cited.
  *(39) Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics
and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 5; cf David Brion Davis,
The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1969), pp. 3-7.
  *(40) See, for instance, Robert Brandfon, "Specific Purposes and
the General Past: Slaves and Slavery," Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 3 (1972): 351-56; and William W. Freehling, "Paranoia and
American History," The New York Review of Books, 17 (September 23,
1971): 36-37, and an exchange of letters between Davis and Freehling,
The New York Review of Books, 17 (December 2, 1971): 37-38.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 40}
  *(41) Bruce Mazlish, In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry
(New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp. 84-85.
  *(42) Freud, "Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account
of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," in Standard Edition,
ed. Strachey (1958), vol. 12, p. 63.
  *(43) P. G. Daston, "Perception of Homosexual Words in Paranoid
Schizophrenia," Perception and Motor Skills, 6 (1956).
  *(44) H. S. Zamansky, "An Investigation of the Psychoanalytic
Theory of Paranoid Delusions," Journal of Personality, 26 (1956).
  *(45) Ibid., p. 424.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_4 ^paragraph 45}
  *(46) Kline, Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory, p. 275.
  *(47) See, for example, R. Rossi et. al, "The Problem of the
Relationship Between Homosexuality and Schizophrenia," Archives of
Sexual Behavior, 1 (1971).
  *(48) Paul Ricoeur, Freudian Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 344-75; Christopher
Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York:
Basic Books, 1977), p. 200, fn. 22; Heinz Hartmann, "Psychoanalysis
as a Scientific Theory," in Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and
Philosophy, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press,
1959), p. 21- cited in Ricoeur; R. D. Laing, "The Study of Family and
Social Contexts in Relation to 'Schizophrenia,'" in Laing, The
Politics of the Family and Other Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1969)
p. 44. For discussion of Ricoeur's recommendations, see E. Slater,
"Freud: A Philosophical Assessment," British Journal of Psychiatry,
120 (1972), 455-457

{NOTES_ON_CHAPTER_FIVE
                 Notes on Chapter Five
-
  *(1) John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth
Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 49-51.
  *(2) Among the more recent such experiments, see E. Hull et. al,
"Population Density and Social, Territorial, and Physiological
Measures in the Gerbil," Journal of Comparative and Physiological
Psychology, 84 (1973); Hull et. al, "Effects of Crowding and
Intermittent Isolation on Gerbils," Physiology and Behavior, 13
(1974); and T. F. Pettijohn and B. M. Barkes, "The Influence of
Living Area Space on Behavior in the Mongolian Gerbil, " Journal of
Genetic Psychology, 100 (1979). Cf. J. L. Freedman, Crowding and
Behavior (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975) and D. Stokols, "The
Experience of Crowding in Primary and Secondary Environments,"
Environment and Behavior, 5 (1973)- both of which show that among
human populations definitions of space are highly relative and that
responses to perceived crowding are dependent upon a wide variety of
personal and social variables.
  *(3) Demos, A Little Commonwealth, pp. 27, 29.
  *(4) Ibid., p. 47.
  *(5) D. W. Robertson, Jr., Chaucer's London (New York: Wiley,
1968), pp. 5, 11; J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man (New
York: Norton, 1961); Bernard G. Rosenthal, The Images of Man (New
York: Basic Books, 1971); Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A
Social History of Family Life (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 103.
For somewhat more cautious criticism of psychohistory from this
perspective, see Dietrich Orlow "The Significance of Time and Place
in Psychohistory," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1974).
                                                {NOTES TO CH_5 ^paragraph 5}
  *(6) Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis
and History (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 257.
  *(7) David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic
of Historical Thought (New York: Harper, 1970), p. 49.
  *(8) Hans Jonas, "Change and Permanence: On the Possibility of
Understanding History," Social Research, 38 (1971): 500-501.
  *(9) Jack W. Meiland, Scepticism and Historical Knowledge (New
York: Random House, 1965), p. 192.
  *(10) Daniel Cappon, Technology and Perception (Springfield, Ill.:
Thomas, 1971), p. 38.
                                      {NOTES TO CH_5 ^paragraph 10}
  *(11) H. A. Murray, "Toward a Classification of Interactions," in
Toward a General Theory of Action, eds. Talcott Parsons and E. A.
Shils (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 446.
  *(12) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1963), p. 7 [from James' 1908 preface to the New
York edition of his works].
  *(13) W. H. R. Rivers, "Introduction and Vision" in Report of the
Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, ed. A. C
Haddon (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1901), vol. II;
L. Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think [orig. pub. 1910] (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1926), p. 43.
