 |
 |
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
 |
|||
By Brian Fitzgerald
|
|
|
Anna Geifman Photo by Vernon Doucette |
|
|
Psychohistory? Qu’est-ce que c’est?
Besides being
the study of the psychological origins of historical events, it’s
also a new colloquium offered this fall at BU. Psychohistory (HI 503),
according to the course description, “addresses the ‘whys’ of
history and focuses on the application of Freudian analysis” and
other psychological models to interpret past individual and group behavior.
“
Actually, we don’t rely that heavily on Freud when studying
people who are no longer alive,” says Anna Geifman, a CAS professor
of history and director of undergraduate studies in the history department. “You
can’t put Julius Caesar on the couch and interrogate him about
his relationship with his mom. But there are other aspects of psychological
knowledge that are relevant in studying history — for example,
what we know about behavior patterns, complexes, and insecurities, and
how
they are revealed by leaders and their followers. We know a lot about
the way some people react to stress and fear.”
When looking at events,
historians traditionally study the political and economic factors leading
up to them. This course shifts the focus
to individual motivations. For example, when probing the reasons for
the rise of Hitler and Nazism in 1930s Germany, Geifman (CAS’84,
GRS’85) says that scholars shouldn’t narrow their focus to
just the political chaos that took place as a result of the 1919 Treaty
of Versailles, which forced reparations on the country and limited its
armed forces, and the dismal German economic situation after World War
I and into the Great Depression. She says that it is necessary to look
into the psyches of Hitler and his followers.
And plenty of psychological
writings on Hitler exist, thanks in part to a 1943 study by Walter C.
Langer done for American intelligence officials
that pointed out the well-known brutality of the German leader’s
father toward his wife and son. Hitler’s autobiography, Mein
Kampf,
gives a description of the life of a child in a lower class family, describing
drunken and “brutal attacks on the part of the father towards the
mother” that he witnessed “personally in hundreds of scenes.” Langer
argues that since Hitler had no close friends, it was unlikely that he
saw such situations firsthand in any home other than his own — he
was actually writing about his family and upbringing — and that
such a damaged childhood can cause psychopathic behavior.
Indeed, Geifman
says that because many autobiographies tend to be distorted and rife
with rationalizations, historians looking for an accurate picture
should read between the lines, along with other sources. “When
you study people,” she says, “and that is what historians
are dealing with — individuals and groups — you can read
what they consciously reveal about themselves, but you cannot ignore
what is not
said, what is not professed, but what nevertheless is an integral part
of a personality.”
Graduate and undergraduate students in Geifman’s
course read For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and
the Roots of Violence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983),
a book by psychoanalyst Alice Miller on the background of Hitler’s
henchmen and the leader’s appeal
to troubled German youth. People such as Adolf Eichmann and Rudolph Hess,
Miller notes, were trained to be ultra-obedient as children, and that
is partly why they never questioned the morality of the orders they were
given, and further, that Hitler’s followers looked to him as a
father who could do no wrong. “She explains why they saw violence
as a solution to the country’s weak position after World War I,” says
Geifman.
Although studying family dynamics can provide insight into culture
and historical events, Geifman cautions that “one has to be careful
with generalizations.” Some scholars accuse Miller of making too
many assumptions. Indeed, a number of historians say psychohistory is
psychobabble — that society is complex and individuals may act
in particular ways for any number of reasons other than childhood family
experiences.
Geifman’s students also read The Slave Soul of Russia by
Rancour-Lafevrier (New York University Press, 1996). “The author
deals with many extremely controversial issues related to ‘psychology
of nations,’ and
actually shows that it is possible to talk about national psychological
trends in nonracist ways,” she says. “We discuss these issues
along with questions related to group violence and whether or not psychohistorians
are justified in applying aspects of personal psychology — with
modification, of course — to collective behavior.”
There was
a bit of academic interest in psychohistory in the 1980s, according to
Geifman, but the field was also heavily criticized during that decade,
with psychohistorians accused of seeing hidden motivations behind every
action. “A lot of the scholarship was done poorly in the ’80s,” she
says. “People automatically — and mindlessly — applied
Freudian models, and in a way the field discredited itself. As a result,
people
hesitate to venture into this field today, because it seems so subjective,
and it leaves historians with a lot of interpretive power.”
Geifman
and some other historians, however, say that there is still a need to
study the emotional origins of social and political behavior,
especially in the age of terrorism. Geifman, who came to the United States
from St. Petersburg in 1976, has written several books on extremism and
terrorism in the Russian revolutionary movements, including Entangled
in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution (SR Books,
2000), about Evno Azef, who doubled as a secret police agent and a terrorist
from 1893 to 1909, and Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in
Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton University Press, 1993), in which she
asserts that most terrorists during this period tended to demonstrate
mental instability
and a substantial lack of political consciousness. “A wide range
of stimuli proved critical in driving young men and women to terrorist
acts — stimuli that frequently arose from deep-seated emotional
problems and conflicts, rather than from radical zeal or a solid grounding
in
revolutionary theory,” she says.
Psychohistory, defined as “the
science of historical motivation” by
the Journal of Psychohistory, which has been published by the Institute
for Psychohistory in New York for the past 28 years, isn’t widely
taught in universities. Geifman believes that a renewed interest in the
field is possible in higher education. “If psychohistory is done
well, and not in a corny, clichéd way,” she says, “I
think academics will be less dismissive of it.”
31 October
2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations