The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

In his two-part article on psychohistory [NYR, February 22, March 8], Robert Coles remarks that “Even friends get caught in such intellectual warfare, where sides are taken and one is considered either a friend or a foe.” It is a revealing remark. Why must one be either friend or foe? Cannot different inquirers work in different ways, without being enemies? Coles’s shotgun approach to psychohistory, turning it into an apparent wasteland since 1958 and Erikson’s Young Man Luther (he doesn’t even deal with Gandhi’s Truth), suggests he finds this notion uncongenial. The result is a narrow and distorted treatment of the field, and of some of the contributions in it, although there are valid judgments in specific instances. You entitle the first part of his article, “How Good is Psychohistory?” The article really raises the question, “How Good is Coles on Psychohistory?”

Any discussion of the use of psychoanalysis by historians (or history by psychoanalysts) must take place in the context of a basic controversy in history over the use of analysis, of any sort, as against the traditional descriptive and chronological approaches. Many historians, surely the majority in the profession, embrace the traditional approach, and either have little use or a real distrust of the new methods: quantitative, comparative, psychoanalytical, sociological, and so forth. Increasingly, however, some historians have wished to look at history more in terms of an overt “problem” approach, rather than in terms of an account of “what actually happened,” recounted with whatever novelistic and broadly human sympathies the historian might bring to it. Interested readers might look at the Journal of Interdisciplinary History to see what sort of work takes place in terms of the new approaches.

Psychohistory is one of the new approaches. It claims to derive assistance from formal psychology, especially psychoanalysis, which permits it to do something different, with its own value, from that achieved by the historian’s non-systematic, or at least unexplicit, intuition. Coles is right when he says that psychohistorians are no longer “neglected on all fronts.” He is wrong, however, when he remarks that “it is absurd at this time for…those interested in…developing a ‘field’ called ‘psychohistory’ to imagine themselves embattled, scorned outcasts.” He simply isn’t aware of the average historian’s dislike and disdain for this effort.

All he needed to correct his view was to have attended the recent conference on psychohistory arranged by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to see the depth of the resentment, by some of the most distinguished members of the history profession, against any pretension to psychohistory. Erikson, who was there, recognizing an impossible situation, said almost nothing during the formal session, though at lunch time he whispered to a few of us, “Should I mention the word ‘unconscious’ to them?” The general view was presented by Jacques Barzun, who felt that Freud had added nothing to Pascal, and who published his views in the American Historical Review (February, 1972), where the interested reader can get the flavor of it, along with the replies in the next issue by William Langer and Peter Loewenberg, and judge for himself. I need hardly add that the situation was much worse back in 1956, when the Georges published their fine book, Wilson and Colonel House: A Personal Study. Would Coles also like to mention that the AHR did not even deign to review Young Man Luther when it was published two years after the Georges’ book?

Still, things have changed since 1956-58, and are changing even more rapidly today, though among a distinct minority. It is therefore doubly dismaying to have a “friend” of psychohistory attack it in the same dogmatic, intolerant way—legitimate criticism is another matter—as its out-and-out enemies. Coles is attacking it, for he is really distrustful, first, of the whole view of psychoanalysis as an effort at “science,” and, secondly, of its application, suitably modified, to historical study, i.e., psychohistory. What Coles doesn’t like is explicit theory. This is clear, for example, in his own work, such as Children of Crisis, where he praises Anna Freud’s work “with English children during German air attack” for being done “so simply, so directly and with a minimum of theoretical flourish.” Fine! But what of Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense? Hardly without theoretical flourish!

Why not allow for both kinds of work? Not to do so is really to take the position that Sigmund Freud, aside from his accidental artistic qualities, adds nothing to a Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche—or a Pascal. In my own book, In Search of Nixon, I stressed that psychoanalysis “claims to have a scientific system of concepts, based on clinical data.” Others before Freud, of course, had had intuitive glimpses into the human psyche. “What Freud added to their insights…was system, and the grounding and regrounding of his systematized concepts in clinical evidence, and then the hard work of detailed analysis of particular case ‘histories,’ which in turn provided new concepts.” If one adds that, naturally, such an effort at a “new science” will discard, modify, and enlarge its concepts and data, would Coles agree? If not, what does he think psychoanalysis is, and how does he see its difference, at least in principle, from, say, literary intuition? These are fundamental questions.

