'ARTISAN REVIEW
13
be,
at least to a point, if our skepticism
is
to be rooted as well as
fertile.
But what are the impediments? Why is it so difficult for psy–
chology and history to get together? Generally speaking, I would
say that not only do the two traditions often work at cross-purposes,
but worse, each has something of an impulse to eliminate the other.
And
this
is so even if we limit our
o~rvations
to depth psychology
and to man-centered history.
For instance, there
is
in classical psychoanalysis an implicit
as–
sumption that the larger historical universe
is
nothing but
a
mani–
festation of the projections or emanations of the individual psyche.
Or
if
not that, history
is
seen as a kind of featureless background
for those projections and emanations - something "out there" which
is
"given," but which does not significantly influence what
is
"in
here." The emergence, over the past few decades, of a more de–
veloped "ego psychology" has somewhat altered the situation by
directing our attention to the influence of the environment on the
development of the self. But, as Erikson has pointed out, the grudg–
ing and impoverished terms used in the psychoanalytic approach
to the environment reveal the approach itself to have remained
grudging and impoverished. Moreover, ego psychology has had very
little to say about shifts in social ethos central to historical change,
especially those related to the new technological environment and
its destructive capacities.
Neo-Freudian psychoanalysis has been ahistorical in other ways.
More open to the influence of environment, it has for the most part
failed to evolve compelling general principles in the social sphere.
And where
it
has actively sought such principles, as in the work of
Abram Kardiner, it has tended to view a culture or a society as a
more or less cross-sectional entity within which one can study the
relationship of social institution and "basic personality," but not as
evolving phenomena whose relationship is importantly defined by
change. (Kardiner was aware of the problem, but precisely the
his–
torical complexities of advanced Western [specifically American]
s0-
ciety proved refractory to the approach he had evolved in the study
of primitive societies. Primitive societies too, of course, could have
revealed very different insights had they themselves been approached
more from the perspective of historical change. ) Neo-Freudian psy-