  *(14) D. O. Hebb, Organization of Behavior (New York: Wiley, 1949);
and Homer G. Barnett, Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1953). It is true, of course, that Edward Sapir
and Benjamin Whorf, among others, had earlier argued the position
that perception is influenced by cognition, which is itself
influenced by language. The term perception in these studies was
used, however, in more of a metaphorical sense than that employed
here, and the connection was considerably more speculative. See R. W.
Brown and E. H. Lenneberg, "A Study in Language and Cognition,"
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49 (1954), for some
penetrating remarks on these early language and perception studies,
including the classic example of the various Eskimo terms for snow.
On the other hand, for a considerably more sophisticated presentation
of the argument that language influences our awareness of reality
(including a critique of the Whorf hypothesis) see Joseph Church,
Language and the Discovery of Reality (New York: Random House, 1961).
  *(15) Anthony F. C. Wallace, Culture and Personality (New York:
Random House, 1968), p. 122.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_5 ^paragraph 15}
  *(16) In R. Redfield et. al, Aspects of Primitive Art (New York:
Museum of Primitive Art, 1959), p. 56.
  *(17) Hans H. Toch and Richard Schulte, "Readiness to Perceive
Violence as a Result of Police Training," British Journal of
Psychology, 52 (1961); reprinted in Social Perception, eds. Toch and
Clay Smith (Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1968).
  *(18) R. L. Gregory and J. G. Wallace, Recovery from Early
Blindness: A Case Study, Monograph No. 2 (1963) of the Experimental
Psychology Society, Cambridge, England. Reprinted in Perception:
Selected Readings in Science and Phenomenology, ed. Paul Tibbetts
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 368.
  *(19) Roy G. D'Andrade, "Cultural Constructions of Reality," paper
read at 1971 National Institute of Mental Health Conference in Palo
Alto and published in Laura Nader and Thomas W. Maretzki, eds.,
Cultural Illness and Health: Essays in Human Adaptation (Washington:
American Anthropological Association, 1973). I am grateful to
Professor D'Andrade for sending me a copy of his original manuscript,
from which this quotation is taken.
  *(20) For convenient summaries and examples of some such studies,
see Toch and Smith, Social Perception, W. N. Dember, The Psychology
of Perception (New York: Holt, 1960); M. D. Vernon, The Psychology of
Perception (London: Penguin, 1962); and M D. Vernon, Experiments in
Visual Perception (London: Penguin, 1968), esp. pp. 333-417.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_5 ^paragraph 20}
  *(21) John R. Platt, Perception and Change (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 44-45.
  *(22) Stephen C. Pepper, "A Dynamic View of Perception," Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, 32 (1971): 45, 44.
  *(23) It should not be overlooked that these problems exist not
only for the historian but for any social scientist studying or
trying to understand others. Historians, however, are more seriously
affected, since they cannot directly question their subjects on
matters unrevealed by existing data. For one good example of the kind
of work that is being done in the social sciences in closely related
areas, see the work on the relationship between culture and cognition
in Michael Cole et. al, The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking
(New York: Basic Books, 1971).
  *(24) Marshall H. Segall, Donald T. Campbell, and Melville J.
Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception
(Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. vi.
  *(25) Ibid., p. 84.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_5 ^paragraph 25}
  *(26) Ibid., pp. 88-89.
  *(27) Ibid., p. 97.
  *(28) Ibid., pp. 213-14. Although this study remains probably the
most extensive field investigation to date, a good bit of subsequent
research has sometimes merely confirmed Segal et. al, but much of it
has also fruitfully extended the lines of inquiry. See, for example:
G. Jahoda, "Geometric Illusions and Environment: A Study of Ghana,"
British Journal of Psychology, 57 (1966); G. Jahoda and B. Stacey,
"Susceptibility to Geometrical Optical Illusions According to Culture
and Professional Training," Perception and Psychophysics, 7 (1970);
J. W. Berry, "Ecology, Perceptual Development and the Muller-Lyer
Illusion," British Journal of Psychology, 59 (1968); J. W. Berry,
"Muller-Lyer Susceptibility: Culture, Ecology or Race?" International
Journal of Psychology, 6 (1971); J. B. Deregowski, "Pictorial
Recognition in Subjects from a Relatively Pictureless Environment,"
African Social Research, 5 (1968); and J. B. Deregowski,
"Difficulties in Pictorial Depth Perception in Africa," British
Journal of Psychology, 59 (1968).
  *(29) George S. Klein, Perception, Motives, and Personality (New
York: Knopf, 1970), p. 4.