Their answer, obviously, affects one’s view of psychohistory. If psychoanalysis is seen as an effort at “scientific” understanding of unconscious mental processes, however halting and however limited in achieving therapeutic success—Coles evidently encounters difficulties here—then the attempt to use it in dealing with historical materials is justified. Of course, such use must take into account the fact that we are seeking to comprehend and explain historical materials, and not to treat and cure living patients. So conceived, however, the use of psychoanalysis in history can be more or less explicit, and more or less “theoretical,” i.e., actually using psychoanalytic concepts, and even attempting to modify them in the light of historical data. It can also be used in terms of a “problem” approach, as well as a descriptive one. Both approaches are legitimate, and one judges examples in each genre on their merit, and, for the former, especially as it contributes to further research.

Because Coles is dogmatically against the “problem” approach, he is simply unable to estimate or even recognize most of the work done in the field. For example, what one wants in an estimate of Langer’s The Mind of Adolf Hitler is not only a judgment on a work written in 1943, and now published openly as a classic example of its kind, but a discussion of what corrections, extensions, etc. are called for in the light of both recent historical research and psychoanalytical developments. How does Langer’s work measure up in the light, say, of Erikson’s own article on Hitler’s youth? Of the work done by Robert Waite (and not just his afterword to Langer’s book) and Rudolph Binion? Of the various psychological studies on Nazism by Peter Loewenberg and Saul Friedlander? Etc.

Similarly, we should want to know about the actual work and its importance for theory of those whom Coles lumps along with me as active proponents of “psychohistory,” a term, incidentally, propagated by Erikson. Why, instead of spending so much time on the ancient Leonardo, didn’t Coles analyze the value of Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), Death in Life (1967), and Revolutionary Immortality (1968), or John Demos’s A Little Commonwealth (1970), and “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England,” (AHR, June, 1970)? Major developments have been taking place in relation to family history and, for want of a better term, group history, and a fair estimate of psychohistory’s achievements since 1958 would have to deal with these, too.

Coles doesn’t deal with them because his intent is purely polemical. He simply doesn’t like “problem” history. He will only accept “life history,” tout court. I assume, to take an example close to home, that this is what leads him to sheer falsification of quotes and to a complete and unconscionable distortion of my book, In Search of Nixon. Let me be specific. I begin by stating that I am not attempting a life history: “A true psychohistorical account, or even psychobiography, would approach Nixon’s life chronologically, seeking to study his personal development in the context of the changing times…. Another possible approach deals with themes or patterns discernible throughout Nixon’s life, in the context of general history; I shall take this approach.” Instead of a life history, I address myself to a problem, which I call the Nixon Problem, one which has puzzled many people, and which I spell out in much detail. Is this illegitimate? Well, let us see how Coles deals with such a work.

He starts out (after a quote from Wallerstein, as a putative justification for psychohistorical activity of my kind, which seems to me a lot of nonsense) by distorting the difference between an important element in a man’s character—orality—and a supposed character type (the “oral type”); a distinction that an analyst, of all people, ought not to ignore. Thus, he says, “Nixon is called ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ at various points.” I defy Coles to produce such a quote. In the two or three pages I devote to this matter, I state specifically that I am dealing with, for example, the concept of orality in Eriksonian terms, i.e., as oral modes of behavior, and merely note a few items under this heading, e.g., Nixon’s food habits, and his use of speech as a mode of releasing aggression. I certainly do not call him an “oral type.” The same is true for the concept of anality, which I deal with even more slightingly in terms mainly of Nixon’s metaphors, and their connection with his fear of “letting go,” as manifested in body rigidity, and his intense need for control: “control of himself, control of others, and control of the world around him.”

Why, then, does Coles single out this small part of my book, in order to misconstrue it? Incidentally, why does he have nothing to say about Erikson’s discussion of anality in Luther, a major and prominent topic, frequently criticized (incorrectly, I believe) by many historians who cite the wide prevalence of anal language at the time? Why the double standard?

Dismissing the possibility of sheer malevolence, I believe that the answer to all of the above lies basically in Coles’s disdain for explicit theory. We see this when Coles goes on to chide me for saying, “What we have been discussing up to now may be thought of as the psychological banalities of Nixon’s character” (of course, as the context shows, I meant that his private psychological traits were of no importance to history if not connected to cognitive and political strengths), and arrogantly asks “why the author has bothered to write this book at all, especially since the rest of the book offers nothing else about the President’s ‘character’ [utterly untrue as a glance at the summary on page 166 will show], only an extensive justification of the value of ‘psychohistory’ as ‘science.’ ”