10. Psychoanalysis and the Writing of History

10 Psychoanalysis and the Writing of History DAVID SPRING I On the centenary of Freud's birthday Lionel Trilling ob served that Freud's ideas (which this essay will look to for the meaning of psychoanalysis) "have become an integral part of our modern intellectual apparatus ..• they are of prime importance to anthropology, to sociology, to literary criticism; even theology must take account of them." 1 This catalogue makes no mention of the writing of history. Is this an oversight on Trilling's part, or is it a deliberate omission? Has the writing of history gone untouched by what Trilling elsewhere described as "the only systematic account of the human mind which, in point of subtlety and complexity, of interest and tragic power, deserves to stand beside the chaotic mass of psychological insights which literature has accumulated through the centuries?" 2 In recent years a distinguished historian chose the occasion of his presidential address to the American Historical Association to answer this question in the affirmative. Professor William Langer urged historians to make themselves knowledgeable about psychoanalysis. This task, he declared, was their "next assign ment." His tone was reproachful. Their ignorance was "truly regrettable," evidence of a tendency "to become buried in their 194 Psychoanalysis and the Writing of History 195 own conservatism" ... indifferent to that opening of "new hori zons" which "our cousins in the natural sciences are constantly doing." 3 This is a formidable indictment. It is perhaps pitched too shrilly. Unfortunately presidential addresses are often solemn and hortatory, providing the professional m.an with a vicarious sense of sin-or virtue. Nonetheless, it would seem unwise to dismiss the admonitions of an historian who has not only served his craft well, but has devoted his life to its most austere branch, the history of diplomacy. It might therefore be profitable to scrutinize -more closely than Professor Langer does-what would seem to be an idiosyncrasy of historical writing.

It may be best to state at the outset that the truth of the Inatter is not simple. The writing of history has not, in fact, gone alto gether untouched by psychoanalysis; but a case might well be made that its influence should be extended. At the same time, if historians have shown less interest in psychoanalysis than, let us say, anthropologists have, they have had their reasons. This essay will seek to examine these reasons and to decide how far they go to forbid the consorting of historians and psychoanalysts. It might also be said by way of preface that this essay will take the writing of history to mean simply what the vast majority of professional historians do. They seek to answer a relatively modest question: What happened (and, less hopefully, why did it hap pen) in a particular society at a particular juncture of time? And their profession is so organized as to provide a great number of highly detailed answers to this question. They do not, however, (in the main) seek to answer that less modest question to which philosophers of history address themselves: Whither man? What is the ultimate meaning of human existence? As it is defined here, therefore, the writing of history will not include such works as Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History or Spengler's Decline of the West.

196 Psychiatry and Responsibility II It would seem to be a commonplace opinion among those psychoanalysts who have thought about the relation between his tory and psychoanalysis that their discipline bears a marked resemblance to the historian's. Not only (they say) do both disciplines share the same subject matter-the nature of man but they share the same method, the historical method. 4 Each seeks to reconstruct the past, the psychoanalyst being especially concerned to reconstruct the individual's childhood past. Dr. Erik Erikson, the well-known child analyst-and biographer of Martin Luther-has thus declared that "the psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method." He adds, however, unlike his colleagues, that "the psychoanalyst is an odd, maybe a new kind of historian"; for (as he puts it), "in committing himself to influencing what he observes, he becomes part of the historical process which he studies." 5 This may strike the historian as less of an oddity than Dr.

Erikson thinks. If he is suggesting that the professional historian is altogether separated from the object of his study, historians themselves are likely to remind him that they are not in fact so remote from their subject matter-so objective-as he seems to imply. Historians may not set themselves up as therapists, as healers of the soul, seeking to cure the ills of a sick society. But they are often concerned-consciously or otherwise--to set society right, to put it back on the tracks, to renew its sense of direction by making clear the direction of its movement in the past. Nonetheless, the historian is likely to agree with Dr. Erikson that the psychoanalyst as historian is something of an oddity. Indeed he may state this very emphatically; for at bottom he finds lacking in the psychoanalyst the proper historical spirit-by ,vhich is meant that anxious concern and patience to unravel the past as accurately as possible in its full and everchanging par ticularity. Freud lacked this concern, although he did not lack a lively interest in the past. In the midst of an arduous and immensely fruitful profes~i9nal {:areer he never lQ~t his enthu ..

