20
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
combination of psychoanalytic sensitivity and historical imagination.
The combination has been long in coming.
IV
But the great man tends to be inaccessible, at least to direct
interviews, or
if
accessible not yet great. One must usually approach
him through records, or, if he belongs to recent history, through
interviews with surviving friends and followers.
This
does not mean
that the psychohistorian cannot say useful things on the basis of
careful observations from a distance. But when he
is
centuries re–
moved from the individual he wishes to study in depth, problems
of historical reconstruction are inevitable.
Freud faced these problems with the cavalier grandiosity of a
genius - as one particularly memorable footnote in
Moses and
Monotheism
makes clear:
I
am
very well aware that in dealing so autocratically and ar–
bitrarily with Biblical tradition - bringing it up to confirm my
views when it
suits
me and unhesitantIy rejecting it when it contra–
dicts me - I am exposing myself to serious methodological crit–
icism and weakening the convincing force of my arguments. But
this
is
the only way in which one can treat material of which
one knows definitely that its trustworthiness has been severely
im–
paired by the distorting influence of tendentious purposes.
It
is
to
be
hoped that I shall find some degree of justification later on,
when I come upon the track of these secret motives. Certainty
is
in any case unattainable and moreover it may be said that every
other writer on the subject has adopted the same procedure.
While one cannot but admire Freud's honesty and boldness, the
method seems a somewhat dubious one for the aspiring psychohis–
torian.
Erikson is much more careful with his historical data, but he
too runs into difficulties. For instance, he is forced to recreate cer–
tain
psychological themes of Luther's early family life on the basis
of very limited evidence. And problems have also been raised about
events in Luther's adult life, notably
his
celebrated "fit in the choir"
during which he made his dramatic statement of negation of iden–
tity: "I
am
not!"
Erikson
himself
points out that it
is
not known
whether "Martin roared in Latin or in German," and others have
