THE LEADER Psychohistorical Essays THE LEADER Psychohistorical Essays Edited by CHARLES B. STROZIER Sangamon State University Springfield, Illinois and Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center Chicago, Illinois and DANIEL OFFER Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center and Un iversi ty of Chicago Chicago, Illinois With a Foreword by PETER GAY Yale University New Haven, Conneclicut SPRINGER SCIENCE+ BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Leader: psychohistorical essays. Partly based on a conference at Michael Reese Hospital in June 1979. Includes bibliographies and indexes. l. Leadership-Congresses. 2. Leadership-Case studies-Congresses. 3. Psycho history-Congresses. 1. Strozier, Charles B. II. Offer, Daniel. [DNLM: l. Leader ship-essays. 2. Psychoanalytic Interpretation-essays. WM 460.7 L434[ BF637.L4L38 1985 901/9 84-26431 ISBN 978-1-4757-1840-9 ISBN 978-1-4757-1838-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4757-1838-6 © 1985 Springer Science+ Business Media New York Originally published by Plenum Press New York in 1985 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1985 A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation 233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013 AII rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher For two mothers, Margaret Wright and Ilse Yallon C.B.5. and 0.0. and to Michael C.B.S. CONTRIBUTORS JOSEPH A. BONGIORNO, M.D., is a psychiatrist in private practice and a Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry of the Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago. He has studied psychoanalysis at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. His essay on Woodrow Wilson is his first research effort. Currently, he is working on a book-Iength psy choanalytic study of collective behavior. PRAKASH DESAI, M.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois (Chicago) and Chief, Psychiatry Service of the Vet erans Administration West Side Medical Center, Chicago. He is cur rently working on a book to be entitled Health and Medicine in the Hindu Tradition. PETER GAY, Ph.D., is Durfee Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books on modern European history, in duding The Enlightenment (1966), Weimar Culture (1968), Freud, ]ews, and Other Germans (1978), and the recent The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria ta Freud, VoI. 1, "Education of the Senses." THOMAS A. KOHUT, Ph.D., received his doctorate in history from the University of Minnesota in 1983 and is a graduate of the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Williams College. vii viii CONTRIBUTORS HYMAN MUSLIN, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois, Chicago and a graduate of the Chicago Institute for Psycho analysis. He has written numerous articles in the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, including "Transference in the Dora Case," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 26, (1978); "Romeo and Juliet: The Tragic Self in Adolescence," in the Annals of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry, 1982; His most recent book is Kohut's Analysis of the Self (Cambridge: Current Medical Literature, 1981). DANIEL OFFER, M.D., is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry of Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. He is the author of nine books in the fields of adolescent development and concepts of mental health. His latest book (with M. Sabshin) is Normality and the Life Cycle (New York: Basic Books, 1984). CHARLES B. STROZIER, Ph.D., is Professor of History at Sangamon State University, Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Rush Medical School, and Senior Research Consultant at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center. He is the author of numerous articles on psychohistory, published Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (New York: Basic Books, 1982), and is the editor of The Psychohistory Review. He is also the editor of the forthcoming volume, The Self and History (Norton Publishing Company). JAMES A. WALTER, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute for Modern Biog raphy, Griffith University, Australia. MARVIN ZONIS, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, Committee on Human Development, Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of Chicago. FOREWORD PETER GAY The syllabus of errors rehearsing the offenses of psychohistory looks devastating and seems irrefutable: crimes against the English language, crimes against sdentific procedures, crimes against common sense itself. These objects are real enough, but their contours-and their gravity mysteriously change with the perspective of the critic. From the outside, psychohistorians are to academic history what psychoanalysts are to academic psychology: a monolithic band of fanatics, making the same errors, committing the same offenses, aH in the same way. But seen close up, psychohistorians (just like psychoanalysts) turn out to be a highly differentiated, even a cheerfuHy contentious, lot. Disciples of Hartmann jostle discoverers of Kohut, imperialists claiming the whole domain of the past debate with modest isolationists, orthodox Freudians who insist that psychoanalysis engrosses the arsenal of psychohistorical method find themselves beleaguered by sociological revisionists. The charges that confound some psychohistorians glance off the armor of others. Yet there are three potent objections, aimed at the heart of psy chohistory, however it is conceived, that the psychohistorian ignores at his periI. It would be a convenient, but it is a whoHy unacceptable, defense to dismiss them as forms of resistance. The days are gone when the advocates of psychoanalysis could checkmate reasoned critidsms by psychoanalyzing the critic. To summarize these objections, psychohistory is Utopian, vulgar, ix x FOREWORD and trivial. It is Utopian because it uses the most stubbornly indi vidualistic of alI psychologies to unlock the riddle of colIective conduct and crowded events. The road from biography to history cannot prop erly folIow the path of psychoanalysis, which, if it is a road at alI, is one to the interior. And psychohistory is vulgar, because it reduces historical experiences and events to neurotic mechanisms. Indeed, if there is one objection to psychohistory that enjoys universal popularity among its critics, and almost invariably arouses anxiety among its supporters, it is this charge of reductionism. And, finalIy, psychohistory is trivial be cause we cannot psychoanalyze the dead, who do not, and cannot, behave like analysands. I should note at the outset that each of these objections has, in my judgment, some substance. It is only that their devastating conc1usions do not folIow. Psychohistory has been calIed an illegitimate reading of history through biography-and a very peculiar form of biography at that. It is no secret that psychoanalysis is the psychology of the individual. The psychoanalytic situation, with its hermetic encounter of the lone analy sand with the lone analyst, dramatizes this concentration on one person alone. The psychoanalyst, is, by choice, a depth biographer keeping his confidence, a private eye and, even more, a private ear. But to separate the study of the past sharply into biography (the history of a single person) and history (the biography of colIectivities) is to misread the respective domains of these two genres, which interact and overlap. Every biographer is something of a historian, every histo rian something of a biographer. With some recent social historians, who are retrospective sociologists in historians' c1othes, the human subject has become almost wholIy attenuated. But this, I submit, is bad history, just as biography that fails to place the individual firmly into his living context-his economic, social, religious environment-is bad biogra phy. Each of these two genres, biography and history, no doubt has its particular perspective on the past, and each its professional deforma tions. There is tension between them, as welI as colIaboration. But the hoary commonplace that history is about human beings, about their encounters with nature, technology, power, one another, and them selves, retains aII its validity. Practitioners of social history, however hostile they may be to psychoanalysis, only underscore this commit ment; they aspire, after alI, to what they caII histoire totale. It is necessary to remind them that when human beings, even dead human beings, are the subject of inquiry, and when their experience is to be sounded to the depths, the psychology that will reach those depths deserves a priv ileged role in the making of intelligible patterns and credible explana tions. FOREWORD Xl Psychoanalysis has yet another claim to the historian's sympathetic attention. For alI the differentiated palette of human experience across time, space, class, and temperament-and it is these riches that make history interesting-human beings are much alike, both through their biological endowment and through the emotional gauntlet they must run, dictated by their long helplessness, their biphasic psychosexual maturation, and their inescapable confrontations with developmental crises, notably the Oedipal drama and the storms of adolescence. In short, human beings are much alike since they must alI resolve similar conflicts and overcome similar obstacles; alIlearn to control impulses, to postpone gratifications, to surrender incestuous love objects-or to pay the penalty for failing to do so. And human beings are much alike, finalIy, because in each the ego is in commerce with the outside world, testing and adapting to reality. Vast as the repertory of human motives and actions may be-and written history is, as I have suggested, the record of how vast, in fact, that repertory is-this glittering array is achieved through unique combinations of relatively few ingredients. The raw materials of human nature are, in this sense, like chessmen, the principal activities of the drives and defenses like the moves in chess, the elaboration of historical actualities like individual games, each oper ating with a handful of basic elements, alI members of a family, yet none precisely like any other. To analyze the game of chess, the expert must be committed to particularity and known universals. The historical ana lyst is in the same situation. He examines the figure of the unique against the ground of the general, aware, if I may borrow the concise formulation of Kluckholn and Murray, that "every man is in certain respects (a) like alI other men, (b) like some other men, (c) like no other man."l Biography, I repeat, is a kind of history; history a kind of biography. But the psychohistorian can draw scant comfort from this intimacy, for if biography and history are twins, they share their troubles quite as much as their styles of thinking. Both the individual's case history and the general historical record are crowded to illegibility with complex motives and contradictory external forces; both are overdetermined. Freud knew this; after alI, he invented this term precisely out of his respect for complexity and contradiction. Two almost identical clusters of impulses may have dramaticalIy different results; two very different sets of impulses may have almost identical results. Seemingly unam biguous statements mask defeated wishes pointing in an opposite direc tion; seemingly decisive actions disclose, upon examination, buried con flicts. Psychological constellations play more than one part at several levels of human functioning and change their part with the passage of