Psychoanalysis and the Writing of History 197 siasm for the literature and history of the Near Eastern and Greco-Roman civilizations~an enthusiasm which in specialist historians is often wanting. As a youth he had kept a personal diary in Greek; in maturity his much-needed holidays were often spent somewhat feverishly ransacking the great museums of Europe, Rome being always a kind of magic city for him. 6 This admirable enthusiasm, however, did not make Freud into a proper historian-as his method of dream analysis and his approach to the study of man in society reveal. In a certain sense Freud's method of dream analysis might be called historical; it is :meant to provide the analyst with much of the data by which he reconstructs the individual's past, es pecially the vital past of his early childhood. Nonetheless, it strikes the historian as essentially unhistorical. This is not only because the analysisas Philip Rieff puts it-"always follows, often at great distance, the event";7 but because Freud was not much put off by the patient's remembering little of the dream, and, worse still, because Freud was content to 'accept the patient's associations-evoked by the memory of his dream-as the asso ciations which originally produced the dream and which were therefore important in reconstructing his childhood past. s Now the historian may well admit that such evidence helps to disclose something of the workings of the patient's mind and emotions at the time of his analysis. He may well be skeptical, however, that such evidence discloses much of the origin and evolution of these workings. It is Freud's certainty here that sets the historian's teeth on edge. The historian is likely to know only too well that reports of the past, by participants in the same historical situation, are often significantly different, even when delivered in circumstances vastly happier than those which may surround the analyst's couch. In short, it is Freud's credulity that offends the historian.

Freud's lack of the historical spirit reveals itself even more plainly in his approach to the study of man in society, past or present. Broadly speaking, there are H¥o approaches to such a study. One is by making detailed accounts of people in actual relationships in particular societies. This is the typical way of 198 Psychiatry and Responsibility the professional historian. He acquires a great mass of data, which he seeks to limit and reduce to some kind of order with the help of certain organizing concepts or generalizations. It is some times said that the hallmark of the historian is his avoidance of generalizations. If this were true, however, if the historian simply recorded his particular observations, the result would be chaos and confusion, a bewildering mass of detail. In fact the historian must employ generalizations, if for nothing else than to select and arrange the meaningful. His generalizations may come from other disciplines: economics or political science; anthropology and even psychoanalysis; but more often from the multifold common-sense experience that life has afforded him. 9 It is not that the historian avoids generalizations, but rather that he sub ordinates them to the detailed narrative that is the prime object of his endeavors. For the historian, generalizations are in a sense muffled voices offstage.

The other way of approaching the study of man in society is to begin with a theoretical scheme of concepts or generalizations -explicitly elaborated-and to apply them to certain historical situations. This is the way that Freud chose. It is not, of course, a procedure distinctive to Freud or to psychoanalysis; some social scientists, or, as they might now wish to be called, behavioral scientists, even some historians, resort to it. Their chief aim, however, unlike that of most historians, is not to construct a narrative or exposition of some particular historical situation, but to show how a particular historical situation or situations illus trate their generalizations. As Miss Emmet has put it, their aim "is to invite us to say whether the concepts so illustrated help us to understand better some aspect of human relationships." 10 At bottom, then, their chief concern is to frame and possibly refine general concepts, not to sift and arrange particulars.

Since we are seeking here to adduce the differences between history and psychoanalysis-as historical disciplines-it would be pointless to arbitrate between these two ways of looking at man in society. It would probably be pointless in any case. Neither is more legitimate or (if you wish) more scientific than the other, unPsychoanalysis and the Writing of History 199 less science is narrowly defined; neither is even more useful than the other, unless usefulness is also narrowly defined. This last may indeed be the heart of the matter. The historian's uses are less spectacular than the psychoanalyst's, less concerned to get at the "hidden machinery" of the historical or social process. For what is useful to the psychoanalyst is knowledge that is by its nature manipulative, knowledge that will do decisive work in the world. What is useful to the historian is often knowledge that is descriptive, knowledge that is less directly operative. If one insists on choosing between one kind of know ledge and the other, in all likelihood the choice will ultimately depend on one's temperament and aspirations. In a world that feels itself insecure, and yet believes that it holds destiny in its own hands, the psycho analyst's knowledge-and his kind of usefulness-is likely to get a wide hearing.