  *(30) Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd
ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 113.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_5 ^paragraph 30}
  *(31) John W. Atkinson makes this point rather lightheartedly in
"The Achievement Motive and Recall of Interrupted and Completed
Tasks," in Studies in Motivation, ed. David C. McClelland (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955). "The achievement motive is viewed as
a latent characteristic of personality which is manifested in
behavior only when engaged or supported by appropriate environmental
cues.... A hungry man is more likely to reach for, pick up, and chew
an object on a table at which he is sitting if the object happens to
be a sandwich than if it happens to be an ashtray." (pp. 501-502).
  *(32) An exception is Gustav Ichheiser's provocative and suggestive
chapter, "Social Perception and Moral Judgment," in his Appearances
and Realities (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1970), pp. 152-67.
  *(33) Klein, Perception, Motives and Personality, p. 144.
  *(34) I have confined myself here to discussion of substantive
confrontation with the solipsistic dilemma of cultural relativism.
On a philosophic level the matter is cogently analyzed in Bernard
Williams, "The Truth in Relativism," Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 75 (1974-75).
  *(35) For Schutz's important thinking on this and related matters,
see his Collected Papers, I: The Problem of Social Reality (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), esp. pp. 7-27.
                                               {NOTES TO CH_5 ^paragraph 35}
  *(36) Clifford Geertz, "The Struggle for the Real," in Geertz,
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 99.
  *(37) The writing on this subject is enormous in quantity, but for
a good introduction see J. W. Berry and P. R. Dasen, eds., Culture
and Cognition: Readings in Cross-Cultural Psychology (London:
Methuen, 1974).
  *(38) Walter B. Cannon, "'Voodoo' Death," American Anthropologist,
44 (1942). Cf. the subsequent comments of the following: Curt P.
Richter, "On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man,"
Psychosomatic Medicine, 19 (1957); David Lester, "Voodoo Death: Some
New Thoughts on an Old Phenomenon," American Anthropologist, 74
(1972); and Barbara W. Lex, "Voodoo Death: New Thoughts on an Old
Explanation," American Anthropologist, 76 (1974).
  *(39) Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic
Books, 1963), chap. 9.
  *(40) These are, of course, widely discussed matters. Some writings
worth attention that are concerned with the specific phenomena
mentioned are the following: T. Gladwin, "Culture and Logical
Process," in Explorations in Cultural Anthropology: Essays in Honor
of George Peter Murdock, ed. W. H. Goodenough (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964); Dorothy Lee, Freedom and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1959); Patricia Marks Greenfield and Jerome S. Bruner,
"Culture and Cognitive Growth," in Handbook of Socialization Theory
and Research, ed. David A. Goslin (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1969);
Peter Lawrence, Road Belong Cargo (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester
University Press, 1964); Dorothy Lee, "Being and Value in a Primitive
Culture," Journal of Philosophy, 13 (1949); Paul Bohannan, "Concepts
of Time Among the Tiv of Nigeria," Southwestern Journal of
Anthropology, 9 (1953); Clifford Geertz, Person, Time, and Conduct in
Bali (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, Cultural
Report Series No. 14, 1966); Bert Kaplan and Dale Johnson, "The
Social Meaning of Navaho Psychopathology and Psychotherapy," in
Magic, Faith, and Healing, ed. Ari Kiev (New York: Free Press, 1964).
                                               {NOTES TO CH_5 ^paragraph 40}
  *(41) Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood and L'Homme devant la
mort (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978); Carolly Erickson, The Medieval
Vision: Essays in History and Perception (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976); D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in
Medieval Perception (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1962); William J. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in
Modes of Perception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Thomas
S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1957); Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to
the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1957); Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (New
York: Harper, 1973); Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual,
1050-1200 (New York: Harper, 1972); Peter Burke, The Renaissance
Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin's, 1970); Michel Foucault,
Madness and Civilization (New York: Pantheon, 1965), The Birth of the
Clinic (New York: Pantheon, 1973), Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977), The History of Sexuality,
Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1971); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in
England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper, 1977); Maria W. Piers,
Infanticide (New York: Norton, 1978); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing
Process (New York: Urizen, 1977). See also the forthcoming Essay in
the History of Bourgeois Perception by Donald M. Lowe.
  *(42) van den Berg, Changing Nature of Man, pp. 7-8.
