Robert
Jay
Lifton
PSYCHOHISTORY
Granted there is such a thing as a "psychohistorical ap–
proach," can we then speak of a "new psychohistory"?
If
so we had
best
be tentative. Historians know well- and psychologists should
know - that anything now new
will
soon be old, and that we often
label
as new (or New) that which does not yet quite exist.
As
for
psychohistory,
it
is in one sense already old, and in another hardly
born.
None can deny the logic of a marriage between psychology and
history. Many writers from both traditions have emphasized their
common concern with narrative sequence and with the nature of
man's experience in the midst of that sequence. But a certain
amount of skepticism about logical marriages (and their offspring)
is
always in order. And the greater one's commitment to
this
mar–
riage, the more convinced one becomes of the impossibility - and
undesirability - of an
easy
union.
I
Skepticism, in fact, is as good a principle as any for approach–
ing psychohistory. Most of us involved in the project are not only
critical of traditional psychoanalytic views of history but are skep–
tical of the kind of pristine cause and effect - and therefore of the
kind of knowledge - claimed by any monocausal or hyperreductive
approach to history. Our simple commitment to an effort to de–
velop a psychological framework that takes historical currents se–
riously is itself an act of skepticism toward what I
shall
soon identify
as the ahistorical position of most psychological thought. But
this
kind of skepticism must be differentiated from the automatic
dis-