It is, however, fair to say that Freud has gone to extremes-as a startling admission in his Moses and Monotheism clearly reveals. Moses and Monotheism was Freud's most ambitious essay on the nature and history of religion; it relied heavily on his earlier work in social anthropology, Totem and Taboo. This essay ex pounded the theory of the primal horde: that the primitive form of human society was that of a horde ruled over despotically by the all-powerful father, and that this patriarchal system was ended by the sons' murdering the father, consuming his body, and setting up in his place an animal totem. This totem worship perpetuated the sons' ambivalence toward the father: on the one hand, the totem stood for the father and was the object of wor ship; on the other hand, at the annual totem feast the sons as sembled to tear the totem animal to pieces. This was, as Freud put· it, "the solemn repetition of the father-murder, in which social order, moral laws and religion had had their beginnings." 11 Freud pieced together his social theory from hints and sugges tions admittedly borrowed from Darwin, J. J. Atkinson, and Robertson Smith. It is doubtful that ethnologists and anthropolo gists today would give it serious attention. 12 Freud himself, at the end of his life, when he published his Moses and Monotheism~ 200 .Psychiatry and Responsibility was aware that this was so and that Robertson Smith's ideas, in particular, were no longer acceptable. To his critics, however, he replied as follows: I would reply that these alleged advances in science are well known to me. Yet I have not been convinced either of their correctness or of Robertson Smith's errors. Contradiction is not always refutation; a new theory does not necessarily denote progress. Above all, however, I am not an ethnologist, but a psychoanalyst. It was my good right to select from ethnological data what would serve me for my analytic work.

The writings of the highly gifted Robertson Smith provided me with valuable points of contact with the psychological material of analysis and suggestions for the use of it. I cannot say the same of the work of his opponents.t 3 Plainly enough, when Freud wrote history or prehistory, it was his psychoanalytical work, his generalizations derived from that science, that came first. Rarely did this lead him, it should be added, to entertain deliberately a false history; but it did lead him to entertain, as a matter of course, a notion of historical reality that the professional historian is bound to find uninstruc tive, if not patronizing. It was Freud's notion that there is a psychic reality which stands to most, if not all, of the rest of historical experience in the relation that the wish stands to the dream it generates, and from which it is somehow separate. 14 It is this psychic reality that produces the rest of history.

Inevitably, then, Freud was led to present history as an eternal recapitulation of certain prototypal events that embodied this psychic reality-for example, the murder of the primal Father, the murder of Moses, the murder of Jesus Christ. This amounts, as Rieff has put it, to "a denial of social and historical changes in their own right," 15 to a reduction of problems that the his torian views as genuine problems to the status of pseudo problems. As Freud saw it, the historical process is not really subject to change: the more things change the more they are the same, since the underlying reality is always the same. 16 It followed that, when Freud got down to writing history, the results seemed strange to historians. The inevitable psychoanalytic Psychoanalysisand the Writing of History 201 theme drove out much that the historian would normally wish to keep, and drew in not a little that the historian would nor mally find irrelevant or untenable. Freud the historian dealt mainly with the history of religion. Here he was content to account for the form that Judaism took by tracing Jewish history back to the conjectural IDurder of Moses in the wilderness and to the feelings of guilt produced by that event and somehow kept alive in the folk memory of the Jews. This prototypal event sufficed for Freud's reconstruction of Jewish religious history. In a briefer compass he provided a similar reconstruction of the history of Christianity, centering on the murder of Christ, whom Freud declares to have been "the resurrected Moses and the returned primeval father of the primitive horde as well." 17 In a still briefer compass, although confessing to unfamiliarity with the subject, Freud brought Mohammedanism and Far Eastern religion up to the same touchstone, characterizing the one as lacking in vigor, "perhaps because it lacked the profundity which in the Jewish religion resulted from the murder of its founder," 18 and dismissing the other as an ancestor cult that stopped short "at an early stage of the reconstruction of the past." 19 Freud once spoke~as a historian might~of the "rich phenomenology of religions"; 20 but in fact he managed to reduce the historic religions to a bleak sameness.

