14
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
choanalysis thus still finds itself, as much as, or at times even more
than, the Freudian tradition it rebelled against, bound by certain
limitations of the rationalistic and mechanistic imagery of the nine–
teenth-century world view. And when psychoanalysis has moved in
a phenomenological or existential direction, its intrapsychic insights,
however valuable, have tended to be insulated from historical issues.
Historical writing, about which I can speak with considerably
less authority, seems (perhaps somewhat analogously) to replace a
psychological perspective with common-sense assumptions about hu–
man motivation, or else to drown psychological man - that is, the
inner life of individual man - in a sea of collectivity.
I
And yet there is much evidence of a longing from both sides \
for some kind of union - of widely shared recognition that psy–
chological man lives in a history extending beyond himself, and that
history is bound up with conflicts and struggles of the minds of men.
Indeed, these two simple principles form the basis for a contemporary
psychohistory.
II
I have suggested that the general idea of a psychological ap–
proach to history is by no means new. But rather than attempt to
document comprehensively the various efforts that have been made
in the name of that idea, I would like to focus upon four models
(really paradigms) of psychohistory, all of which have emerged in
some relationship to the psychoanalytic tradition. Two of them are
Freudian, and the other two both draw upon Freud and move
away from his historical assumptions.
Freud's most fundamental historical model is not really histor–
ical at ,all, but is rather a
prehistorical
paradigm: the primeval
encounter between father and sons, in which the sons rebel against
the father's authority and kill him, with the entire encounter psy–
chologically centered around the
O~dipus
complex. This model was
first put forward in
Totem and Taboo
(1912-1913) as an explana–
tion for the origins of society itself, and then again in modified form
toward the end of Freud's life in
Moses and Monotheism
(1934-
1938), to account for the origins of Jewish religion and Jewish iden–
tity - for how, as Freud put it, the "one man, the man Moses ...
created the Jews." Freud saw Moses as a kind of foster father, an
Egyptian who "chose" the Jews as his people and gave to them the
