PARTISAN REVIEW
17
problems surrounding the Lamarckian position on inheritance of ac–
quired
characteristics which Freud held to throughout his work.)
The entire argument derives from an individual-psychological model;
and precisely the "return of the repressed" becomes the basis for
Freud's view of history as psychological recurrence. And in the
individual-psychopathological model, it is the
aberration
of a specific
person that is writ large as historical explanation.
No wonder, then, that Freudian models are frustrating to the
historian: they interpret but avoid history. They are equally prob–
lematic for the historically-minded psychologist. On the one hand
Freud's clinical method, as many have pointed out, is entirely his–
torical: it works on the assumption that a man automatically reveals
his personal history if he merely lets his mind wander freely, that
is,
if he engages in free association. And Freud's fundamental dis–
coveries - of the significance of man's individual and collective
past - provide the beginning basis for psychohistory. Yet on the
other hand these same Freudian principles, when applied with
closed-system finality, tend to reduce history to
nothing but recur–
rence
(or "repetition-compulsion") and thereby to eliminate vir–
tually all that is innovative, or even accumulative, in the story of
man.
The Faustian intellectual temptation is to
dismiss
the paradox
and make things simple - either by direct and uncritical applica–
tion of classical Freudian terms to all manner of historical event,
or
else
by pretending that neither Freud nor the emotional turmoil
he described (and himself stimulated) has ever existed. We do
better, I am certain, to embrace the paradox. For
it
can be en–
ergizing.
III
Erik Erikson has done just that. He has retained a focus upon
the individual- the great man - and upon the
kinds
of inner
conflicts illuminated by the Freudian tradition. But he has placed
the great man within a specific historical context: hence the model
of
the great man in history.
And with his elaboration of this para–
digm something approaching a new psychohistory began to take
shape.
Erikson's
Young Man Luther,
a pivotal work for the psycho–
historical enterprise, has a direct historical relationship to Freud's