Religion, past and present, Western and Eastern, was for Freud essentially an expression of neurosis. Religious symbols were a dramatization of those early relations with parents which were the most important factors in an individual's development. Those relations, in so far as they were shaped by the Oedipus complex, were inevitably ambivalent, productive of love and hate for the father, together with a sense of guilt; apart from the Oedipus complex they left a craving for security and protec tion that could be satisfied only as the individual matured by the image of an all-protective father. God ,vas thus a projection of this father image, and religion a means of assuaging guilt and affording a sense of security. Religion was a kind of mass delusion that helped people avoid individual neuroses by providing a socially accepted form of fantasy. As Freud saw it, religion was 202 Psychiatry and Responsibility conservative and regressive, capable of bringing relief to man, but at the cost of fixing him in a state of childishness.

The historian need not be religious to find this account of religious experience-in part at least-uninstructive. The history of religion has encompassed far more than the efforts of men who sought security and the relief of anxiety. If not, what is to be made of the long procession of saints, prophets, and heretics? If there was one quality shared by all of them, it was an aversion to comfort and security. They were not only prone to flail society, both lay and ecclesiastical, but they were equally prone to scourge themselves. The historian cannot help but tax Freud with ignor~ ing the plain truth that religion in the past has been the matrix out of which has emerged a wide variety of personality and aspiration. Religion may embrace the infantile, the regressive and the routine; it may equally embrace the mature, the dynamic and the exceptional. 21 For the historian, it may therefore seem that the exceptional religious personality suffers at Freud's hands-or for that matter at the hands of a psychoanalytical biographer like Dr. Erikson. 22 The historian may welcome as suggestive the idea that the great ness of Moses lay in providing an effective father image: "it must have been a tremendous father image," Freud wrote, "that stooped in the person of l\10ses to tell the poor Jewish laborers that they were his dear children" ;23 but the historian is likely to ask for further demonstration of that greatness at work in the world-as religious thinker and leader. This, in fact, is ,vhat is altogether lacking in Dr. Erikson's portrait of Martin Luther, for ,\Thorn (unlike Moses) there is no scarcity of historical evidence.

Dr. Erikson leaves us in no doubt that he regards Luther as a great man and a great theologian. But the Luther he portrays, torn by an "identity crisis" rooted in his childhood, reveals few qualities of greatness. "He becomes a chance figure who, afflicted most heavily with the nightmare of his times, stumbled, after infinite psychological strain, upon a new myth." 24 With this we may end the survey of those reactions which render psychoanalysis as an historical discipline suspect to his torians. It may well seem from this account that the historian has Psychoanalysis and the Writing of History 203 very little to learn from psychoanalysis; neither Freud's method of dream analysis nor his approach to the study of man in society nor his actual writing of history seems especially illuminating for historians. Yet it would be wrong to stop here. For there are, in fact, valuable things that the historian may learn from psy choanalysis; they are to be found, however, not in what Freud wrote about the past, but in his general conception of the mind and the self.

III Psychoanalysis may well instruct us about moral posture about attitudes to moral judgmenta matter that concerns the historian deeply. Curiously enough, it has been at Cambridge reputedly the home of science and rationalism-that the subject has in recent years received a good deal of attention. It is not a new one, but Professor Butterfield has had us look at it in the light of this century's stormy experience. And his colleague, Professor Knowles, chose it as the theme of his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History. This illuminating address, if it does nothing else, takes us quickly and firmly to the heart of the matter. 25 Professor Knowles sharply contrasts his own attitude to moral judgment with that of Lord Acton. He quotes the latter's exhorta tion to historians: "nevet to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on ·WTong."2'6 So to sit in judgment on the character of the dead is, according to Professor Knowles, both inappropriate and pointless; it embodies a conception of the historian's func tion-that of acting as a judge in a court of law-which is "radically false." The dead, after all, are not on trial. And such judicial pronouncements as are made on them are not likely to stand: they are easy to revise because they deal with elusive things.

"The degree of ignorance, the degree of malice, the degree of weakness, the degree of guilt, must always elude us." 27 204 Psychiatry and Responsibility For Professor Knowles, the historian's function is quite dif ferent. It is essentially contemplative: the historian "contemplates the whole of his world; he does not apportion guilt; he considers the quality of the whole man, seen, it may be, during the passage of many years .... He neither condemns nor acquits, he neither censures nor praises, but he presents what he sees." Professor Knowles presumably understands by "contemplation" something more than mere description. He insists on evaluating: the histor ian must, he believes, look to see whether a man, by and large during his life, shows any evidence of acting according to a divine or moral law outside himself, whether he ever sacrifices his own profit or pleasure for the sake of a person or a principle; whether he shows evidence of loving other men, where by love we understand the classical definition of wishing them well and doing well to them; whether he puts justice before expediency; whether he is sincere and truthful. In so doing the historian is not trying the men and women of the past: he is contemplating them; he has to see them as in truth they were and to present them as such to others, and a man, as a man, cannot be seen truly unless his moral worth, his loveworthiness, is seen.

How different is this from Lord Acton's way of dealing with the character of the dead? One is compelled to conclude that it is not so different as the word "contemplate" would suggest. Both Lord Acton and Professor Knowles deal in moral judgment; and both are immensely serious about it. Yet there is an appreciable difference in the way they go about it. Professor Knowles pro ceeds more cautiously, more aware of the subtleties involved, more aware of the pitfalls, above all concerned to see accurately and disinterestedly. His cautionary words about the traps that lie in wait for the historian as moralist are valuable. Failing to know the meaning of words used for moral categories, using these words without proper care, is one trap. Professor Knowles pro vides a frightening example of the slovenly use of moral language from the writing of so eminent an historian as J. L. Motley. Mis taking a natural gift or ability for ethical excellence, or confusing a man's religion or party with his character, is another trap. Still Psychoanalysis and the Writing of History 205 another is forgetting that a man's character is never fixed fOl, life: that "a life is not a bundle of facts; it is a stream or land scape; it is the manifestation ofa single mind and personality that may grow more deformed or more beautiful to the end."

The historian, then, must resort to moral judgment, for the Uloral realm is both real and significant. But how is he to do it without falling into that kind of moral excess which may well blur his sight? Unfortunately, it is especially difficult to pre scribe for the historian as moralist, since what he does is both difficult and egotistical, being the resumption by a single mind of the doings and thoughts of thousands or millions. Plainly there is no simple prescription for him to follow. It may help, however, to enjoin caution and point to the pitfalls. It may help to pre scribe, as Professor Butterfield does, Christian humility; it is the Christian, according to Professor Butterfield, who best under stands what is a fitting moral posture, "understands it as one who feels himself a partner in man's universal sin." 28 Perhaps it could be said that the Freudian also understands it. He understands it as one who entertains a vision of man-more remote from the Christian vision than some religious thinkers seem prepared to acknowledge-but no less stern. 29 The Freudian vision-rightly understood-portrays man as the carrier "of a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten civilization." 30 As such, the Freudian vision may help to curb that moral excess which prompts the historian to sit in judgment on the dead.

Psychoanalysis may also instruct the historian about human motivation, both on the individual and the mass level; it is in struction that he greatly needs. Compared with the novelist, for example, in the treatment of human nature, the historian seems often to be so lacking in subtlety as to prompt the observation (offered by an historian) that "a visitor from another planet would think that they were talking about two different kinds of sub stance." 31 It was the novelist, Virginia Woolf, who remarked that "it is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done." 32 Too few historians entertain such scruples. This may be why we speak, on 206 Psychiatry and Responsibility the one hand, of the novelist's art, and on the other, of the historian's craft. Is it implied that the historian's efforts to re create life are, by comparison, rude and primitive-something many may do without any special endowment of talent or imagi nation? Even so gentle and undemonstrative a person as the novelist, E. M. Forster, has raised his voice in protest against the historian's crudities: "The past," he once wrote, "must be left to its own dead who knew that it was alive." 33 As much as anything, it is the bald abridgment of motive and purpose, the lack of imaginative insight, which creates the sense of lifelessness and unreality in so much historical writing, espe cially in that vast underworld of textbook history. How dreary it tends to become; how scanty the supply of stereotyped motives called on again and again: the will to power, ambition, economic interest, idealism. One looks so often in vain for some touch of irony, of paradox; for some suggestion that men usually are unaware from moment to moment where they are going, that the depths of the mind and human nature are not neatly com partmented. Freudian psychoanalysis might persuade the historian that fear, conscious or otherwise, may prompt the most ill-assorted actions and pursuits, from overeating to philanthropy; that ideal ism is not without vanity or pride or aggression; that the material istic entrepreneur may entertain the most fanciful of utopias. 34 In short, Freud may teach the historian something of the ambiv alence of individual human nature and of the obscure workings of the unconscious.

