16
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
individual and the undifferentiated collectivity. When
this
principle
of repetition is seen as the essence of historical experience there can
be nothing new in history; indeed,
if
(in Rieff's paraphrase
of
Freud) "history is predestination," then there is no history.
The second Freudian paradigm is perhaps the most obvious
one, the one most likely to come to mind when people think of a
psychoanalytic approach to history; that of individual psychopathol–
ogy. The
best
known example here is the Freud-Bullitt biography
of Woodrow Wilson, a work which Bullitt almost certainly wrote
but which exemplifies the Freudian approach to history more
than
many present-day followers of Freud would care to admit. In lan–
guage and quality of thought, the Wilson biography is a
vulgariza- ,
tion of the Freudian paradigm - Freud himself never wrote with–
out elegance. But the idea of interpreting the outcomes of major
historical events as expressions of the individual psychopathology of
a particular national leader - in this case Wilson's struggles with
masculinity and ,his need to fail- was prefigured in Freud's own
work. I have in mind not only his treatment of men like Leonardo
and Dostoevski (as great artists rather than political leaders), but
also
Freud's general focus upon individual psychopathology as ex–
isting more or less apart from history. When this second paradigm
dominates, psychopathology becomes a substitute for the psychohis–
torical interface. The psychopathological idiom for individual de–
velopment (so prominent in the literature of psychoanalysis) be–
comes extended to the point where it serves as the idiom for history,
or psychohistory. When this happens there is, once more, no history.
These two Freudian paradigms - the prehistorical confronta–
tion and the leader's individual psychopathology - come together in
their assumption that, in one way or another, history represents the
intrapsychic struggles of the individual writ large: the same intra–
psychic struggles that can be observed by the psychoanalyst in
his
therapeutic work. For instance, the scenario of
Totem and Taboo
includes not only the murderous rebellion against the father and the
consuming of the father in the totem feast, but the subsequent
re–
morse and residual guilt of the sons, and of their sons and daughters
ad infinitum, which then reasserts itself periodically in the phenom–
enon of the "return of the repressed." (I
shall
not discuss the ques–
tion of
how
this guilt is transmitted through the generations, or the