  *(43) On a theoretical level, some of the most suggestive
anthropological work in this area remains the discussion of the
concepts of "emic" and "etic"- borrowed from the linguistic
distinction between phonemics and phonetics. See K. L. Pike, Language
in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior
(The Hague: Mouton, 1966); D. French, "The Relationship of
Anthropology to Studies in Perception and Cognition," in Psychology:
A Study of a Science, vol. 6, ed. S. Koch (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1963); and W.C. Sturtevant, "Studies in Ethnoscience," in
Transcultural Studies in Cognition, a special publication of American
Anthropologist, 66 (1964). Cf. Erving Goffman's important discussion
of "primary frameworks" in Frame Analysis: An Essay on the
Organization of Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1974), pp. 21-39.
  *(44) Edgar A. Levenson, The Fallacy of Understanding: An Inquiry
into the Changing Structure of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books,
1972), p. 111. The references to Erikson are on pp. 96-99 and concern
his "reanalysis" of the case of Dora.

{NOTES_ON_CHAPTER_SIX
                      Notes on Chapter Six
-
  *(1) A note of caution is necessary here, though it does not
deserve elaboration in the text. In an effort to make a silk purse
out of a sow's ear (or its equivalent in logical discourse) some
friends of psychoanalysis make the intriguing claim that since
psychoanalytic theory is so logically flawed it is immune to
experimental disconfirmation. It then follows, so it is suggested,
that either all experimental disconfirmations are invalid or, if they
are accepted, that the logical soundness of the theory is thus
established. [For a brief allusion to this sort of thinking, see
Marie Jahoda, Freud and the Dilemmas of Psychology (New York: Basic
Books, 1977), pp. 16-17.] This logical naivete is typical of
psychoanalytic thought. First, as we have seen, much of
psychoanalytic theory is metaphysical (the life and death instincts
and the like) and thus untestable, requiring that, it be accepted or
rejected on faith- like a belief in the Holy Ghost or in
transubstantiation. And, like these other alleged phenomena, such
aspects of psychoanalytic theory are simply ruled out of scientific
consideration. Other matters that are affected by the problem of
irrefutability only through timely appeals to the so-called defense
mechanisms are testable (despite the continuing illogic of the
proposition) because even psychoanalysis posits the existence of
normality. That is, while in an individual case (the limit, for
obvious reasons, which the psychoanalyst wishes to explore) it can
always be said that apparent disconfirmation results from the
operation of a defense mechanism, in large-scale studies the fact
that concepts of normality exist (e.g., that the normal shape of the
Oedipus complex is antipathy for the father and attraction to the
mother) does permit successful experimentation. What such studies
have most often found, as we have seen, is that no correlation of any
sort exists. Further, the really critical experimental failure of
psychoanalytic theory involves the lack of evidence for postulated
causal factors, even if the alleged phenomena themselves are
spuriously shown to exist; and here the escape clause of
irrefutability cannot salvage the theory.
  *(2) For a recent survey of these studies and insightful comments,
see Jerome Kagan et. al, Infancy: Its Place in Human Development
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 113-65.
  *(3) P. B. Medawar, "Victims of Psychiatry," The New York Review of
Books, 21 (January 23, 1975).
  *(4) Lionel Trilling, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1955), p. 12.
  *(5) George Hakewill, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God
in the Government of the World [orig. pub. 1627) (London, 1635), p. 1.
                                                {NOTES TO CH_6 ^paragraph 5}
  *(6) C. P. Snow, "Preface" to Carl Bode, The Half-World of American
Culture (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965),
p. viii.
  *(7) Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York:
Anchor-Doubleday, 1964), pp. 48-51. This can perhaps begin to explain
(though I venture it only as a suspicion) the paradox of so many
tough-talking, self-styled radicals uncritically accepting
psychoanalytic ideas with their often politically reactionary
consequences. The recent work of Christopher Lasch is a prominent
example: compare Lasch's comment that his approach to the past
"insists on the historical importance of human actions, and . . .
sees history not as an abstract social 'process' but as the product
of concrete struggles for power"- an approach that rejects the
"mystification of social science" and its alleged claim "that society
runs according to laws of its own"- with his starry-eyed acceptance
of all manner of unverified, mystifying, and deterministic
psychoanalytic ideas. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World:
The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. xv, 200; and
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing
Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), passim.
  *(8) For some lively discussion of Velikovsky, von Daniken, and
other latter-day scientific "paradoxers," see Carl Sagan, Broca's
Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (New York: Random House,
1979), pp. 43-136.
  *(9) Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in
New England," The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward
Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1904), vol. 10,
pp. 337-39.
  *(10) Erik H. Erikson, Dimensions of a New Identity (New York:
Norton, (1974) p. 12.
-
-
                               THE END