One can, however, play fast and loose with the unconscious. Mr. Gordon Rattray Taylor, for example, the author of Sex in History and of The Angel Makers (a study of the Evangelical Revival in England in the early nineteenth century) goes much too far, ending with a picture of human motivation as naive and barren as that of any textbook. The "various changes and con trasts in European sexual behavior," he writes, "can be system atically accounted for in terms of these two identifications-that at certain periods there was a predominating tendency for male children to model themselves on their fathers, and so to produce an authoritarian and restrictive attitude in society as a whole, Psychoanalysis and the Writing of History 207 while at others there was a tendency to model on the mother, producing a very different attitude." ~5 These two attitudes Mr. Taylor called patrist and matrist respectively. The patrist is given to authoritarianism in public life and asceticism in private; the matrist is given to democracy in public life and hedonism in private.

This caricature of human motivation might serve to remind us that the historian's normal strategy of explanation-by which he gives primacy to the conscious, rational thoughts of his indi vidual characters-has its wisdom. 36 Such thoughts often enough have a pragmatic validity: they are related to what men do, and what men do has an. unmistakable reality. What is unfortunate, however, is the historian's excessive reliance on such thoughts, almost as if they marked the limits of the distinctively historical and beyond which lay something to be called psychologica1.37 The historian must not shrink from looking into the depths, or-to change the metaphor-he must not close his ears to the music that underlies men's actions-that music, as Sir l ..ewis Namier has reminded us, to which ideas are a kind of libretto.~8 Whether the underlying music is the same on the level of mass psychology as on that of individual psychology presents the his torian with a difficult problem. According to Freud, it is, for all practical purposes, the same. He demonstrated this in his Moses, and M onotheism J where he treated the Jews as he might an individual neurotic. His example has already had its imitators among historians. Noteworthy is Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millenium J which, like Freud's Moses and Monotheism, is a study of the social psychology of religious movements, making much use of certain concepts taken from psychoanalysis. In particular it treats the history of revolutionary chiliasm in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, and, although admitting the danger of using concepts from the psychology of the individual, it boldly applies them. Revolutionary chiliasm is presented as a paranoid fantasy, generated by the collapse of a way of life. A grave breakdown in society, according to Mr. Cohn, not only arouses adult anxiety but also creates "that sense of helpless ex posure, disorientation and guilt-and thereby reactivates the 208 Psychiatry and Responsibility infantile complex and sets in motion, as it were, that fatal se quence of mortal anxiety, murderous rage and unconscious pro jection which is the genesis of paranoia. And it does this to many individuals at the same time." 39 Despite this highly plausible exposition-more plausible indeed than Freud's account of Judaism and Christianity-one doubts that it settles the question of the relationship between individual and mass psychology. Perhaps the most that can be done at present is to raise the question. Does collective behavior differ qualita tively from individual behavior? Or does the difference consist in nothing more than "a greater suggestibility of individuals when they find themselves to be part of a crowd, a mob, a nation?" 40 If the latter is true, then one will agree with Professor Potter, who, in his study of American character, declared that "group character ... is but a composite of individual character." 41 There may, however, be more truth than historians like to think there is in Sir Charles Snow's observation that "groups of men, even small groups, act strangely different from individuals" 42_a theme that he has suggestively explored in his novels. It may be the path of wisdom for historians to confess how much they are in the dark about the behavior of large and small groups, and if, like Mr.

Cohn, they apply psychoanalytical concepts to mass behavior, to follow his example of tentativeness. Whether the underlying music of individual and mass psychology be the same or not, historians will be wise to listen for it. It may be that they are already doing so-for example, in their concern to find the style of a civilization or a society, or the pattern of a climate of opinion. We may therefore conclude that the most valuable thing that historians can learn from psychoanalysis is a heightened awareness not only of the depths of individual and mass emotion but of the significance of what Professor Riesman has called "underprivileged data." 43 Just as the psychoanalyst seeks for meaning in such curious places as dreams, weaning habits, and family relations, so the historian too is turning his attention to phenomena that once signified nothing to him. Some of these have, in fact, been brought to his attention by psychoanalysis; others he has found for himself, like third-rate novels and bad art. It may be a sign of Freud's Psychoanalysis and the Writing of History 209 growing influence on historians that a growing number of them now look on their neglect of the history of the family as both serious and odd. 44 NOTES 1. L. Trilling, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (New York, 1955), pp. 11-12.

2. L. Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, 1951), p. 34. 3. W. L. Langer, "The Next Assignment," The American Historical Re view, January, 1958. 4. G. Roheim (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences (New York, 1950), Vol. II, article by R. de Saussure, "Psychoanalysis and History." 5. E. H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York, 1950), p. 12. 6. E. Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London, 1953-1957), 3 vols., passim. 7. P. RielI, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York, 1959), p. 113. 8. Ibid., pp. 113-114. See also J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1953), V, 516. "In analyzing a dream," Freud writes, "I insist that the whole scale of estimates of certainty shall be abandoned and that the faintest possibility that something of this or that sort may have occurred in the dream shall be treated as complete certainty."

9. For an excellent account of the importance of common sense to the historian, see ~ir Isaiah Berlin, "History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History," History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History, Vol. I, No.1 (1960). Sir Isaiah remarks: "A man who lacks com mon intelligence can be a physicist of genius, but not even a mediocre historian." 10. D. M. Emmet, Function, Purpose and Powers: Some Concepts in the Study of Individuals and Societies (London, 1958), p. 13. II. S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 168. 12. See E. E. Evans-Pritchard et al., The Institutions of Primitive Society (Glencoe, Illinois, 1959), p. 3. 13. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 169. 14. See Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 52. 15. Rieff, Freud, p. 207. 16. Ibid., p. 213. 17. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 114. 18. Ibid.) p. 118. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 117.

21. What is perhaps most baffiing is that religion may do all these things at the same time in the same person.

210 Psychiatry and Responsibility 22. E. H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and His tory (New York, 1958). 23. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 140. 24. The Times Literary Supplement (December 18, 1959), review of E. H. Erikson, Young Man Luther. 25. D. Knowles, The Historian and Character (Cambridge, 1955). 26. Lord Acton, The Study of History (London, 1895), quoted in Knowles, T he Historian· and Character. 27. Knowles, The Historian and Character. 28. H. Butterfield, History and Human Relations (New York, 1952), p. 110. 29. A most helpful account of the relations between religion and psychoanalysis is D. Cox, Jung and St. Paul (New York, 1955). 30. Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 57. 31. Butterfield, History and Human Relations, p. 170. 32. V. Woolf, Jacob's Room, p. 29. 33. E. M. Forster, Hill of Devi, p. 266. 34. Sir L. B. Namier, Personalities and Powers (London, 1955), the essay entitled "Human Nature and Politics."

35. G. Rattray Taylor, Sex in History (New York, 1955), pp. 76-77. 36. See W. Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (London, 1957), chap. V. 37. Ibid., pp. 138-139. 38. Namier, Personalities and Powers, p. 4. Sir Lewis gives this point an emphasis which I should hesitate to give it. 39. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London, 1957), p. 311. 40. G. J. Renier, History: Its Purpose and Method (Boston, 1950), p. 204. 41. D. M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, 1954), p. 33. I am not convinced that Professor Potter proves his poin t. 42. Sir C. Snow, The Masters, p. 107. 43. D. Riesman, "The Study of National Character: Some Observations on the American Case," Harvard Library Bulletin, Winter, 1959. 44. See, for example, the articles by Peter Laslett on the family in seven teenth-cel)tury English society: The Listener, April 7, 14, 21, 1960.

See also the review of P. Aries, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous ['ancien regime, in Times Literary Supplement, September 30, 1960.